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Is Anyone Aware Of Any Research On Ptsd Resulting From Short Periods Of Emotional Abuse?

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I won't go into too much detail but essentially I had a very short but also very emotionally abusive relationship with a man I met at university when I was a teenager which seems to have caused PTSD or something very like it (on the opinion of a Woman's Aid councilor and a psychiatrist - although I'm aware that my experience might not meet the criteria for an official diagnosis). I had quite an extreme (preexisting) sleeping disorder at the time and from what I've read this made me especially vulnerable given that the body processes stress during sleep. I had to live next door to the guy after we'd split up so the situation kind of extended to last an academic year but I think the main damage was done in the two months or so that we were together (although I was at my most physically ill towards the end of the year; I stopped sleeping almost completely at some point due to the stress and never really started again to the point that I lost consciousness on several occasions, couldn't physically stand up or walk on one occasion and experienced some (momentary) vision and hearing loss, again due to the lack of sleep.) While I was able to move on with my life and largely put this behind me after finishing the academic year it has now come back to haunt me all these years later as the man has now moved to my small home town where I am living.

I posted about the situation on a general relationships forum before I'd seen any mental health professionals and while some people were lovely others were absolutely horrible. For various reasons I didn't go into the details of how the stress affected my physical health and some people seemed to think that emotional abuse can only be harmful over the long term. They said I was an attention seeker and drama queen and I think reading peoples' nasty comments may have done more damage. I'm aware that the relationship doesn't fit the normal pattern of abuse, where incidents, however horrendous in themselves, are usually quite dilute (you might only get an explosion once a month or less whereas I was getting one every time I saw him - 3 or 4 times a week) and where abuse usually starts quite far into the relationship (it started almost as soon as we started spending time alone together in my case) but I'd be curious to know if there has been any research on how quickly trauma can occur in instances of emotional abuse. I googled this some time ago and found a study on bullying that found that symptoms of trauma started to appear at around the 2 month mark but somehow I didn't save the study and now I can't find it. I also had some involvement through my work with an industrial tribunal case in which a man was sacked for bullying his staff. His behaviour was similar in many ways to that of the man that I was in a relationship with (he was mostly just very very very angry over everything and nothing) and many staff members got ill very quickly with some ending up with long term mental health problems. To me this suggests that despite being very susceptible to trauma due to my health condition mine is not an isolated case and that emotional abuse (or bullying) doesn't have to go on for years before any damage is done but I'd be really interested in finding some actual research.

Is anyone aware of any research that looks at the timescale for trauma from this type of abuse?

Thank you.
 
I am sorry for the way you were treated on the other forum, I hope you find this forum, more supportive.

For PTSD you need to meet Criteria A. The period of exposure to a traumatic event can be very brief. You can also have emotional damage from an event without having PTSD. Short term emotional abuse can be very damaging. A traumatic health crisis does meet criteria A. I am just throwing that out there.

I do whant to say that you a misinformed on domestic violence.
I'm aware that the relationship doesn't fit the normal pattern of abuse, where incidents, however horrendous in themselves, are usually quite dilute (you might only get an explosion once a month or less whereas I was getting one every time I saw him - 3 or 4 times a week) and where abuse usually starts quite far into the relationship
I can't stress how wrong that it is. As a survivor of domestic violence and as someone who has done a lot of research and attended many survivors classes and support groups, I can tell you that doestic violence has no distinct time frame for when it begins in a relationsip. There are certian events however, that bring out a persons abusive nature. In my case the verbal abuse started just 3 days after I got together with my ex.

In ealier stages of the domestic violence (the time table is different for every relationship) The abuse may only happen once a month. For the majority of cases it is far more frequent than that. In my case the days it didn't happen were the nights he drank enough to pass out right away. Yes, there are patterns and red flags that are pretty general but to say that abuse "usually" starts far in to a relationship is quite wrong.

Health, previous trauma, stress, it all makes a person more suseptible, no doubt about that one.

Hope this makes sense as I am medicated atm.
 
The sleep disorder that you had prior to the relationship - what kind of condition was it? Were the problems purely physiological or was it unclear why you had sleeping problems? I'm just curious because insomnia and sleeping problems are often a sign of deeper emotional issues, sometimes issues that haven't been confronted yet. I suffered from severe insomnia for years and only later started to remember an early childhood trauma that turned out to be the cause of the insomnia ... So I do wonder if the sleeping disorder is somehow connected to something deeper. Also, I can't say whether or not short term emotional abuse could cause PTSD, but I imagine it could in certain circumstances. It does seem like if the emotional abuse were combined with your health problems from not sleeping, it may have done more damage ... Can you describe what the emotional abuse entailed? How did this man treat you? You don't have to if it's unpleasant, just trying to get a better idea of the situation.
 
Hello Tryingtomoveforward

Welcome to this forum. I hope and expect that you will find the guys here more friendly and helpful.

Echoing what Fadeaway and Casey have already suggested. It could be that the guy triggered something from much earlier in your life. It's taken me around half a century to realise that c-ptsd or developmental trauma explains a lot about how I experience and react to life, and stuff very early in my infancy is probably what set me up or predisposed me for later shit.

There is even good evidence that high levels of stress in either parent before conception, or high levels of stress ( including depression) in the mother during pregnancy, and especially during the final trimester, can lead to the child being more susceptible to stress for their entire life. Also, the baby's amygdala, the small and not very bright part of the brain that learns to recognise danger, is active and learning throughout the final trimester. Studies in rats show that increased susceptibility to stress can be passed on for several generations.

No criticism of the earlier posters. There are several different paradigms that try to account for the difficulties that we can experience in functioning and relating in our lives.
The medical one, tries to split difficulties up into dozens of different "disorders" and assumes physical or chemical causes. It's the same principal that worked so well with chickenpox, measles, mumps, malaria... It's the model generally used by psychiatrists, and is elaborated in the American psychiatric association's diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM) and the WHO's international catalogue of diseases (ICD).

This model with its emphasis on physical and chemical causes, suggests physical and chemical treatments...

The DSM diagnoses are used by American health insurers for billing purposes, so ( no disrespect intended) you will tend to see the DSM definitions being used with almost religious reverence by some members.

Psychologists, again have several paradigms, but tend to look at learned coping behaviours, information, and skills. so a diagnosis assumes much less importance, because it's not like identifying say the malaria parasite in order to determine whether you need a specific drug treatment. There are no chemical tests for PTSD(there are chemical changes but they can't be used diagnostically) and fMRI brain scans will only show patterns of activity and shut down, if the person's triggers are already known and understood, so that the person can be triggered when they're in the scanner.

I think you can see, I'm not a fan of the medical model.

Within PTSD, the amygdala and other fear parts of the brain, set off the body's freeze, flight, fight, Fuzzy, flop and faint responses, either in response to external triggers, or to trauma memories getting triggered in flashbacks.

Trauma memories are usually fragmented, so they might consist of only a single sense or feeling. With early stuff it tends to be emotional flashbacks, or physical sensations. They can be hard to recognise - I've gone over half a century without recognising some of my emotional flashbacks for what they are.

Hoping that wasn't too confusingly written!

There's a lot to be gained here, even if you don't think you'd get a PTSD diagnosis*
Welcome to the forum
@
________________________
* one of the dirty little secrets about psychiatric diagnoses, is they give an illusion of certainty and precision, where neither exist. Even with highly trained practitioners under ideal conditions. Once chance agreement is corrected for, different practitioners diagnosing the same patients only achieve around 60% agreement.
 
Welcome to the forum:) Shitty that you've got stuff in your life that's brought you here, but I think you're going to find plenty of people who relate.

I don't think I have much wisdom to impart that hasn't been covered better by the above posts, except to reflect back to you the focus you're putting on the fact it "only" lasted a couple of months.

Firstly, 3-4 times per week over 2 months - my maths ain't crash hot, but that means he abused you somewhere around 30+ times? That's not small fries...

Second, the trauma wasn't actually just 2 months. You had to live next to the guy even after you broke up, so your abuser, and the trauma, actually hung around longer than that.

Compassion for others is a beautiful quality to have. Just try not to use it as a way of minimising what happened to you. It was a big deal, and it did a lot of damage.

Hope you find this place helps with your healing:)
 
I had quite an extreme (preexisting) sleeping disorder at the time and from what I've read this made me especially vulnerable given that the body processes stress during sleep.
Do you know the source of your sleep disorder? In other words, was the insomnia a symptom of something else mental health related, or was it it's own diagnosis? (Edit to add: basically, I'm asking the same question @Casey_03 is)
 
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