The thing that made me decide to see a psychologist was an incident during a doctor appt. This doc told me he wanted to inject my shoulder (again) and instantly, without thought, I threw my arms into the air, criss-crossed, in front of my face and started saying, "No!" No!" No!"...you can't do that. And then I discovered I was trying to push him away from me, even though he was across the exam room from me. I had no conscious control of my reaction. I just knew I was terrified of being hurt again and didn't want him to touch me. The reaction only took a minute or two but it was an eternity for me. When I came back to my senses, I profusely apologized for my childish actions and was extremely embarrassed to have acted out like a little girl. He was caught off guard, too and didn't know what quite to say. After the appt. was over and I was out of the office, I was still shaken to the core with no understanding of what had just taken place. Later that afternoon, I decided to seek help. This was my first flashback to beatings and assaults of which I have had throughout childhood and into pre-married adulthood. It was a tough day.
After I was diagnosed with PTSD and getting frustrated that I do not match the military scenarios for this disorder, I started researching, trying to find information that more matched my symptoms. That is when I found a site that blew the socks off me!!! It talked about "me". It was an article titled, "Adult Traumatic Stress Disorder of Child Abuse. It is on the NAASCA.org site. This is the National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse. I highly recommend reading this article. It helped me know that I am not totally weird or on my own in this PTSD diagnosis.
As for a C-PTSD diagnosis, I have read that it is to be made 'official' this year, in the mental health field. Until then only the PTSD is recognized as a bona-fide disability, though most of the mental health field, recognizes the need to include C-PTSD, too.
