Surviving and thriving from the adult child trauma syndrome.

My name is Andrea and this is adult child.

Welcome back to adult child where we take a deep dive into the impact of growing up in a dysfunctional family.

And today we are diving deep or shall I say diving deeper into complex PTSD.

Now this is another episode where there probably won't be as many laughs as some of the other ones.

This episode is fucking heavy y'all.

It may stir up some unpleasant emotions.

Perhaps you don't listen to it all in one sitting.

Regardless, it is so important that we talk about this subject.

I'm going to be sharing with you more about my personal experience with complex PTSD.

And then I have an amazing interview with Shannon, the founder and creator of Surviving Childhood Trauma,

which is a support community for victims of childhood sexual abuse.

But before we proceed, I do want to provide a little bit of a high level general overview on complex PTSD.

For anyone out there saying what the fuck is complex PTSD.

Now the PTSD that most of us are familiar with is a mental condition resulting from a short lived,

intense traumatic experience, a soldier being in war, your house burning down,

a horrible car accident being sexually assaulted, and complex PTSD is a mental condition

resulting from continual and repetitive, stressful or traumatic events occurring during childhood.

And this includes things that perhaps some people might not even consider as trauma,

such as insidious forms of emotional abuse or neglect.

And someone suffering from complex PTSD will typically suffer from all the same symptoms as regular PTSD,

such as flashbacks, hypervigilance, insomnia.

...