The History of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and an Introduction to Emotional Flashbacks

Posted On May 30, 2019

Hardwired, our brains react viscerally to traumatic events, and then stores in our central nervous systems emotions where we feel endangered for similar future events.

Emotional flashbacks, experienced by those living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder, are sudden and horrific, often prolonged, attacks from the past of highly traumatic events. These flashbacks are different than those experienced in ordinary post-traumatic stress disorder, as they are very intense, confusing, fear-laden attacks of sorrow, and rage that cause terror and despair.

This is an introductory article we shall examine together the history of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and how complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) and PTSD differ, especially in how people living with them experience flashbacks.

Nostalgia and Shell Shock

To understand the differences between the diagnoses of PTSD and CPTSD, we need to understand the evolution of stress-orders and their eventual recognition by the American Psychiatric Association.

PTSD has been around humans have inhabited the earth. It was inevitable that our ancestors would develop the disorder as they lived in constant threat of death. It could be that long ago post-traumatic stress disorder was adaptive, teaching us to respond quickly to a similar situation to the one that caused us to develop PTSD in the first place.

Although in the present it is common knowledge that post-traumatic stress disorder exists, it wasn’t always so.

Josef Leopold, an Austrian physician, in 1761 wrote about what he termed “nostalgia” among the soldiers he had observed who received exposure to military trauma. These men experienced problems with missing home, sleep problems, anxiety, and feeling deeply sad.

Dr. Leopold’s description became a model of what physicians during the Civil War in the United States saw among fighting men. The doctors of that time suggested the cause of nostalgia was a physical injury. In fact, United States doctor Jacob Mendez Da Costa, who studied civil war soldiers determined the racing hearts and rapid breathing and pulse as markers of the heart and described it to be overstimulated. This diagnostic description became known as Da Costa’s Syndrome.

Thus, during the civil war men received drugs to control their symptoms and returned to the battlefield.

Spring forward to World War I. In 1919, World War I ended, but the war continued for many returning to their homes from the battlefields of Europe.

By then, PTSD, known as shell shock, got its name because physicians believed the reactions observed in returning soldiers resulted from the explosion of artillery shells.

Men who had served in World War I had the symptoms first observed by Josef Leopold, panic, and sleep problems. The Doctors determined that the damage was hidden brain damage from the impact of the firing sound of big weapons.

However, physicians had to reconsider their decision when they observed men who had not been near explosions presented with the same symptoms. Thus, the name change to war neuroses was born.

Once again, soldiers, who received the diagnosis of war neuroses during World War I received a few days rest before returning to battle.

Battle Fatigue or Combat Stress Reaction (CSR)

It was during World War II that shell shock took on a different name, combat stress reaction, more commonly known by the term battle fatigue.

Many men during World War II entered the hospital suffering from severe symptoms of PTSD after surviving long surges of battle. Unfortunately, there were many military leaders, such as Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who did not believe in the existence of the disorder and treated men with cruelty considering them to be cowards and deserters.

However, the fact remained that almost half of World War II military discharges resulted from combat exhaustion.

The treatment options of the day were extremely limited, and the pressure was on doctors to treat men without delay, so they could recover and return to battle.

However, because of these men, support of military men became the focus of both preventing the stress causing battle fatigue and promoting recovery.

The Development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Diagnosis

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Within its pages was a new diagnosis, gross stress reaction, the precursor to PTSD.

Gross stress reaction, the DSM-I stated, happens to normal people who had lived through traumatic events such as a natural disaster or war combat. However, there was a problem. The diagnosis of gross stress reaction was flawed because it did not address the fact that symptoms lasted more than six months and did not resolve quickly.

In the second edition, the DSM II, published in 1968, deleted the diagnosis associated with the psychiatric problems after a traumatic event. Instead, it added the diagnosis of “adjustment reaction to adult life,” even though there was an ever-growing pile of investigative research telling a different story.

The symptoms of the new diagnosis were very limited with two examples comprised of suicidal thoughts and fear of military combat. However, the most damaging example of the diagnosis in the DSM-II was the inclusion of Ganser syndrome.

Ganser syndrome is a condition where people deliberately and consciously act like they are physically or mentally ill mimicking behaviors of these disorders. Physicians, legal experts, and military leaders saw those who suffered from PTSD as people trying to get out of legal difficulties and military service and received disbelief instead of help.

Finally, in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association added post-traumatic stress disorder to their latest version of the DSM, the DSM-III. This came about because of research involving veterans of the Viet Nam War, Holocaust survivors, and other trauma victims where they linked trauma to symptoms.

The symptoms of PTSD included in the DSM-III established its diagnostic criteria, and, with some revisions, and has carried over until this day in the DSM-5.

A new realization came about the same time that PTSD is a very common disorder affecting 4 out of one hundred men in the U.S. (40%) and 10 of every 100 women (10%) of women living in the united states in their lifetime.

If one does the math, the numbers are staggering.

The population of the United States today consists of 309 million adults. If half of those adults develop PTSD in their lifetime, it totals approximately 154 million people.

Post-traumatic stress disorder is not just an American problem. As I stated in the beginning, PTSD is a human condition and recent data collecting world statistics indicates that rates of PTSD are much higher in post-conflict countries such as Algeria, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Gaza.

The two most important realizations from the reclassification of PTSD into a new category Trauma and Stress-Related Disorders, and for our purposes, the criteria symptom, flashbacks.

Flashbacks in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Brain

Flashbacks, in PTSD, are waking nightmares where one relives a traumatic event while awake. Flashbacks are devastating to those who experience them as they are a sudden and uncontrollable reliving of something that happened sometimes decades earlier. Flashbacks are akin to vomiting with a stomach virus. You cannot choose when or where it will happen.

Yet, flashbacks are not like a nightmare where the person wakes to realize it was only a dream. People experiencing flashbacks become transported back to the trauma event, reliving it with all its sights, sounds, and fear as though it were happening today.

To understand how flashbacks are so all-consuming, heart-wrenching experiences, we need to look at what is happening in the brain. The key players in flashbacks are the amygdala and the hippocampus.

The amygdala is responsible for processing emotional information, especially fear-related memories. Once again, the fear-response created by the amygdala evolved to ensure the survival of mankind by encoding the information as memories to the threats we encounter. This reaction prepares us for future encounters with the same or similar danger.

The hippocampus is vital for the formation of long-term memory and catalogs the details of our experiences so that recall of those events is possible.

Normally, the hippocampus and amygdala work together to form new memories that become encoded in the brain for quick access later. However, traumatic events change this cooperative system into something quite different.

Another important role of the amygdala is the recognition of danger and sending out signals to our bodies to prepare us for the flight/fight/freeze response. When the amygdala is over-stimulated by trauma, the hippocampus becomes suppressed so that the resultant memory of that event cannot become a cohesive memory. Instead, these memories become jumbled and force our amygdala to always be on the alert to any clues that tell it we are in danger.

After the threat has passed, strong, negative emotions leave our brains a mumble of memory of what just happened. Later, when encountering similar sensory input from our environment (triggers), we transport back to the original event and do not remember what caused the flashback to occur.

When encountering a sensory stimulus (trigger) from days to decades later reminding us of the trauma we experienced, our amygdala over-reacts and sets up a cascade of chemical events in our bodies getting us ready to fight/flee/ or freeze. Thus, our brain sends us into a flashback remembering all the event as though it were happening in the here and now.

There is no information stored by the hippocampus to tell your amygdala that the danger has passed.

The Differences Between Flashbacks from PTSD and CPTSD

Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) is a complicated and new diagnosis that has yet to appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

One of the primary differences between PTSD and CPTSD is that post-traumatic stress disorder results from a single event, where complex traumatic-stress disorder forms in relation to a series of traumatic events.

Normally, PTSD involves experiencing traumatic events such as the following:

• Car Accident
• Tornado or Other Natural Disaster
• Mugging
• Rape

These events, while highly traumatizing, are quickly resolved with emotional support from either friends/family, short-term psychotherapy, or both.

However, usually, CPTSD involves traumatic and long-term abuse, either physical, emotional, or sexual in scope. The following are a few examples.

• Sexual Abuse
• Emotional Abuse
• Neglect
• Physical Abuse
• Mental Abuse
• Domestic Abuse
• Human Trafficking
• Living as a Prisoner of War
• Living in a War Zone
• Surviving a Concentration or Interment Camp

Clearly, complex traumatic-stress disorder results from a different kind of traumatizing than PTSD, and healing may take decades or even an entire lifetime.

Our Introduction to Emotional Flashbacks

Like regular flashbacks in PTSD, those experienced by people living with the diagnosis of CPTSD involve the same regions of the brain. Normally caused by events from abuse in childhood where the child’s caregivers made them feel trapped, small, and full of self-loathing.

First coined by Pete Walker, the term emotional flashback in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving introduced us to the inner critic, emotional flashbacks force people to relive the helplessness and hopelessness of the past.

Accompanied by inappropriate and intense amygdalar arousal, emotional flashbacks present as intense episodes of toxic shame and despair that can lead to angry outbursts at the self or others.

Often, when fear dominates the emotional flashback, the individual can experience overwhelming panic and sometimes suicidality.

When despair is the dominant emotion, the individual may experience profound numbness, paralysis, and the need to isolate and hide.

Ravaged by emotional flashbacks, people living with CPTSD but along with them comes toxic shame, a phrase first coined by John Bradshaw in his book Healing the Shame that Binds.

Pulling It All Together

It is clear, post-traumatic stress disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder are related diagnoses but differ in important ways. The dissimilarities involve the type of trauma that caused them, and how they experience flashbacks.

In future articles from this series, we shall tackle what it is like to live with emotional flashbacks, and how our own inner critic can make life a living hell.