What Is Complex PTSD? There Isn’t Nearly Enough Awareness Around This Illness [bustle.com]

Trauma is a complicated experience, and what happens after a traumatic experience even more so. Two people's reaction to trauma may be completely different, and we're learning more about how different and varied those reactions are every day. While many of us are familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which may develop as a result of acute trauma, the growing body of research around complex PTSD, or C-PTSD, is helping people who may have experienced trauma over a prolonged period of time without relief, whose experiences may not align exactly with those of PTSD.

While PTSD is better understood now than in years past, researchers are now starting to investigate what happens when trauma is experienced over extended periods of time — especially during childhood and adolescence. Dr. Melanie Greenberg, author of The Stress Proof Brain, tells Bustle that understanding the varying ways in which trauma affects a person has a lot to do with the time frame in which the traumatic events were experienced. Because C-PTSD happens as a result of a prolonged trauma, a person with the illness may experience similar symptoms to someone with PTSD, such as flashbacks or nightmares, but also more complicated feelings such as guilt, or even dissociation, according to the Talkspace blog. And while anyone can experience problems coping after a difficult life event, “PTSD is much more complicated: you have intrusive thoughts and moods, you avoid things, and you have physiological arousal,” Dr. Greenberg notes.

@Donna Jackson Nakazawa , author of Childhood Disrupted, tells Bustle that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and chronic, toxic childhood stress can overlap with the symptoms of PTSD, but “the difference is that ACEs or toxic childhood stress [are] happening before the age of 18 without reliable adult support.” Nakazawa further notes that “When a child experiences adversity, [that stress] begins to cause epigenetic changes to the genes that oversee the stress response for life — they’re caught in a state of fight, flight, or freeze.”

[For more on this story by CAROLYN DE LORENZO, go to https://www.bustle.com/p/what-...this-illness-9621443]