What is C-PTSD?
C-PTSD is a form of complex, conditioned PTSD, a medical condition that leaves victims physically suffering from extreme stress illnesses, neurological and biochemical damage related to repeated exposure to trauma, and intense social anxiety caused directly by exposure to toxic people.
Conditioned PTSD issues tend to arise after victims of Narcissistic Abuse are repeatedly subjected to physical, psychological, emotional, or social trauma. Those most prone to developing C-PTSD issues are soldiers, hostages, and people who are targeted for pervasive social abuse as victims of workplace or schoolyard bullying or who live with domestic abusers.
Emotional abuse, mental abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and spiritual abuse coupled with financial abuse and social abuse issues tend to cause people with healthy neurotypical or emotionally intelligent minds to suffer. Physical response to ambient abuse, flagrant social or emotional abuse, and covert situational abuse tends to involve a functional destabilization of the mind and body.
Individuals with healthy levels of emotional sensitivity who were born to toxic parents are the most likely to grow up with C-PTSD issues and not even know it. Those who are raised by abusers tend to feel normal in abusive environments because that’s what they normalized for tone and tenor of how adult humans and family members act towards one another both in everyday community life as well as at home.
Conditioning a submissive, Stockholm Syndrome response in emotionally sensitive children is the goal of most abusive parents. They are supported in achieving their aims by Abuse Enablers known in self help social circles as flying monkeys.
When a toxic family or abusive peer group get ahold of a child when it is young, social conditioning begins immediately. Those who can be desensitized to things like in-home violence are trained to conform; those who refuse to copycat but who condone abuse become passive or active Enablers, while those who learn to enjoy abusing others tend to become more disordered than their captors.
People with C-PTSD issues tend to have a healthy, normal, and pro-socially high level of emotional acuity. Abusers and Abuse enablers, in an attempt to undermine victims, tend to name call such people things like “crybabies”, “whiners”, and to ridicule them while claiming they are “overly dramatic” or “too sensitive”.
If a human being makes remarks referring to emotionally normal and healthy people who are traumatized after exposure to trauma or ongoing abuse as crazy, irrational, or in some way pathetic, understand you are listening to a person who is actively and openly abusive and striving to create physical damage in the mind and body of their preferred scapegoat targets.
Resist the urge to sweep the red flag you are listening to a willing and active abuser socially deride and ridicule people who have been traumatized by life events (like war, poverty, or having been the victims of violent social crimes). To allow them to continue to hurl verbal assaults at victims and to normalize their insistence on creating an atmosphere of pervasive ambient abuse of emotionally intelligent targets is pound foolish.
Because people with Cluster B personality disorders thrive on creating misery and chaos in the lives of other people for fun, to alleviate boredom, and for pleasure, they tend to constantly find new excuses to target any person or peer group who they feel in some way is immune to their gaslighting or social influence.
If one supports Cluster B or vertical thinking in a community, expect all members of their preferred scapegoat target groups to run the risk of suffering severe, ongoing, physical and mental health depletion.
The stress of feeling unsafe in one’s home or community — or worse… socially invalidated while being marked for ongoing public shaming, harassment, and social ridicule… ups the stress illness rate, compromises target’s ability to take care of themselves or family physically or financially, and makes every national and international household weaker.
As Out Of The Fog, a Narcissistic Abuse Recovery website notes, “Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (Complex PTSD) is defined as a psychological stress injury which results from ongoing or repeated trauma over which the victim has little or no control, and from which there is no real or perceived hope of escape.”
For more information about how to recover from C-PTSD issues as well as to learn more about how the condition develops in targets and collateral damage victims, check out any articles on this website featuring the key term or visit the Veterans Administration website.
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