• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

News Article claiming divorce caused ptsd

Status
Not open for further replies.
from Pete Walkers Complex PTSD from surviving to thriving

"....bullying alone can cause Cptsd. If it goes on long enough as it does with bullying parents in a dysfunctional family, in can cause Cptsd."

p. 112

The author is talking about bullying by parents, not peers. If a caregiver is a bully it has a whole different effect than if a peer or community-member is a bully, don’t you think? No matter how cruel the peers are the victim is not dependent on them.

IMHO think bullying that is severe enough to give you PTSD is better referred to as emotional abuse?

I agree, and especially if it comes from parents. But bullying is a specific kind of emotional abuse, among others, that parents can do. I’m not sure you would call it abuse unless the victim is in a relationship with the bully, am I right? Otherwise it would be something like harassment.
 
IMHO think bullying that is severe enough to give you PTSD is better referred to as emotional abuse?

Emotional abuse cannot cause PTSD. But bullying is not just emotional. Actually many times it's straight up assault as it was in my case but everyone I have come across say "oh, you mean bullying". It is a generalized term that can mean a widespread of things. So, personally I would caution against thinking of "bullying" as just emotional abuse as it can, and usually, mean physical and, in my case, sexual abuse. Which can cause PTSD.
 
Sexual abuse isn't bullying, it's sexual abuse. Not sexual bullying, sexualised bullying or any other term that minimises what's happening. Bullying does cover a range of behaviours but calling patently illegal, harmful activity as bullying is minimising in the extreme. Same with physical assault, when we stop calling the assault of one child towards another "bullying" and start recognising it as the assault that it is we'll go some way to taking bullying seriously.

And I can think of instances where emotional abuse could represent a Criterion A trauma and could therefore cause PTSD.
 
And I can think of instances where emotional abuse could represent a Criterion A trauma and could therefore cause PTSD.

This:
According to the current diagnostic criteria, emotional abuse alone cannot cause PTSD, and it is not the criteria for, or definition of, CPTSD.
is why I stated that. And I am not one to argue what can and cannot cause PTSD but I have now read in several threads that emotional abuse alone (and I also remember anthony, I believe it was, stated bullying alone cannot cause PTSD). Can emotional abuse cause PTSD? I have no idea. And am not arguing it nor am I trying to derail the thread but rather advise why I stated what I did.

Sexual abuse isn't bullying, it's sexual abuse. Not sexual bullying, sexualised bullying or any other term that minimises what's happening. Bullying does cover a range of behaviours but calling patently illegal, harmful activity as bullying is minimising in the extreme. Same with physical assault, when we stop calling the assault of one child towards another "bullying" and start recognising it as the assault that it is we'll go some way to taking bullying seriously.

I agree. But, in conversations with people, what I experienced and suffered was "just bullying". Bullying is a rather blanket term I have learned and it can include emotional, physical, and sexual assualt via other children or even adults. To the point of suicide many times. I guess the question is, when do we stop calling it bullying and start calling it what it is: assualt and/or emotional abuse?
 
The point is defined in law surely? If someone sexually assaults me I can have charges brought - I don't have them charged with bullying, the law seems quite clear about bullying, sexual and physical assault. We might minise that difference but the law is clear.

In terms of emotional abuse, if the criteria is that the person needs to perceive a real threat to life where a child is threatened with being left, abandoned or put out into the street that action does threaten their life and children will perceive it as life threatening. Extreme emotional abuse of young children who literally rely on their abuser for survival can leave a child feeling that they won't survive. It's very often caught up in complex PTSD and in reality is exceptionally rare for a child to only experience emotional abuse - I don't think I've ever come across someone who didn't experience it as part of a landscape of other abuses, so it's an academic argument really.

I have massive respect for both @anthony and @joeylittle but I know they would tell you to do your own research rather than regurgitating their views as your own.
 
the law seems quite clear about bullying, sexual and physical assault. We might minise that difference but the law is clear.
Yes, and one of the few achievements of the law (cough, splutter) in this area is it makes it clear that there is a myriad different ways these things can play out, and just as many ways they can be labelled. There’s lots of different potential offences that might involve (or not) a sexualised component, and the same can be said for actions containing a bullying component, or an emotional abuse component.

Doesn’t make it sexual assault just because there’s a sexualised component. And different jurisdictions define offences differently, so that what one person may have legally termed sexual assault, or sexual harrassment? May not be called that somewhere else. Some places recognise certain things as an offence where other places it may not be an offence at all.

Bullying is a term that could mean anything from harassment to assault, and even both of those interchangeably. So whether bullying amounts to assault, or a crit A trauma? Seems that you’d need to look at the detail of what actually took place. What people even consider ‘bullying’ seems to be in a constant state of flux.
 
Bullying is a rather blanket term I have learned and it can include emotional, physical, and sexual assualt via other children or even adults. To the point of suicide many times. I guess the question is, when do we stop calling it bullying and start calling it what it is: assualt and/or emotional abuse?
Yes - this is always where I get a little hung up on bullying. Bully is a word that has been in common use for a very long time, and used to mean a few different things - it's gone from meaning 'sweetheart', to 'fine/good', to 'blustering', to what we know it as today.

The use of it to describe a behavior - bullying - didn't really come into widespread (formal) social/psychological use until the 60s-70s. Here's a quote from a nice little book review on a book about bullying:
Dr. Peter Paul Heinemann...developed a theory about bullying after witnessing the local community’s hostility toward his adopted son...Heinemann looked to the behavior of animals—specifically mobbing, a violent, instinctual behavior of birds assaulting a weaker member of their own species—and in turn applied the concept to a group’s aggression against a particular child. A young Swedish academic named Dan Olweus...disagreed with the idea that mobbing was a “crowd” behavior...Typically, a small group of two or three students would do the majority of the bullying that occurred in a class...When Olweus translated his 1978 book Aggression in the Schools from Swedish into English, he chose the English word bullying to describe these cruel schoolyard behaviors. Over time, Olweus refined the meaning of bullying to include three conditions: Bullying is (1) repeated (2) deliberate verbal or physical abuse by (3) someone with more power than his or her target.

The term "bullying" has either outlived it's psycho-social usefulness, or it needs to evolve into a more narrow definition, if it's to continue to be applied to psychological and legal concepts.

I find 'emotional abuse' to be a strange concept as well - I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but I have a hard time really understanding where it fits in. It seems to me that many things could be said to contain emotional abuse (neglect, gaslighting, cruelty), and/or that it's likely a component of physical assault or sexual assault.

But absent those other structures, is there really such a thing? Is harassment a better term for emotional abuse?

I find that people often use emotional abuse to describe something that felt/feels really really horrible - and in order to find the validity in their own experience, they look for a word - abuse - that can contain the scope of their experience. But then, it drifts off into becoming it's own thing, and that muddies the waters, in terms of how we communicate about these issues.

Verbal cruelty, verbal harassment, manipulation, neglect...are these the things people are talking about, when they talk about emotional abuse? Or am I missing something?

Bullying is a term that could mean anything from harassment to assault, and even both of those interchangeably. So whether bullying amounts to assault, or a crit A trauma? Seems that you’d need to look at the detail of what actually took place. What people even consider ‘bullying’ seems to be in a constant state of flux.
(you could sum up my whole post as, "yes, what she said")
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top