Workplace bullying might end up as Complex PTSD

 

Dear Bloggers,

As some of you might know that my wife is suffering from Complex PTSD caused by her managers over a period of three years and then something in her brain just snapped. Since this event she has been in therapy and until today there is no way to cure her fully. This means that there are no opportunities for her to do any kind of job. As there are to many triggers out there and she might be harmful towards other people. Instead of working she is going two mornings in a week to a farm with care for people with mental challenges and she is learning to do some light tasks and learns to ride a horse.

Complex PTSD is a traumatic experience due to workplace bullying or sexual abuse. But as more attention is paid to these kinds of experiences and exactly what they can do to victims, we are beginning to understand more about this condition. And this increased understanding should, in turn, give hope to the hundreds of people who find themselves subjected to workplace bullying every day.

Because the victims of C-PTSD do exhibit some of the same symptoms seen in standard PTSD, it can easily be misdiagnosed. But C-PTSD sufferers also exhibit some other symptoms that are more specific to the condition. These can include difficulties regulating emotions such as prolonged sadness, inability to control your temper or inhibited temper, and even suicidal thoughts. My wife became a victim of workplace bullying by her manager.

Other symptoms of complex PTSD include either forgetting or consistently reliving traumatic events; feeling detached from your own body and thoughts; overwhelming feelings of helplessness, shame, guilt or stigma; a distorted perception of the bully. Workplace bullying is so much more than just making your job more difficult. It is a very real form of abuse that can undermine a person’s entire sense of well-being.

By understanding the realities of C-PTSD, we can begin to break through the wall that surrounds workplace bullying and begin to let victims know that they are not alone and healing is very much possible. It will not work after three years of constant abuse at the certain point you might just snap.

Just an example of what you encounter with a partner with C-PTSD

All of a sudden a loud scream and she is sitting straight up in our bed her heart is pounding, I am fully awake at 2 am. She is totally panic-stricken and consumed with terror in her eyes. And mumbles: “He is throwing me out of a window”.

Our bedroom is quiet. There are no intruders, only our faithful hairy friends Fedde and Heiko are standing on the other side of the bedroom door.

I wonder if her loud screaming has scared any of our children.

After 5 minutes, maybe 10 minutes as I lie in a snoozing mode again, I feel her and she is terrified in our darkened room. I try to decide if I should call a doctor to give her something to calm her down… perhaps I’m having it wrong and is it only just a bad dream. I am both afraid and confused. I know that it is safe in our bedroom, that there is no immediate threat, but her body and emotions are hijacked, and without my consent I find her immersed in past horrifying events.

Thankfully I do know now, from more than 8 years of experience, that a panic attack will eventually pass.

It feels like it’s going to kill her, but it won’t. but her body and emotions are hijacked, and without my consent I find her immersed in past horrifying events. I have to wait it out.

PTSD is typically the result of a specific, horrifying event, Complex PTSD is the consequence of numerous traumatic events, over a longer period of time. CPTSD is frequently caused by childhood abuse and neglect or, in my wife’s case, being trapped for many years in a very abusive workplace.

Complex PTSD and PTSD share symptoms, but there are some symptoms unique to CPTSD. If you are interested in a somewhat detailed list of symptoms for both PTSD and CPTSD, you can scroll to end of this post.

When I look objectively at the symptoms of PTSD and Complex PTSD, I can check off 99% of them (anger isn’t a symptom for her and also low self esteem has never been an issue) but still she tries to live in denial that she has CPTSD… until she is triggered and panicking so badly that she is struggling to speak’

Every morning she is waking up and begins her day with limited emotional energy. Our children are priority so she does everything to work around her limitations with PTSD to be available for them. She carefully plans her day tasks and she is trying to avoid crowds when she has to go to the shop.

One crowded, overwhelming event can sideline her for several days afterwards, so she is choosing her activities carefully, mindful of the probable fallout.

Still, 8 1/2 years after escaping her abusive managers, she still has nightmares and panic attacks. She is having huge gaps in her memories of the past years.

CPTSD is basically an emotional injury ~ an invisible illness. Since it isn’t as tangible as a broken bone I frequently have to remind her that living so much of her life being on “high alert” and in “panic mode” is both emotionally and physically exhausting.

According to my wife: “For me, being triggered causes a level of overwhelm that is very difficult to describe. Research done by PTSD patients has shown that when someone with PTSD is triggered and panics, the right half of the brain “takes over” and the logical, thinking left side of the brain is sometimes almost totally “shuts down.” When this happens to me it becomes almost impossible for me to speak and I can’t think. All I am aware of is the panic and a desperate need to hide. If I were walking with someone else, we would have to stop talking until the truck has passed because there would be no way to hear each other over the noise of the truck. For the minutes that the truck is roaring past, there is only the truck. I am totally consumed by the noise and vibrations of the passing truck. 

I’ve been told repeatedly that in many ways my situation was (and continues to be) somewhat extreme and unique. I am still struggling and doing little steps forward.”

There’s no way around it: PTSD sucks. There are ways that she has improved a lot in the past 8 years though. I can now write about it here on my blog. As horrible as CPTSD is, I want you to know this: there is still joy in the midst of the struggle.

I still laugh with my children. We have so much fun together. Our girls love to make us laugh… it’s become a bit of a competition between them to see who can show the funniest memes each day.

I have been blessed with two Shetland Sheepdogs, one of them is being a service dog for me. They bring all of us so much joy. Truthfully, I am not sure that She’ll ever will totally “conquer” her CPTSD but she is slowly but surely learning to manage it.

Instead of actively working she is trying to learn new ways to heal and better manage the symptoms of PTSD while she embraces her weakness and struggles. Many people do recover from PTSD and even CPTSD. There are numerous healing resources to explore. Perhaps you are also in the thick of PTSD or CPTSD.

CPTSD is a more severe form of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is delineated from this better known trauma syndrome by five of its most common and troublesome features: emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment, a vicious inner critic and social anxiety.

• CPTSD emotional flashbacks do not typically have a visual component. Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feelings of past abuse/abandonment.
• Fatigue with symptoms of or similar to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
• Numbness, both physical (toes, fingertips, and lips) and emotional (inability to feel love and joy)
• Clumsiness
• Hyperawareness and an acute sense of time passing, seasons changing, and distances travelled
• Feelings of worthlessness, rejection, a sense of being unwanted, unlikeable and unlovable
• Social isolation, avoidance of relationships
• night terrors, chronic insomnia
• Variations in consciousness, including forgetting traumatic events (i.e. Psychogenic amnesia), reliving experiences (either in the form of intrusive PTSD symptoms or in ruminative preoccupation), or having episodes of dissociation.
• explosive or extremely inhibited anger (may alternate)
• Changes in self-perception, such as a chronic and pervasive sense of helplessness, paralysis of initiative, shame, guilt, self-blame, a sense of defilement or stigma, and a sense of being completely different from other human beings

 

If I could share one thing with you it would be this: please be gentle and take care of  yourself.

The Old Sailor,

Trying hard to win the war within yourself

Dear Bloggers,

My wife is going through some traumatic times as she is emotional abused for almost three years in a row by two psychopathic and narcissistic persons (managers) that did everything to bring employees down that didn't fit into their profile. The company gives them a lot of freedom and it is a very sick atmosphere. A lot of former employees signed for their resignation and got a few months pay so they agreed to keep their mouth shut. My wife wasn't in the flow for leaving the company as she enjoyed what she was doing and this was against all the expectations of her manager. He was not amused with the fact that she was putting up so much resistance to keep her job. 

She kept up the fight for three years and dragged herself to work everyday. I pulled the plug in February of 2014 and she was tired and mentally so beaten up. In the last two years we have been trying to get her back on her feet with psychological help and psychiatric assistance. She has been checked on a medical scale by a neurologist and she was tested on defects by a neuro psychologist, lucky enough that there is no damage found in the brain. She is diagnosed with Complex PTSD with a panic and a anxiety disorder. Our wonderful future has been destroyed by two bastards that should be held responsible. 
 
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is mostly associated with soldiers returning from war. After the horrors witnessed in such an unnatural setting, many wo/men have a difficult time returning to “normal” life, often suffering from flashbacks, panic attacks, and severe anxiety.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Acute Stress Disorder (or Reaction) are not typical responses to prolonged abuse. They are the outcomes of sudden exposure to severe or extreme stressors (stressful events). Yet, some victims whose life or body have been directly and unequivocally threatened by an abuser react by developing these syndromes. PTSD is, therefore, typically associated with the aftermath of physical and sexual abuse in both children and adults.

Any traumatic event can trigger it. Rape, assault, acts of physical or verbal violence, even repeated emotional abuse or the sudden split of a significant relationship, especially if abuse was involved.

Repeated abuse has long lasting pernicious and traumatic effects such as panic attacks, hyper vigilance, sleep disturbances, flashbacks (intrusive memories), suicidal ideation, and psychosomatic symptoms. The victims experience shame, depression, anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, abandonment, and an enhanced sense of vulnerability.

My wife is rather ashamed to admit that she has experienced them all. These last few weeks have made me realize just how deep the managers have traumatized me, she said. It was my husband who noticed, actually. He said that I was exhibiting symptoms of PTSD, and he was right. How embarrassing to be experiencing PTSD because of such a short-lived work-relationship. But all of a sudden there it is.

However, this reaction doesn’t reflect her or her ability to cope with it, as much as it speaks to the depth of the abuse. The depth of the trauma caused by emotional, cruel verbal, and even narcissistic pressure abuse, not to mention the sudden change in her personality and subsequent abandonment.

The first phase of PTSD involves incapacitating and overwhelming fear. The victim feels like she has been thrust into a nightmare or a horror movie. She is rendered helpless by her own terror. She keeps re-living the experiences through recurrent and intrusive visual and auditory hallucinations (“flashbacks”) or dreams. In some flashbacks, the victim completely lapses into a dissociative state and physically re-enacts the event while being thoroughly oblivious to her whereabouts.

In an attempt to suppress this constant playback and the attendant exaggerated startle response, the victim tries to avoid all stimuli associated, however indirectly, with the traumatic event. Many develop full-scale phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, aversion to specific animals, objects, modes of transportation, neighbourhoods, buildings, occupations, weather, and so on). My wife has somethings the other way round for example she has no more fear of heights and isn't afraid of spiders anymore. Strange how the brain works

Her fear has been so great, that an email from him throws me into a panic attack, knowing that it just contains more pain. She doesn’t read them when they come in. In fact, she does not longer know if they are coming in or not, thanks to email filters that just delete them before we will even see them.
Thank goodness for technology.

Emotional abuse, like gaslighting as well as so many other insidious forms, is hard to recognize and even harder to prove. Let me first of all explain the gaslighting effect: “Gaslighting is an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation that is difficult to recognize and even harder to break free from. That’s because it plays into one of our worst fears – of being abandoned – and many of our deepest needs: to be understood, appreciated, and loved. The abuser is usually a very insecure person. He has a need to put others down in an attempt to make himself feel better. He must be seen as right at all times.” Often, the only indication that your partner is causing emotional damage is to trust yourself and how you feel.

• Are you asking yourself if you’re crazy?
• Are you questioning reality?
• Do you feel blamed for everything in the relationship?
• Do you feel unsafe to talk with your partner about anything? 
  
  
  
   
  

Certainly not all charming people are predators or abusive, but it is something of which to take note, especially if they are particularly charming. Please, please look closer, or perhaps, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Find out about their past relationships. How many? How did they end? Do they take responsibility for their actions? Their words? Are they relatively consistent in their words/actions?
indication: They don’t take responsibility for their own actions.
Please believe me when I say that these actions are insidious. I mean it. They are so subtle and often covered up by grand gestures of love and excessive affection. It is very intoxicating and convincing, but beneath it all there might be a constant assault on your sense of self through gaslighting and other forms of covert abuse.

The first step is recognizing abuse as abuse. One very surprising thing I learned about this over the past few weeks is that some types of emotional abuse feel like love. Another reason the trauma is so deep: it’s not just the damage , but it is unhealed damage from a lifetime of emotional abuse.

Research PTSD and Emotional Abuse. If you are exhibiting any of the signs, you might be trapped in a betrayal or trauma bond with the abuser. This makes it even harder to get away and heal.

Let us all learn how to protect ourselves from such people, for in this society, there is no other recourse. No way to prove it. No way to make them accountable for the damage they cause. Our only hope of defense against this type of abuse is to recognize the danger early, reinforce our armor, and get away before a trauma bond can be created. Slowly we start with counseling. To me it’s an interesting one, and it might be helpful to you, reading this blog, as it shows how one is in so much denial at first because of the shock and disbelieve, and how, if you commit to healing, you can uncover some pretty horrific things and extensive PTSD.

My wife quotes: “I might never be working again and damaged for life. Still, I’d rather know, accept, and heal than to fall into the same trap with another predator”.
Let's hope the future brings better times.



The Old Sailor,

When your boss is wanting to destroy you.

Dear Bloggers,

Imagine the scenario - a woman goes into work one day and her manager acts in an abusive and malicious way towards her. This is so shocking that she spends the next three years suffering from the consequences of that incident. She cannot sleep at night, she has frequent flashbacks and nightmares, she turns into a different person. The way she has been treated by her colleagues at work creates an ongoing condition that requires serious psychiatric support. If she would not have done anything but she knocked on every door that she could find to ask for help but no one reached out to stop this mentally disturbed manager who did everything in his power to destroy her mentally.
Is it right to talk about this as a complex post traumatic stress disorder (Severe PTSD)?

I compare to a dog. This dog was good and it was loyal and if something might be wrong it would bark for a while to be heard. If it looks like a dog, if it barks like a dog, and if overall it behaves like a dog, then it is most likely to be a dog. In the case of PTSD caused by bullying and abuse at work, this is a particularly black dog that has been beaten with a stick until it either shut up or it would attack and could be put down.

But most of our images of Severe PTSD come from much more 'obvious' and dramatic causes of such shock. When we think of PTSD we are most likely to think of the soldiers in Afghanistan who have suffered from exploding devices or have been subject to combat and personal loss.
In the cases of PTSD at work, then the obvious examples are of fire-fighters, on-patrol police officers, and other emergency workers who have had near death shocks in extreme circumstances. Each of these clearly are people who may be suffering from PTSD.

So is it fair to use a diagnosis of PTSD for someone whose mental health has been severely affected by bullying at work, rather than some more easily identifiable event or incident? On the other hand, let's give some thought to how a person who has been subject to workplace bullying may feel about themselves.

If we are all used to thinking of PTSD only in terms of combat veterans and violent and near death experiences, then a PTSD sufferer is also very likely to feel that their own suffering and experience is 'trivial' in comparison to the more obvious triggers of PTSD. Unfortunately, someone with PTSD is already likely to have feelings of self-worthlessness and somehow a diagnosis of their condition as PTSD may only serve to make them feel worse.
The starting point for this is to recognise the problem.

Thankfully, the issue of bullying, abuse and harassment at work has become firmly acknowledged in many respects in recent years. (Although it is shocking that it was only in 1988 that it was given the term 'workplace bullying'). The psychological harm this can cause to someone at work is recognised, but it is still rare that such harm is understood in terms of PTSD.

It is becoming recognised that PTSD can be caused by abuse in non-extreme contexts. For example, the case of my dear wife she has been mocked by her former manager that she was smelling. So after a few weeks she went to the doctors office, who could not find anything and send her to a dermatologist and there was nothing to be found. Strange thing was that i did not smell anything either and I sleep next to her every night I kept telling her it looks to me like bullying.

'Traumatic experiences or strains imposed on us by others can often hurt more than accidents.'

Indeed, the manager was replaced inside the company and my wife entered a new team in the mean time she went to a psychological centre and got treatment from great psychologist. Her new manager got the bills for it as they wanted to keep it out of sight of their headquarters and placed the bills under education bills. After being halfway the sessions she needed her manger told her that it should be enough and they would not pay for it anymore (he probably ran out of budget) My wife disagreed and called our health insurance and they picked up the bills. 

After a while the manager got the reports of the psychological centre as well. So he was informed about the case totally and started a even harder campaign on my wife to get rid of her with no extra costs. In November 2013 something snapped in her brain and she was not able to do her job anymore as a call centre agent. They gave her different job tasks in the mail room, but the bullying continued. In February 2014 I called her boss that she was too sick to come to work. He straight away told me that she should agree to sign off. I informed the Union and they told me not to panic as in the Netherlands you can be sick for 2 years and the employer must do everything to make you reintegrate into work. Either in or outsourcing.

Well you probably can guess what happened they did not see it as their problem and they believed of course their own manager.


A psychiatrist put this to me very well: It is already recognised that PTSD can be caused by experiences that are outside of the extreme shock of a life-threatening situation (such as combat or an accident). That is, there are many people suffering from PTSD due to various forms of personal abuse particularly domestic and/or sexual abuse. Such PTSD may have been caused by a single incident of abuse, or a series of events stretching over a period of time, even many years.

And so if domestic abuse or school bullying can cause a person to suffer from PTSD, it should come as no surprise then that PTSD can also be caused by abuse in the workplace. We might like to think that the workplace is a safe enough place where people behave with respect and do care, as perhaps we used to assume was the case in the home and at school. Many employers would like us to think this. But this is simply not the case. People can be nasty at work to their colleagues, just as they can be at home with their families.
For many people, the workplace is a site of bullying and abuse by their own workmates and managers, and is not a safe place at all.
If we give this some thought, most of us can probably pinpoint one or more examples of such bullying we have seen in our own careers - either done to us or others. It might not always cause PTSD, but the consequences are always nasty. 

 
The employment tribunal system has slowly begun to pick this up and use what powers it is given to redress some of the wrongs caused by employers against their workers. The most high profile of I know is the case of my wife who was subject to a nasty campaign against her by her managers and senior colleagues over a number of years. She suffered from this to such an extent that she was diagnosed with severe PTSD, and until now she is covered by the law that she can be on sick pay but this will stop in the month of April 2016. If it is up to me, she should receive compensation of €285,000 in order of lost wages, money that she could make until she could go on pension benefits in the year 2037 just towards this personal psychiatric injury, as part of a larger award amounting in total to €500,000. as all our family members suffered from the direct effects of the PTSD.

Our claim is that she is suffering from a post traumatic stress disorder and depression after being ridiculed by co-workers and managers in the call centre department of big telecom provider. My wife had had to endure a 'hostile and degrading' environment in a company which had 'lacked empathy'. It had left her in a state where she was unable to do the simplest of household chores.
In some respects, when it comes to a law suit the process will be hard and emotional and let us hope we are fortunate (if we can use this term). The system should be able to help us at this stage. It is a kind of abusive discrimination. If there had not been that element to the abusive behaviour of their managers and colleagues, it would be much harder for us to be compensated for the PTSD that her workplace has caused.

But I think most would agree that although bullying is harmful and nasty, there are many other forms of bullying and abuse that do not involve any particular forms of putting some on down and a make you feel undetermined.
It is estimated that at least one in ten people in the workplace suffer from bullying, but not all of them develop PTSD. If we can take the figures for this we should do more as employers as they are in some way indicative of the problem, then perhaps one third of these people may have some form of PTSD. This calculates as 3.3% of the working population suffering from PTSD caused by workplace bullying. With a workforce of around 7 million, that means nearly 231000 people in the Netherlands are perhaps experiencing PTSD caused by workplace bullying and abuse. That is a lot of people, and a lot of time lost from work by the people suffering the terrible consequences of PTSD (and of course it also time lost from their normal lives). It is a complete waste for everyone, apart from those who do the bullying.

It is simply the case that many people suffer the terrible experiences of PTSD due to bullying and abuse in the workplace (as can also happen or at school or at home). Although this has been happening for years, and is likely to continuing happening in future, there needs to be much more recognition of this problem and the harm it causes.

Such recognition of workplace PTSD needs to be acknowledged particularly for the sake of those with the PTSD, and also for those around them, their families, their friends, and also their employers. It is no one's interest for someone to suffer from PTSD without recognition and support.

Bastards are all over the world, maybe we should hang them.

The Old Sailor,