Post Traumatic Stress Disorder / Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome

When you are in the midst of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder -PTSD- and you are unable to deal woth emotions for various reasons, you may become the victim or the victimizer. Please read what is 'abuse' and look deep within your soul. Search out the crevices that you have hid or hidden from and be HONEST with yourself. That is the first step.

Abuse is a general term for the use or treatment of something (person, thing, idea, etc.) that causes some kind of harm (to the abused person or thing, to the abusers themselves, or to someone else) or is unlawful or wrongful. Its close synonyms are mistreatment and maltreatment. The word "misuse" has a more distant meaning of incorrect, uneducated use, not necessary harmful.

Several types of abuse include:

* Sexual abuse: The improper use of another person for sexual purposes, generally without their consent or under physical or psychological pressure (which may include children whether abused by parents, those in loco parentis or strangers).

* Physical abuse: Where one person inflicts physical violence or pain on another.

* Emotional abuse or psychological abuse: coercion, humiliation, intimidation, relational aggression, parental alienation or covert incest: Where one person uses emotional or psychological coercion to compel another to do something they do not want, or is not in their best interests; or when one person manipulates another's emotional or psychological state for their own ends (see battered person syndrome), or commits psychological aggression using ostensibly non-violent methods to inflict mental or emotional violence or pain on another.

* Drug abuse: the misuse of drugs, alcohol or other substances, usually a form of addiction.

* Child abuse: Abuse, usually physical, emotional or sexual, directed at a child.

* Incest: Sexual activity between close family members.

* Spousal abuse (or domestic violence): Abuse, usually physical, or psychological abuse, directed at one's spouse.

* Elder abuse: Abuse, most often physical or in the form of psychological threats, directed at the elderly, especially in nursing homes and similar institutions.

* Human rights abuse: Violation of human rights.

* Verbal abuse: The use of foul language, obscenities or demeaning talk directed at another.

* Animal abuse: Abuse or cruelty directed at animals.

* Legal abuse: Vexatious litigation or malicious prosecution to retaliate, coerce, or emotionally/financially harm a person.

Physical violence

Physical violence is the intentional use of physical force with the potential for causing injury, harm, disability, or death, for example, hitting, shoving, biting, restraint, kicking, or use of a weapon.

Sexual violence and incest are divided into three categories:

1) use of physical force to compel a person to engage in a sexual act against their will, whether or not the act is completed;

2) attempted or completed sex act involving a person who is unable to understand the nature or condition of the act, to decline participation, or to communicate unwillingness to engage in the sexual act, e.g., because of illness, disability, or the influence of alcohol or other drugs, or because of intimidation or pressure; and

3) abusive sexual contact.

Sexual vice is the use of sex as a weapon to commit aggression against a partner, to take a partner's resources, and/or to gain power and control over a partner. As it is covert, politically taboo to acknowledge and almost always overlooked by domestic violence researchers, sexual vice is rarely seen in domestic violence literature. Sexual vice depends on erotic predation and abuse to commit intimate aggression often with ostensibly nice, and overtly non-violent but covertly violent seductions and/or sex acts. It is also often used against children by parents to rape their children'(s) freely offered respect and attention.

Psychological violence

Threats of physical, psychological or sexual, or social violence that use words, gestures, or weapons to communicate the intent to cause death, disability, injury, physical, or psychological harm.

Psychological/emotional violence involves violence to the victim caused by acts, threats of acts, or coercive tactics. Psychological/emotional abuse can include, but is not limited to, humiliating the victim, controlling what the victim can and cannot do, withholding information from the victim, deliberately doing something to make the victim feel diminished or embarrassed, isolating the victim from friends and family, and denying the victim access to money or other basic resources. It is considered psychological/emotional violence when there has been prior physical or sexual violence or prior threat of physical or sexual violence.

Psychological abuse refers to the humiliation or intimidation of another person, but is also used to refer to the long-term effects of emotional shock.

Psychological abuse can take the form of physical intimidation, controlling through scare tactics and oppression. It is often associated with situations of power imbalance, such perhaps as the situations of abusive relationships and child abuse; however, it can also take place on larger scales, such as Group psychological abuse, racial oppression and bigotry. A more "mild" case might be that of workplace abuse. Workplace abuse is a large cause of workplace-related stress, which in turn is strong cause of illness, both physical and mental (see battered woman syndrome).

Another specialized form of abuse, known as 'gaslighting,' derives its name from two movies of the early 1940s, in which an attempt is made to cause a woman to question her sanity, due to tricks and reality distortion caused by trusted people around her. More detail can be found under gaslight.

There need not be an agitator for psychological abuse to occur — one can undergo self-abuse, as in the case of someone who is a depressive, or self-mutilation.

Any situation in which the repeated and extreme impact of a situation affects a person's emotional and rational thinking, in such a way as to adversely impact their later lives, could be termed as psychological abuse at some level.

Psychotherapy and psychiatric methods can help some people overcome the negative effects of abuse, given time and a healing environment.

Relational aggression: is form of psychological/social aggression the uses various forms of falsehood, secrecy and gossip to commit covert violence. Also known (incorrectly) as 'Female Bullying', it is often a spectacularly successful tactic because so few people know how to detect it. Women, and also men, often use it because it is covert, leaves no visible scars and can be done with a smile. It destroys or damages the target's reputation and ruins the targets relationships.

Parental alienation: is another form of covert violence where children are used as a weapon of war by one parent to alienate the other parent. This covert form of domestic violence is often used by women, and sometimes men too, in high-conflict marriages. It is often devastating to the alienated spouse/parent and to the alienating/alienated children caught in the middle. In effect, it uses innocent, unwitting children to commit relational aggression by one parent against the other.

Economic/social abuse: Controlling victim's money and other economic resources. Preventing victim from finishing education or obtaining employment.

Stalking  In addition, stalking is often included among the types of Intimate Partner Violence. Stalking generally refers to repeated behaviour that causes victims to feel a high level of fear (Tjaden & Thoennes, 2000). However, psychiatrist William Glasser states that fear and all other emotions are self-caused as evidenced by the wide range of emotions two different subjects might have in response to the same incident.

Spiritual abuse includes:

1) using the spouse’s or intimate partner’s religious or spiritual beliefs to manipulate them

2) preventing the partner from practicing their religious or spiritual beliefs

3) ridiculing the other person’s religious or spiritual beliefs

4) forcing the children to be reared in a faith that the partner has not agreed to

 Violence against children: When it comes to domestic violence towards children involving physical abuse, research in the UK by the NSPCC indicated that "most violence occurred at home (78 per cent) with mothers being primarily responsible in 49 per cent of cases and fathers in 40 per cent of cases."

Power and control

… power in a relationship is often a matter of perception. A person may perceive themselves to be put-upon when a less involved observer would disagree.

A causalist view of domestic violence is that it is a strategy to gain or maintain power and control over the victim.

An alternative view is that abuse arises from powerlessness and externalizing/projecting this and attempting to exercise control of the victim. It is an attempt to 'gain or maintain power and control over the victim' but even in achieving this it cannot resolve the powerlessness driving it. Such behaviours have addictive aspects leading to a cycle of abuse or violence). Mutual cycles develop when each party attempts to resolve their own powerlessness in attempting to assert control.

Modes of abuse tend to be gendered, females tending to use more psychological and men more physical forms. The visibility of these differs markedly.

Questions of power and control are integral to the widely accepted Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project. They developed "Power and Control Wheel" to illustrate this, it has power and control at the center, surrounded by spokes (techniques used), the titles of which include:

* Coercion and threats

* Intimidation

* Emotional abuse

* Isolation

* Minimizing, denying and blaming

* Using children

* Economic abuse

* Male privilege

The model attempts to address abuse by one-sidedly challenging the misuse of power by the 'perpetrator'.

Critics of this model suggest that the one-sided focus is problematic as resolution can only be achieved when all participants acknowledge their responsibilities, and identify and respect mutual purpose.

Bullying: Domestic violence comes as a form of bullying, as a means to an end that is easier than other means. The heading on the UK National Website for Bullying in the Family states that 'Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can't Bully.' It seems reasonable to add that those who won't also prefer violence too.

The cycle of violence

Frequently, domestic violence is used to describe specific violent and overtly abusive incidents, and legal definitions will tend to take this perspective. However, when violent and abusive behaviours happen within a relationship, the effects of those behaviours continue after these overt incidents are over. Advocates and counsellors will refer to domestic violence as a pattern of behaviours, including those listed above.

Lenore Walker presented the model of a Cycle of Violence which consists of three basic phases:

•  Honeymoon Phase : Characterized by affection, apology, and apparent end of violence.

•  Tension Building phase : Characterized by poor communication, tension, fear of causing outbursts

•  Acting-out Phase : Characterized by outbursts of violent, abusive incidents.

Although it is easy to see the outbursts of the Acting-out Phase as abuse, even the more pleasant behaviours of the Honeymoon Phase serve to perpetuate the abuse.

    Symptoms