Okay. You seem to be in a constant state of shock. I’m traumatizing you.

No, it’s fascinating though. I like this information because it causes my wheels to turn. And then it’s going to make me go and watch even more of your videos because I really like knowledge. It helps me. Although it is scary, it is terrifying, it is traumatizing, but it’s that fear that makes you do better.

Is that how hard they have to work to get views?

I get it now. I understand.

There’s something that you also said that abuse of all kinds interferes with the victim’s ability to work. And I had never heard that before, but it makes sense because I talk to survivors of domestic violence every day.

And one of the side effects of abuse, they just can’t function in the workplace. They can’t find work and they brush up against the societal view that you don’t want to work or you just don’t want to do it. And it’s not that they don’t want to, is that they’re incapable of doing it because of the trauma that they’ve experienced.

So why is that? Why do so many victims have such an inability to work?

Abuse is especially narcissistic abuse, not all abuse, but especially narcissistic. It’s all pervasive.

First of all, it negates you as a separate entity. It takes away your autonomy, self-autonomy, and self-independence, and self-efficacy. It renders you an object, objectifies you. Logics and dehumanizes you, definitely defeminizes you if you’re abusive as a man. It takes away your attributes. It strips away at your core identity. You are left wondering who you are because this information is no longer accessible to you.

And so the abuse is all pervasive in the sense that it is multiple simultaneous effects on your moods, emotions, cognitions, and so on. It’s not limited to one realm, one internal realm.

And so at some point, you’re unable to contain the abuse. It’s a little like a flood. You can’t limit the flood to the basement.

You say, flood, flood, you’re going to remain in the basement, and we’re going to survive wonderfully. You’re going to be in the basement. I’m going to be upstairs. You can’t do this. Water, be water. Boys, be boys. Abuses, be abusers. And they’re going to crawl up to the top of the floor and invade your bed.

So at some point, your internal boundaries break down. Your external boundaries are long gone. Otherwise, you would not have had an abuser in your life.

But then your internal boundaries break down. And everything becomes characterized. All your internal objects are out of whack, and you can’t control your internal environment anymore.

At this point, you begin to compensate for the internal mayhem via anxiety, depression, intrusive dreams, intrusive thoughts, obsessive compulsive behaviors, PTSD in extreme cases, flashbacks, and so on. That’s an extreme case.

So, of course, you can also not compartmentalize anymore. Jung and much later, even Goofmann suggested that when we go to work, for example, we wear a mask. It’s called persona. Jung called it persona. Goofmann called it a mask. We wear a mask. The mask simply means that we separate a part of us that is able to cope with external circumstances and is inaccessible to the other parts of us which are bothered and disrupted by the abuse.

This trick works neatly for a while, but then it’s not working anymore. It becomes overwhelming. The abuse becomes overwhelming and all pervasive, ubiquitous, and destroys the compartments, the inner boundaries that you had constructed, and dysregulates you. You’re unable to think straight. Your emotions overtake you. You freeze suddenly in the middle of a task. You freeze. You find yourself ruminating, thinking the same thought over and over again, painful, relieving the pain. It’s called revealedness.

At some point, abuse overwhelms you and disrupts your functionality as a worker, as a mother, as a daughter, as an inolio function.

Let’s see.

You also mentioned that the guidelines to establish a PTSD or complex PTSD are too restrictive. What did you mean by that?

It is. Guidelines for PTSD are too restrictive because diagnostic criteria for PTSD, which has survived for well over 40 years mysteriously, because we know a lot more now than 40 years ago, but the diagnostic criteria are the same, strangely.

So the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, for example, focus on a single event. Let’s say it’s a single event that has caused this disease, PTSD.

And that’s, of course, way too restrictive.

The difference between CPTSD and PTSD is flashbacks, a major difference. We have flashbacks in PTSD.

Contrary to the nonsense online, we do not have flashbacks in CPTSD. And there is no such thing as emotional flashback. It’s utter unmitigated nonsense.

So we have flashbacks. The clinical term is reviviveness. We revive, we relieve, relieve an experience.

And when we leave, we leave through an experience again. We mistake, we make a mistake. We think we are in that experience again. It’s not that we are aware that we are in some other reality, but we are catapulted, we are thrown back into the original event.

Smells, tastes, noises, everything. That’s flashback. There’s no flashback in CPTSD.

Complex trauma is much longer. I mean, the abuse is repetitive, takes much longer. Complex trauma has its own set of criteria and so on.

Originally described by Judith Herman, but we’ve come a long way since then, Van der Kolk, others.

And what I’m, my beef, my carp is that I think PTSD can occur even with multiple exposure.

We need to distinguish PTSD from CPTSD.

The prognosis for PTSD is somewhat less promising than for CPTSD. PTSD is much more destructive, much more destructive. It also contains an element, an element of a threat to existence or threat to the order of the universe, a threat to establish perception of the world.

So it’s distinguishable from complex trauma, but we should open up the PTSD diagnosis to allow for PTSD that occurs after multiple exposures or multiple events or multiple circumstances, because it does occur sometimes.

So let me give you an example, just to elucidate.

Imagine two women, both of them are married to a physical abuser. So there’s domestic violence, there’s family violence, okay?

One of them is beaten up on a regular basis. Let’s say once a week, let’s say once a week to become a ritual. She’s beaten up once a week, but the beating is kind of perfunctory and bruising, but not so serious. It’s more symbolic. I’m your master and you’re my property. I’ll do with you whatever I want. And that’s my way of showing my love to you.

The abuser says, I beat you up because I’m jealous and I’m jealous that I love you.

So there is this, and in this kind of abuse, the woman will develop complex PTSD.

First of all, because the messages from the abusers are messages of love, crazy love, distorted love, sick love, but still a message of love.

And second reason is the abuse is not too egregious, not too extreme, okay? She will develop complex trauma, see if it is the other woman who has a neighbor next door. Her husband is beating up once a year, but when he does, she ends up in a hospital on life support. And when he does beat her up, he tells her how much he hates her and how much he wants her dead. That woman will develop PTSD, not complex PTSD, because it’s much more extreme and because it’s embedded in a message of hate and annihilation. I’m going to kill you. I’m going to destroy you.

So even though in both cases it’s a repeatable event, in the second case every year, the reaction would be very different.

So the fact that an event repeats itself should not exclude a diagnosis of PTSD.

That’s all I was trying to say.

That’s interesting.

Okay.

Let’s see.

Okay. You mentioned something that was really interesting to me.

You said that major traumas lead to two opposing outcomes.

One is regression into an infantile behavior and defenses. And the other is a spurt of personal growth and maturation.

And I’m wondering if this difference, does this difference cause some to become narcissists as a result and the others not become narcissists?

No.

This sentence that you had cited refers to adulthood.

In adulthood, when we hear a trauma, some of us react by regressing to childhood. Some of us react by growing. It induces growth, personal growth, maturation.

Some of us do both.

We first regress for a while, recuperate, recover, and then we grow.

Now, of course, narcissists, people with personality disorders, I would even say people with mental health disorders, generally, more generally, they would tend to regress.

But especially narcissists and borderlines, they would tend to regress to childhood. This would be their safe zone and their tactic, their coping strategy.

And they never, never grow as an outcome of trauma. They just spend time as newly minted children for a while, six months, one year, one month, two weeks, I don’t know why. And then they emerge unscathed. There’s no nothing that happens. And they do this by deploying a special psychological mechanism known as dissociation.

When they regress to childhood, they become infantilized. They become dependent. They become immature. They become petulant. They refuse to fulfill adult chores or meet adult responsibilities. They don’t hold themselves accountable. They act out recklessly, unthinkingly, etc.

So they become children.

And then after a while, they revert to form. They become narcissists again, no borderlines. They don’t grow. They don’t change.

The trauma induces zero change.

Why?

Because they have this dissociation mechanism. They dissociate. They cut off the trauma, store it in cold storage and move on. They have been doing this since early childhood.

Children who are traumatized, and there are many ways to traumatize a child by the way, to spoil a child is to traumatize a child. Children who are traumatized usually dissociate the trauma, cut it off, slice it off. And then they cold storage it. They put it in storage.

And this process is known as dissociation. And this survives into adulthood.

So adults with narcissism, they use the same technique exactly.

Bad thing happened, cut it off, cut it out, store it in cold storage, try to forget about it. Takes a week, takes two weeks, takes a year. Then at some point they forget about it and they revert to being themselves, unmolested, unchanged, forever younger.

That’s really common, I’m finding.

Dissociation is becoming more and more common because reality had become unbearable and intolerable. Dissociation is a defense against reality. We now have what I would call environmental trauma.

While previously trauma had been inflicted by one individual or another, today we have structural trauma that means structures and institutions that inflict trauma on groups of people. We’repeople.

We’re talking today about racism, for example. So police is inflicting structural trauma on minorities, piece of that kind.

Not of course, not all police, but some policemen.

And I would add environmental trauma. Trauma that is not inflicted by anyone, but the environment itself is dystopian and sick.

So just being in the environment traumatizes you. It’s like I would put you tomorrow in a mental asylum. All the mental patients would be very nice to you, but just being there would be so dark and that you would be traumatized. You would emerge traumatized.

And many doctors and nurses, for example, describe being traumatized in COVID words.

None of the patients attacked them. I mean, there was no, the patients did not traumatize.

It’s the environment that traumatized. The COVID word or department in the hospital is a very hellish, traumatic place.

So these are types of trauma that are becoming a lot more common than before.

Environments today, I can’t think, I can’t think of a single environment that is not conducive to trauma. Online or offline, the dating scene, you date, when you date, highly traumatic. When you go online, highly traumatic. I mean, you name it, there’s no escape. There’s environmental traumatization everywhere.

And so people are dissociating more. They need to forget. They need to forget. If you remember, you’re done for. It’s too much to remember. It’s overload and you will short circuit.

Okay.

Well, thank goodness I’m not dating. I said, thank goodness I’m not dating. I don’t have that drama to worry about.

Ask me, talk to your friends who are dating. This is first becoming one of those traumatic experiences.

Absolutely traumatic.

The consequences that many men and women gave up on, I mean, many women gave up on men and many men gave up on women and they kind of, thank you very much. The prize is not worth the price.

It’s not, it depends on the price.

Well, you have a point there. There are more important things in life. I mean, self-care and being happy and taking care of your family.

Of course, you can always sublimate. This is called sublimation. When actually you want something, but you can have it, then you sublimate it. You use, to resolve the cognitive dissonance, you redirect the energy.

So you say, I actually don’t want sex. I’m writing a book.

So the problem with dating is that people have become much more narcissistic. These grandiose have centered and titled. I would even say that the large proportion are becoming psychopathic. And even more importantly, the younger people, when I say younger, let’s say under age 40, they did not succeed to develop relationship skills because they had been exposed to the hookup culture, casual sex, junk food in essence. They didn’t have practice. Relationship is a muscle. Use it or lose it.

And so they don’t have the basic skills, compromise, negotiation, adaptation, accommodating. They have communication. They don’t have this.

None, zero, nothing.

And so when younger people try to date each other, they are confronted with replicas of themselves. They’re dating themselves. There’s no other there.

And it ends in acrimony and breakup and mess.

Because when they’re faced with their date, the date is self-focused or anxious or depressed or unemployed or narcissistic or psychopathic.

And at any rate, doesn’t know the first thing about courting and flirting and relationships.

And you know what? I whisper your secret. Doesn’t know the first thing about sex.