PTSD Diagnosis vs. Developmental Trauma Diagnosis
PTSD Diagnosis Criteria / DT Diagnosis CriteriaHappens later in life as a single event / Happens during childhood, involves witnessing or experiencing multiple adverse interpersonal events involving caretaker(s) for at least one year.
The person experienced, witnessed or was confronted with an event or events that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury, or a threat to the physical integrity of self or others. Vicarious traumatization occurs when a person witnesses the serious injury or death of others. / Seven major diagnostic criteria:
•Affective and physiological dysregulation.
•Attentional and behavioral dysregulation.
•Self and relational dysregulation.
•Chronically altered perception and expectations.
•At least two posttraumatic symptoms.
•Functional impairment- at least two of the following areas: academic, family, peers, legal, and health.
•Duration of disorder is at least 6 months.
The person has intense fear, helplessness, or horror. / Can directly affect subsequent development, which if not addressed, can impact a person for the rest of his/her life span.
The person has clinically significant distress and impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. / Affects the HPA axis, the immune systemdigestion, appetite,sleep, and temperature regulation. The effects are as disorders of the body.
Can be categorized as acute, delayed, chronic, or intermittent/recurrent. / Can cause auto-immune disorders because the heightened awareness of perceived threats eventually depletes the immune system.
Meet the standard criteriafor PTSD:
- Re-experiencing the traumatic event
- Avoidance of things that remind one of the traumatic event or a general numbing reaction
- Hyperarousal symptoms
Difficult to health with trauma-specific therapies such as EMDR, as they do not address the relational trauma.
PTSD Diagnosis Criteria / DT Diagnosis Criteria
Can cause of self-medicating addictions to cope with post-traumatictriggers. / Can cause emotion, sensation, perception and thought to be fragmented into separate fragments. People dissociate andare unaware of what is happening in their body.
Associated with post-traumatic reactions that includeflashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and uncontrollable thoughts about the event. / Can impair processing in one or more sensory systems, if any of those sensory systems were involved in the early trauma experiences. People have distortions in their sensory awareness as a result.
Typical symptoms include dissociation, rejection of help from others, intense levels of affect, oppositional, impulsivity, distrust, flashbacks, nightmares, attentional problems, physical aggression, psychosomatic disturbances, medical illnesses, school difficulties, depression, self-hatred, and self-injurious behaviors.
Causes dysregulation in the attentional system. This can look like AD/HD but it isn’t. This causes people to compartmentalize their memory of traumatic events, which tends to blunt their natural curiosity and exploratory behaviors.
Causes internal fragmentation that leads to internal disorganization of the Self and prevents an integration of sensory, cognitive, emotional and behavioral experiences. The person builds compartments to hold these experiences and to constructs their life to protect this compartmentalized memory.
Causes fragmentation of emotional awareness. people to disconnect from their own feelings, so they may not even know they are having an emotional experience. This inhibits their ability to self-regulate their feeling states.
Impacts people’s Internal Working Model, causing them to see the world as a place that causes hurt and pain. They tend to expect continuing traumatic experiences.