A syndrome called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can affect victims of sociopaths. The trauma of losing love, friends, family, possessions and of enduring psychological/physical abuse is the cause of this disorder. To fight the symptoms of PTSD, it is helpful to understand the symptoms and how they relate to loss and trauma.
As I read through the current literature on PTSD, I quickly discovered that there is a fair amount of controversy regarding this disorder. We can actually learn about the disorder by listening to the arguments. The first question on which there is much disagreement is, “What trauma is severe enough to cause PTSD?” There were several editorials by experts disparaging the fact that everything from giving birth to a healthy baby to a boss yelling at an employee is now said to cause PTSD. Most experts are in favor of reserving this diagnosis for people who have suffered truly unusual life experiences, like kidnapping, rape, war, 911, etc.
The problem is that many people do experience severe stress reactions to difficult life circumstances. It remains to be determined what we should call these reactions.
Those of us healing from our relationship with a sociopath often vacillate between accepting the trauma and minimizing it. Thus, the argument about what kinds of trauma are severe enough to cause PTSD has a direct effect on us. The argument can leave us feeling weak, like we should be able to get over this. After all it wasn’t as bad as 911, Iraq or Katrina—or was it?
The second question is “what symptoms constitute PTSD?” The following table shows the most common symptoms seen in a group of 103 British men and women diagnosed by psychiatrists with PTSD (Current Medical Research Opinion, 2003):
| Symptom | Frequency (n=103) |
| Insomnia | 98 (95%) |
| Anxiety at reminder cues | 96 (93%) |
| Intrusive thoughts, images, sounds, sensations | 94 (91%) |
| Irritability | 93 (91%) |
| Poor concentration | 93 (91%) |
| Diminished interest in significant activities | 88 (85%) |
| Recurrent dreams of trauma | 86 (83%) |
| Avoidance of activities or places associated with the trauma | 85 (83%) |
| Foreshortening of expectations about the future | 80 (78%) |
| Detachment from others | 78 (76%) |
| Avoidance of thinking or conversing about the trauma | 75 (73%) |
| Poor appetite | 69 (67%) |
| Hypervigilance | 55 (53%) |
| Startle reactions | 46 (45%) |
| Acting or feeling as if the event was recurring | 37 (31%) |
| Inability to recall parts of trauma (amnesia) | 19 (18%) |
I put up this table because I thought that a number of you would also endorse these symptoms. Notice that “acting or feeling as if the event was recurring” was really not that common. But similar symptoms, like “Intrusive thoughts, images sounds and sensations,” were very common. Amnesia was also uncommon. Startle reactions were only seen in half of the subjects.
A feeling of a foreshortened future is a particularly debilitating symptom because it impairs a person’s ability to plan for the future and leads to a sense of hopelessness. I will expand on this further, but I strongly believe this feeling of a foreshortened future has to do less with our thoughts about our past, and more with our thoughts about our present.
As I look at this list of symptoms, I am struck by the fact that many, many of those writing into Lovefraud complain of these symptoms, particularly nightmares. There is something special about having had emotional involvement with an aggressor that seems to produce nightmares. Since so many have all of the most common symptoms, I think it has to be that the trauma of life with a sociopath is severe enough to cause this disorder in many people.
Here’s where defining exactly what trauma is gets sticky. Rachael Yehuda, Ph.D., said in a recent article published on MedScape, “One of the things that biology has taught us is that PTSD represents a type of a response to trauma, but not the only type of response. It is a response that seems to be about the failure to consolidate a memory in such a way as to be able to be recalled without distress.” Well, this is precisely the definition that is too broad. I personally have a lot of memories that I experience or re-experience with distress. Yet these memories are not accompanied by the list of symptoms in the table above.
For me what made the experience traumatic was the truly life course-changing nature of the trauma. The answer to the question, “Will I ever be the same?” for me defines trauma significant enough to cause PTSD. The trauma that causes this disorder redefines us in a way that is different from other emotionally significant experiences. This trauma strikes at the core of our identity.
The final controversy surrounds the treatment of PTSD. Interestingly, there is no question that medications (SSRIs, particularly Zoloft) are very helpful. The problem is though that when a person goes to a physician and receives a medication, he/she is by definition “sick.” Assumption of a “sick role” or “victim identity” is one of the many factors that slow recovery from PTSD.
Many therapists are of the belief that “debriefing” or retelling the story is necessary for recovery. One group of researchers reviewed the studies on debriefing and concluded that there is no scientific evidence that it prevents PTSD. Instead, the evidence points to post-trauma factors like social support and “additional life stress” being most important.
How can we put this all together? Considering last week’s post, those who experience trauma serious enough to have stress hormone overdose as manifested by dissociation, are likely to also develop PTSD. An examination of the symptoms of PTSD reveals that at the core of the disorder is the fact that the person really doesn’t believe in his/her heart that the trauma has ended. PTSD is about ONGOING, not past, trauma. For those of us whose lives were assaulted by a sociopath, there is ongoing stress. The stress is the social isolation, financial ruin, and threatened further losses long after the relationship has ended. Those who recover from this without PTSD work hard to put the trauma behind them in every way.
Putting the trauma behind you does not mean you can’t take medication to help with the process. It does mean facing those bills, former friends, and other personal issues you want to avoid. Remember AVOIDANCE STRENGTHENS FEAR.
Above all, stop the ongoing trauma by ending contact with the sociopath. Do not assume a sick role, instead, work to stay healthy. Fight to be the person you want to be. Don’t allow this single experience to define you. Make living for today the place you love to be. As Louise Gallagher says in her recent post, “This is, in many ways, the greatest challenge of recovery — to accept the past is simply the route I took to get to where I am today, a place I love to be. The past cannot be changed. It cannot be altered. It cannot be made ‘better.’ It can only be accepted so that it, and I, may rest in peace with what was, eager to accept what is true in my life today.”
‘Now I realize I have the right to protect myself from manipulation and lies and don’t feel so bad. ‘
TOWANDA BLUE EYES!!
(Bad ptsd last night, opening up to the idea of talking about the sexual abuse to professionals. Head imploding. )
For decades my S sister uses the line ‘oh you’re awake then!!! when I ever answered the phone at any time of day, she still gaslights me with this little weapon 20 years later.
This is my sister:
cannot . stop . thinking . about . abusing . must . abuse . because . i am . incapable . of . stopping . my mental . state . to . abuse.
If I had cancer my S sister (a doctor) would abuse it beautifully. She would LOVE to know I’m ill with cancer, she would celebrate it with relish. I disclose the ptsd to people I trust, VERY few people. At no point should this information be passed to the sociopath. After the aha! do not present yourself being in pain. It is a juicy bone for the dog.
Dr leedom, your last paragraph I will like to highlight as being a benchmark point for yor article. Understanding that it is a past situation, despite the ongoing presence it carries in our psyche. Maintain healthy living, until your mind accepts the healthy life and stops breathing the trauma. I realise just how ridiculous abusers need to maintain their ‘mental health trap’. I encounter dozens of people in an average day. Not one person sees me as mentally ill. ONLY the people who know the abuser. The contrast is amazing when you’re thick with ptsd. They dont see mental instability but a totally normal confident and engaging person. Go out (the grocery store, the cinema, the bank, the library, the gym) – you’re normal and healthy and people see it. They reciprocate by communicating to a normal and very healthy person.
I stupidly manintained contact over Spring with a view to say ‘hey my dear sister who sexually abused me when I was a child, look at me! you don’t scare me! I’m right in front of you and no matter how much you kill me, I’m still standing. I’m standing because I am standing in front of a child who displayed a personality disorder at 15 and I’ve seen it develop for 30 years.
Then I realised that I was enabling her. I was in fact giving her ammunition that she can say
‘hey outlier, i love it that you can speak so nicely with me even after I abuse you, heh heh heh, you can’t stop respecting me can you, after all the sh!t and pain I cause, I watch you bounce up like a stupid little ball, all the gaslighting I do, and you can be nice back, well thank you, and yeah thanks for keeping silent, it’s a neat trick. you can’t say anything can you? a win-win for me. would you like some tea?’
NC (ptsd induced) screams ‘mentally unstable’ for her and my family. I’ll gladly pay the price of losing my family who are too gullible and so blinded in their eyes. I plan to help the abused, with reference to survivors of sexual abuse. It may make people (with intelligence) wonder of all the things in the world… ……………………… …
Dear Outlier,
I am sorry you are in such a situation with your doctor/sister and yes, if we “pretend” to be “normal” with THEM (the abuser) they take it as a victory. My own egg donor’s mantra was “let’s pretend none of the abuse I did to you ever happened”—-of course under the guise of “I don’t want to talk about unhappy things, I just want to concentrate on the positive” BULL HOCKEY!!!
Of course, as you say, NC with her screams “Mentally unstable,” because she does in retaliation for my going NC with her.” Why would anyone who WASN’T unstable think SHE WAS ABUSIVE?” (tongue in cheek here)
They are quite good at cloaking their fangs!
Well, if you give birth to a boy, raise that boy strictly as a girl, educating them how to toilet train as a girl would that the penis is what all girls have, to use the left hand if they are right, to grow their hair and braid it, to teach them to drink out a dog bowl crouching on the floor and not from a beaker and teach them a cat is a snake and a dog is a cat, have sex with them, let them see you pleasure yourself in front of sesame street, teach them to work to earn a glass of milk or food etc etc…
Experts, okay there’s no war, rape, kidnapping, hurricane. Does the kid have ptsd perchance?
Dear OUtlier,
Those that hurt others, espoecially children, justify themselves by gaslighting and denying what is real, what is true. They justify themselves by saying that what you know is real is imagined, that you are “crazy” because “No one would do such a thing to a child, and surely I wouldn’t do that to my child.”
I’m sorry you have experienced such “crazy-making” but I am glad that you see what is real now, and know what is real now, and though everyone in the world deny it, you can validate yourself now. In the end, sometimes that’s the only validation possible, but it’s enough. Enough for me. God bless you.
As we are dealing with personality disorders, we are reasoning with mentally unstable people! You can’t reason with brain disordered people.
I was reading something about the abuser/victim/helper musical chairs post earlier. Quite brilliant. OxDrover sometimes you make me laugh at your ability to articulate what we know from experience but dont quite get round saying how to say it. I try to answer you, but I often find, how to follow it. If I don’t always answer back you’ve made me THINK, not necessarily exchange back. You just shut me up and made me think, and that’s a powerful thing you can do.
Oxdrover, there’s a powerful film about sexual abuse. It changed me. It validated me. Legal justice will never be reached. SOUL JUSTICE is and will and has and can. Even if the abuse is always silent, we can disclose to support groups, our doctor, our counsellors, fellow vicitims and very trusted people who know nothing about the abuser. That indeed can be enough validation. It’s interesting how it takes so long for someone to realise that they’ve been abused. I thought ‘ but abuse happens to really abused people, people who are really ill in hospital. I didn’t even accept that everything I experienced was “abuse”. My ignorance breathed for decades, so can you imagine the ignorance the abuser’s enablers and society breathe? In the UK, it is not an obligation for schools to report abuse. If they are aware of it, they are not by law to report the abuser. (It is in Northern Ireland) This something I would dearly love to see changed in my lifetime.
Dear Outlier,
NO RESPONSE needed. Sometimes I am musing/talking to MYSELF even if it is “addressed” to you or someone else. That’s part of the wonder here is that in blogging to others it makes US think in order to put it down on the screen in letters. I have preached more to myself than I ever have to others.
Through the years of my life I have learned about various things (one is the victim’s triangle: Victim, rescuer, and abuser and the “musical chairs”) and never really put those things I learned TO USE, but finally, FINALLY, they started to come together and I started to USE THE KNOWLEDGE I had accumulated to protect myself.
It’s scary to admit MY FAMILY IS NOT A NICE NORMAL FAMILY, my family members are FARKED UP! Because after so much energy and so many years have been used keeping up this facade, to admit it, even to yourself, much less the rest of the neighborhood, and world, is devestating. “Protect the family’s good name” above all else, and above ANY REALITY otherwise, keep up the FRONT, no matter how false or how much energy it takes to hold it up there in front of the dirt and filth of what it really is!
I think I know how the Catholic church feels about having its cover ups of the pedophile priests exposed, and even the pope outed as one who covered it up. Gosh, I MUST BE A CATHOLIC and I didn’t even know it!!!! Cause I sure know how the COVER UP THE DIRT AT ANY COST policy works!
And yes, I stood here in all my piety and all my LACK OF HUMILITY after having covered up stuff “just as bad” for my own family, for myself, for my P-son. There goes my HUMILITY AWARD again! DArn it! Every time I thinnk I am so humble, and I put on that humble button and look down on someone else for covering up the dirt in their “family” (in this case the pedophile priests) I REALIZE I AM JUST LIKE THE ONE DOING THE COVERING UP! It turns out I’m not any better than they are. Then there goes the humility award again!
Wonder when I will learn not to wear it!
Oho – just ordered ‘Betrayal Bond’ Patrick Carnes and ‘Without Conscience’ Dr Robert Hare which have been recommended by several people to me.
RE- Will I ever be the same? I had been asking myself this question for around 2 years, that’s right 2 whole years since my exN ‘devalued and discarded’ me. I’ve come a massive long way – because now when people say ‘are you okay’. Sometimes I’m actually surprised that they’re asking I’m like – ‘Er what r u talking about – what do you mean ‘am I okay?’. YAY!
But it was a long roller-coaster journey even to this point – and I know that the ‘healing journey’ is not over.
Basically I would like to talk about the feeling:
“OMG – what’s wrong with me!!! Am I crazy!!!! Why has this happened to me. And also the ideas of looking for ‘labels’ for why you appear to have lost your mind and want to die during or after relationships with your N S or P and fear that there is some ‘intrinsically wrong’ with your inner being”.
Also related to this first idea: has anyone read alot of Sam Vaknin stuff. He claims to have Narcissistic Personality Disorder but is a bit of a controversial figure with some people on the net claiming he’s really a P/S ‘in disguise’. You can’t avoid coming across his stuff ‘first’ if your searching for information on Narcissists.
I did find some of the information on the SV sites helpful, but some of it also quite disturbing. Overall I am left with the impression that although the information on the site is quite factual and accurate in many respects, it does manifest his Narc contempt for ‘victims’, I prefer the term ‘targets’ of abuse as I find it less emotive and ‘blaming’ of the person who’s been harmed somehow.
Anyway in my case, just as I was just after getting out of the relationship with exN. I’m glad I was able to ‘find’ the concept of Narcissitic Personality Disorder in the first place as this is what first came out when I stared doing research on the ‘net that ‘fit’.
However – as a result of reading all the SV stuff quite intensely – I spent around 2 months really quite frightened that I might have a Cluster B personality too (histronic/borderline or ‘inverted’ narcissist).
For everyone else out there who’s still in or just coming out of an abusive relationship with an S N or P. IT WAS A REAL DEAD END to pathologise and label my difficulties at that time.
I mean I do have some issues and behaviours that are unhealthy like everyone, but reading the SV stuff was a complete trigger for the whole ‘maybe I really am crazy/maybe I’m a born victim and will never be able to withstand the predators)
I now believe that I was suffering a form of PTSD and situational depression made worse by heavy/binge drinking at weekends. Probably also processing some old ‘childhood’ trauma that took it’s chance to ‘say hello and be healed’. This process continues of course, or likely I wouldn’t be on LF!!
instead I came to the conclusion that my ‘traits’ fit the fact that I am an ENFP on the Meyer-Briggs (type Meyer-Briggs in your search engines it if you like guys) – and very extrovert, with quite alot of narcissistic traits (ie being in a band, liking attention). However despite having lots of ‘narcisstic traits’ – some of which I do get embarrassed about frankly, I’m not repeat not a Cluster B NPD. How do I know this – well BECAUSE I’m embarrassed by some of my narcissistic ‘show-offy’ traits and try to make sure that I’m not upsetting anyone (showing empathy) etc etc.
I think I was a better ‘target’ for my particular N because of being extravert etc. More ‘Narcissistic Supply’ for someone who craves popularity, more fun to break down and dominate.
I’m not saying that all N’s S’s or P’s target extraverts of course. Each target is picked for different reasons – not so much for what we ‘lack’ but because we all have lots of things that they want and it varies from predator to predator what they ‘want from you’. I’m not saying they’re not clever at picking a ‘weak spot’ to get you. i.e when you’re sick, ill, have come out of a bruising situation of some sort.
But just remember – you were a target because you were worth having. The predators trick is to convince you that you’re nothing, your worthless etc so that they can possess and control you and take what they want from you without fear of being called to account for their anti-social behaviour.
Sorry if this is all a bit obvious stuff. But hopefully it’ll help someone out there still wondering if it’s all their fault.
Erm – noo!
Blessings
Delta 1 x
Dear Delta1,
Many of us are smart, capable, successful, outgoing, giving, caring, empathetic people—just as “they” have many personality qualities in common so do we. One of the things I really liked about LF when I first came here is I recognized the higher quality of “targets” at this particular site. I also recognized that on this site there is almost NO flaming, no attacking each other, there are multiple professionals here, and just in general a “better quality” of folks than on many of the other “suvivor” sites. There is also more science on this site and less pseudo-science and bad information.
I have no doubt I have had PTSD, first from the plane crash that killed my husband before my eyes, and then from my son and his Trojan Horse Psychopaqth ex cell mate destroying my physical safety. MULTIPLE levels of crisis one piled on top of another and like the richter scale for earth quakes the next level up is 10 xs as bad as the previous one, so an earth quake that is a 2 is TEN times worse than a 1, and a level 3 earthquake is TEN times worse than a level 2 (or 100 times worse than the level 1 and so on) The stress adds up rather quickly that way to a monumental lin SURVIVAL mode is about the best you can do or hope for.
There is a PROFOUND EFFECT on the physical and mental and emotional parts of us with huge amounts of chemicals injected into our bodies and brains in an attempt to help us survive in the short term…unfortunately the continued release of these chemicals overwhelms our systems to the point that we literally are “crazy”—-and given the level of trauma we endure, an “abnnormal” response to an abnormal situation is NORMAL.
It takes TIME for our bodies, minds and souls to return to a state of stasis. We may in deed never be “the SAME” but that doesn’t mean we can’t be WELL. Personally I am NOT the same and I am BETTER than I have ever been in my life time. My thinking is more clear, I can now set boundaries and mean them. I am no longer in the FOG (Fear, Obligation and Guilt) or using outdated and self defeating social responses that leave me vunerable to attack from others.
I am using my courage and bravery to PROTECT MYSELF from others who do not have good motives and behavior toward me.
I am using bright mind and my intuition (gut feeling) to assess the situation to see if there are potential threats visible in the people around me?
I am no longer assuming responsibility for doing other people’s jobs or caring for them when they refuse to care for themselves. I no longer feel that I am guilty if someone else throws themselves in front of a train and screams at me as they do so, “This is your fault!”
I am also no longer beating myself up because it took me decades to realize that I had allowed myself to be TARGETED by Ps, over and over and over, and that I had lived in the FOG my entire life. I did the best I knew how then, but now I know better and I am doing better.
Sure I have little ups and downs even now, that is called LIFE, but I am learning to handle them in new ways. That’s called HEALING and GROWTH!
Walk toward the light! Even if it flickers!