Survivors of trauma and emotional abuse develop pattern recognition abilities if prolonged enough.

Emotional abuse can either be intentional, reactive, or unintentional.

Unintentional emotional abuse is when you’re in a relationship with someone who has ADHD for example. On the outside, they can come across as narcissistic – more commonly in men, except it’s not true NPD. In females, they can come across as BPD.

True NPD is a form of childhood PTSD, in the same way BPD is a form of PTSD. This is why people with CPTSD can express both NPD traits and BPD traits in a crisis when externally triggered, but when stable, they tend to go back to their original sense of self but with lingering issues like avoidance, emotional dysregulation, anxiety, trust issues, and a general sense of persistent hypervigilance – although a CPTSD crisis can last years if they have never had any prior form of support or experienced emotional abuse like neglect of care needs in the healthcare system.

Think of emotional abuse like something that distorts your perception of reality. I’ve encountered this so many times in England. A female is usually emotionally abused by an ex-partner, they develop PTSD attacks and when they ask for help to work through that trauma, the mental health system says: It’s BPD in a 10 minute appointment. This is a very common occurrence in England’s NHS system. Half of these women do not have BPD. They are victims of crime, abuse, gaslighting, injustice, and more than half the time, they are neurodivergent and suffering with something called rejection sensitivity dysphoria which is yet to be added into the DSM and the ICD. What’s happened is, the original 1938 label of BPD – which was coined to describe women victims of prolonged abuse was confused with this rejection sensitivity dysphoria we see in individuals with ADHD because the symptoms overlap and are strikingly similar. These group of neurodivergent individuals thought to themselves – but the label doesn’t describe me. So psychologists changed the label to EUPD. But here is where it went wrong. EUPD is NOT BPD. EUPD is RSD. When they realised the mistake they made a decade back, they had to create a new label for BPD – CPTSD.

This meant that the abused women who fit under the original label of BPD had to be allocated a different label because the condition also has PTSD attacks. This was the birth of CPTSD. A disorder to identify women with BPD (dissociative PTSD), who have experienced prolonged trauma and have PTSD attacks – so it could change their treatment approach as leaving it can make it worse and intensify their PTSD levels as their PTSD levels will be off the scale – especially if they had untreated childhood PTSD.

This is a bit different from standardised PTSD where you do get real flashbacks. In CPTSD you get emotional flashbacks. This is my only second episode of PTSD in my life which was triggered externally back by outside forces beyond my control on top of my CPTSD.

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