sad woman with ptsd sitting alone on her bed" />C-PTSD overlaps with PTSD, but it also has some unique symptoms, such as dissociation and negative self-image.
sad woman with ptsd sitting alone on her bed" />
Your response to trauma won’t always look the same as someone else’s. Your experiences — and how long or how often you went through them — can all impact trauma symptoms later in life.
Living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) might mean behaving recklessly or having feelings of hostility or dissociation that make daily life difficult. You may feel like you’ve lost your sense of spirituality or feel overwhelmed by shame.
If C-PTSD doesn’t sound familiar to you, that’s because there’s still some debate in the mental health community about its formal classification. If a mental health professional is following the DSM-5 criteria, you may just be diagnosed as having PTSD.
But PTSD is more often associated with one traumatic event, whereas complex trauma could be connected to repeated events. For this reason, some experts have pushed for C-PTSD to be a recognized diagnosis in all manuals, separate from PTSD.
