How Do Adverse Childhood Experiences Cause CPTSD

You. Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on adverse childhood experiences, what they are and why they cause complex post traumatic stress disorder. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Let's start out by talking about what adverse childhood experiences are when children are young, obviously their children, they rely on their caregivers to keep them safe, to feed them, to keep a roof over their head. And when a child grows up in an environment in which there is abuse of the child themselves, obviously they don't feel safe if there's abuse of others in the household, even if it's not of the child, the child sees this and does not feel safe. When they don't feel safe and they feel disempowered because they can't just up and leave, they can't move out because they're too young, they're children, so they are hopeless and helpless to escape the situation. Same thing is true with neglect of the child. There's physical neglect where caregivers are not providing food, shelter, clothing, medical care that the child needs. So the child is regularly in pain, hungry, uncomfortable, sick, the list goes on. But they don't feel safe. They don't feel like there's somebody that's going to be there to help them feel happy and healthy and safe. Emotional neglect is another form of neglect, and it is just as damaging as physical neglect. Emotional neglect is when the caregivers don't have time to attend to the child, don't have time to help the child figure out what they're feeling or how to manage their feelings. The adults are often too caught up in their own stuff to help the child navigate these developmental tasks. And it leads the child to feeling very out of control. When they feel powerful emotions, a child doesn't know what to do with them. And it's up to the caregiver to help the child learn how to contain anger and anxiety. And when this doesn't happen again, the child doesn't feel safe. Abandonment is another adverse childhood experience. And this can come in the form of a caregiver leaving. It can come in the form of a caregiver dying, and it can come in the form of a caregiver or two caregivers getting divorced where one caregiver leaves, but they are not leaving and never to be seen again. They are leaving and moving to a different place. But children often don't understand this, especially if the divorce is particularly conflictual. There's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of anger. The child doesn't feel safe, the child may not understand why one caregiver moved out. They may think it's their fault, and they may think that they're at risk of being kicked to the curb as well. And finally, if there's mental illness or addiction in the household, this sets up the scene often for a very chaotic environment. Now, when I talk about mental illness or addiction, I'm talking about uncontrolled, untreated mental illness and addiction. People can have mental illnesses. They can be in recovery from addiction and have things well in hand. But if it's uncontrolled, it creates a lot of chaos. You may not know when somebody's going to have an episode. You may not know what to do when they're having an episode. If the caregiver suddenly becomes clinically depressed, the child may not know why it's happening. They may blame themselves. They may not know what to do to make it better. And if they're having a significant major depressive episode, then the caregiver's duties may fall to the child. Because the caregiver cannot meet the child's physical or emotional needs, they are pretty much checked out. And the same thing with addiction. So it's important to recognize that a lot of people experience one or more adverse childhood experiences. Experiencing them doesn't necessarily mean it's going to cause psychological or physical injury experiencing them. If there is another caregiver, whether it's in the house or nearby, that's able to help the child out and support the child and help them feel safe, well, okay, then the child is probably going to resolve these issues without developing complex post traumatic stress. Complex post traumatic. Post Traumatic Stress disorder is when the person is exposed to a situation which was extremely threatening or horrific in nature and there was no hope of escape. So think about a child who's 4, 5, 8 years old in a household in which the caregivers have mental illness or addiction or there's domestic violence, the child recognizes that they don't have a whole lot of options. And this is terrifying because these people who are supposed to be taking care of them, at the very least, are ignoring them and at the worst, are actually abusing them. In the case of complex post traumatic stress disorder abuse, as I mentioned, whether it's to the child or to someone else in the household, that's terrifying to a child. It's terrifying to an adult to see, but it's especially terrifying to a child because they don't know if it's going to be turned on them. It's often also violent against somebody they love. And so they feel helpless to defend that person as well. Neglect. If the child is not able to meet their needs, if they can't count on their caregivers to make sure that they have food that's threatening their, their body is going to start reacting to malnourishment, their body's going to start reacting to lack of sleep and that's going to cause them a lot of problems in other areas of their life. And they will often feel helpless. You know, they don't know how to or where to go to get food. They don't know where to go to get safe shelter or medical care. And then abandonment is terrifying because as I mentioned, the child doesn't know if they have a caregiver that stuck around. They don't know when that caregiver might hit the bricks too, or die, if the abandonment was caused because of death, or if they are going to be kicked out of the house like the other caregiver was in the case of a conflictual divorce. So that can be traumatic for the child. And as I mentioned, with mental illness or addiction, relapses are very often seemingly from out of the blue, especially for the child. So they may feel terrified that it's going to happen again. They may feel it's their responsibility to try to control everything to make sure that the caregiver doesn't relapse. You may have developed complex post Traumatic stress disorder or CPTSD as a result of adverse childhood. Adverse childhood experiences. If you notice that you avoid reminders of your childhood or anybody's childhood. If you re experience the events of your childhood in flashbacks and nightmares. Obviously if you're remembering going to the amusement park, that's not what we're talking about. If you're remembering the traumatic events from your childhood, if you're always on guard, you have difficulty relaxing around other people or relaxing in general, you're constantly scanning for problems. You're constantly looking for clues or indications that there might be a problem happening. If you have extreme mood swings, you go from feeling kind of flat or okay or numb to being either frantic or furious or even super depressed. That may be an indication that you have complex post traumatic stress. If you have low self esteem, you know, we want to look at where that came from. And if you have difficulty feeling close to or trusting others. Now, in order to qualify for the diagnosis of complex ptsd, you have to have all of these symptoms. However, even if you don't have all of these symptoms, if you have even one of them, it's worth addressing because these symptoms are likely cause causing negative impacts in your life in the present because of something that happened in the past, treatment is available and recovery is possible. You can watch allce.comaces for more information about adverse childhood experiences, their impact, and what you can do to begin the healing process.