The Final Six Symptoms of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), regular physical activity can also improve brain health and slow cognitive decline. If this happens to you, it may be helpful to try trauma-informed mindfulness with the help of a trained therapist. After trauma, your nervous system needs a chance to reset and return to the parasympathetic state known as “rest and digest.” This is because staying in fight-or-flight mode maintains a continuous state of stress that can wear out your body and cause unwanted health effects. Your sympathetic nervous system responds to trauma with a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. This response protects you by preparing your body for action against a threat. As CPTSD is a newer diagnosis, research is lacking on how common the condition is.

• Personal accounts of individuals experiencing PTSD blackouts often highlight the profound impact these episodes can have on daily life.
• To treat C-PTSD symptoms, trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), as well as dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) or other therapies, may be utilized.
• ICD-11 identifies complex PTSD as a separate condition, though the DSM-5 currently does not.
• Although C-PTSD comes with its own set of symptoms, some believe the condition is too similar to PTSD (and other trauma-related conditions) to warrant a separate diagnosis.
• For the most part, understand that when the brain protects you through this method of dissociation, it may not be readily apparent to you.

Complex PTSD triggers

The average duration of a PTSD blackout is difficult to quantify due to the highly individual nature of these experiences and the challenges in accurately measuring lost time. Authors of  The Stranger in the Mirror, Marlene Steinberg and Maxine Schnall, write that, often, there is a “ping-pong” game of personality states controlling the way a person managing this type of dissociation thinks, remembers and expresses themselves.» In fact, it is common for dissociation to create disturbances in awareness, personal identity, perception, and recall or memory. A flashback may be temporary and you may maintain some connection with the present moment.

Amnesia («losing» time)

Before you can understand how to control PTSD blackouts, you need to understand what’s causing them in the first place. Your mind does not know how to react around certain sights, smells, sounds and other sensory factors that remind you of that event. You may not realize you are around a trigger; your brain just reacts to it.

How to manage brain fog

• Support systems and resources are crucial for individuals dealing with PTSD blackouts.
• While the manual does acknowledge that some people may experience severe symptoms with PTSD, it doesn’t give a separate diagnosis based on C-PTSD specifically.
• By participating, our members agree to seek professional medical care and understand our programs provide only trauma-informed peer support.

Personal accounts of individuals experiencing PTSD blackouts often highlight the profound impact these episodes can have on daily life. One survivor described it as “feeling like a ghost in my own life, present but not really there.” Another recounted the fear and confusion of coming to awareness in unfamiliar surroundings, unsure of what had transpired during the lost time. Like a camera with a faulty shutter, the mind sometimes clicks but fails to capture, leaving behind a haunting void where memories should be.

Complex PTSD: History and Definitions

However, several guidelines, including those of the American Psychological Association, recommend EMDR as a treatment for PTSD under certain conditions. Clinicians are becoming more aware of the differences between PTSD and complex PTSD. However, because complex PTSD is a relatively new diagnosis, some clinicians could still diagnose another condition instead. These behaviors can develop as a way to deal with or try to forget about the original trauma and the resulting symptoms in the present.

• When underlying trauma is repeated and ongoing, some mental health professionals make a distinction between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its more intense sibling, complex post-traumatic stress disorder—also known as complex PTSD.
• However, complex PTSD dissociation uses walls like minimization, denial, and suppression to keep trauma in check.
• On the other hand, BPD can cause a person to swing between idealizing and undervaluing others.

• A holistic and integrated therapy approach is typically required when treating patients with both C-PTSD and substance use disorders.
• Forgetting to take crucial safety precautions or follow instructions on your surroundings, drugs, or personal care can lead to accidents, injuries, or neglect of self-care needs.
• This is largely because a trauma trigger is related in some way to the original trauma.
• Many mental health professionals do recognize C-PTSD as a separate condition, because the traditional symptoms of PTSD do not fully capture some of the unique characteristics shown in people who experienced repeat trauma.
• So, if you’re living with PTSD and you can’t get enough sleep at night, this can intensify your brain fog.
• Only after working hard with a therapist do people living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder begin to understand, at least on the surface, that they are not damaged goods.

Concluding, the authors suggest a continuum of clinical severity and symptoms’ development in trauma-related disorders, within a spectrum of clinical features, biological background and precipitating trauma, from classic PTSD towards a subtype of BPD; especially concerning cases supposing a comorbidity with PTSD. We also suggest of complex PTSD being an “intermediate” in its phenomenological manifestation, with biological analogies seemingly supporting these hypotheses. If you’ve experienced repeated trauma or long-term trauma, you may have a higher ptsd blackouts chance of developing C-PTSD symptoms. In conclusion, PTSD blackouts represent a significant challenge for many individuals struggling with the aftermath of trauma. These episodes of memory loss and dissociation can have profound impacts on daily life, relationships, and overall well-being. However, it’s important to remember that help is available, and recovery is possible.

When underlying trauma is repeated and ongoing, some mental health professionals make a distinction between post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its more intense sibling, complex post-traumatic stress disorder—also known as complex PTSD. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder is closely related to traditional PTSD but may have additional symptoms. Complex PTSD can happen if a person experiences repeated trauma over a long time. The interplay between PTSD and memory is multifaceted and often perplexing. While blackouts represent one extreme of memory disruption, individuals with PTSD may also experience hypermnesia, or extremely vivid and intrusive memories of traumatic events. This dichotomy highlights the complex ways in which trauma can impact the brain’s memory systems.