One of the last things I deconstructed from my traumatic past was this idea that someone had to hit you for it to be violently abusive. My mother used to hit me. My brother used to hit me. Kids at school used to hit me. The narcissistic and toxic men and women who abused me into my adulthood were much more violent, though. They didn't have to hit me to control me. I'd already been conditioned. They found a way to break through the protective skull behind my face and cause tremendous damage to my brain by preying on my traumatic past and compounding it with their toxic need for coercive control.
A diagnosis of CPTSD is a diagnosis of brain damage. It's a diagnosis of abuse and domestic violence. It can be seen in a brain scan. It causes the amygdala and hippocampus to shrink. The hippocampus is a part of the brain that controls stress responses, memory, and fear conditioning. People with CPTSD may have smaller hippocampi. The amygdala is another part of the brain that's linked to emotion. People with CPTSD may have increased amygdala activity, which can lead to more noradrenaline being released into the body and an increased startle response. People with CPTSD may have less signaling between the hippocampus and the salience network, which is involved in learning and survival, and between the amygdala and the default mode network, which activates when someone isn't focused on the outside world. CPTSD can make the brain's alarm system too sensitive, causing it to trigger easily. This can make it hard to differentiate between safe events and dangerous events from the past.
Brain scans can show signs of complex posttraumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) by producing evidence of abnormal activity, structural changes, and functional connectivity symptoms. (Abnormal Activity) Brain scans can show areas of the brain with abnormally high activity, such as the deep limbic area, basal ganglia, and anterior cingulate gyrus. In one study, scans showed a diamond pattern of increased activity in the deep emotional part of the brain. (Structural Changes) Scans can show focal atrophy of the gray matter, altered fractional anisotropy, and changes in the volume and structure of different areas of the brain. (Functional Connectivity) Scans can show altered focal neural activity and functional connectivity between brain regions associated with PTSD. For example, one study found that people who developed PTSD after trauma had exaggerated activation in the amygdala and weak regulation from the prefrontal cortex.
CPTSD is more than a bruise or a broken bone because the brain is responsible for the entire human body. Bruises heal. Bones heal. The brain can heal but after severe compounding trauma sometimes it's too complicated and widespread to heal the person back to who they would have been otherwise. Causing someone CPTSD or triggering their CPTSD is much worse than hitting someone. Having said that, pain isn't a competition and no two people experience pain and suffering the same. The victim decides what hurts them. They define their trauma and what they consider suffering. This is not the right or task of the victimizer or any third-party.
He didn't hit me, though ...
He just damaged my brain
He didn't hit me
He just screamed in my face
He didn't hit me
He just terrorized the children with fear
He didn't hit me
He just handed me all the blame
He didn't hit me
He just manipulated me with silence
He didn't hit me
He just coerced me into submission
He didn't hit me
He just ignored my emotional needs
He didn't hit me
He just told himself I was crazy
He didn't hit me
He just invalidated what he forced me to experience
He didn't hit me
He just controlled the conversations
He didn't hit me
He just controlled the schedule
He didn't hit me
He just controlled the public narrative
He didn't hit me
He just made me feel less than him
He didn't hit me
He just left me alone to suffer the fall out
He didn't hit me
He just ignored the damage he caused
He didn't hit me
He just fell asleep as I cried
He didn't hit me
He just walked away as I cried
He didn't hit me
He just acted like I was garbage
He didn't hit me
He just tied me to an imaginary trophy pedestal
He didn't hit me
He just compared me incessently to expectations about who he thought I should be
He didn't hit me
He just thought he should "fix me" to be what he really wanted
He didn't hit me
He just minimized the reality of who I was before the trauma bond
He didn't hit me
He just shoved me back off the pedestal with disdain
He didn't hit me
He didn't have to hit me, though
Because he damaged my brain
