^It's an interesting perspective you have, and I absolutely understand the concern about accurate treatment being available for those with adult onset PTSD, and as it could be affected by potential stigma that could be perceived by persons who neglect to comprehend what the terminologies actually mean. And I've never looked into the reasons why they started referring to what was once called developmental trauma disorder as complex PTSD, but my own experience does lead me to draw some conclusions about it, including that my condition is indeed primarily the result of the effects of trauma -- and not the existence of a development "deficit" as you suggest and as the former name could imply. I'm simply scarred, both similarly and dissimilarly to those with adult onset PTSD.

But because it occurred during my developmental years it got stored deep, imprinting me in an extra-significant way and resulting in additional effects. As such, if the term developmental trauma disorder implies what you are suggesting, that it belittles the condition it is describing as being only the result of parenting gone awry, and not as serious or something, then yeah -- I don't think that it does aptly describe the condition.

Not from my own experience anyway. I've been taken out at the proverbial knees at this point. Is it "merely" the result of my parents' actions, that my father didn't care to discern the difference between consensual sex and making aggressive use of tiny children as sex toys, laughing all the way through the horrified screams of children not even yet in school? I personally don't call that bad parenting or even parenting. He was a psychopath and a criminal. Successfully inflicting trauma behind the safe cloak of the American family unit, where no one could hear me scream. I was harvested, and when I was no longer of use he tried to kill me.

It absolutely pre-conditioned me to be extra-terrorized by traumas I endured later in life. It's not as though I was triggered one day while standing in line at the grocery store. I've quite literally had guns to my head, and I don't even consider that my worst day. But, had I lived the life of ease that people so oddly at times imagine, without suffering subsequent trauma in my adult life, I certainly could have contained the effects of my early trauma without much issue, as I had for some time. I may never have had to know what any of this PTSD stuff is even about. So I don't think it's at all safe to assume that adults who are suffering effects that result in some part from early trauma, are in any better shape or less needing or deserving of treatment and regard than those with strictly adult onset or single-incident PTSD.

We can't know what karmic load others are carrying, and it's fallacious to make assumptions about how easy anyone might theoretically have it. I seem to be an outwardly graceful woman, by some strange unprovoked miracle; people think that I come from money, that I am loaded with it, that I take great care of myself, that I must have gotten by in life quite effortlessly on my good looks. None of it is particularly true, which makes the disdain people have for what they perceive as the silver spoon I must have been sipping from all my life quite comical indeed; albeit a joke I am mostly only sharing with myself these days.

I'm also not sure that any disorder, post-traumatic or otherwise, can be deemed even relatively prestigious, or any more so than any other affliction. I personally find it more condemning; it saddles me with people's inclinations to want me to quantify my trauma, to justify my condition, which for me is exhausting and in most situations quite beside the point. My horrendous details. Its less than stellar prognosis seems to me to also add to an ultimate reduction in "prestige"; I haven't met a mental health professional yet who had any idea how to deal with trauma history and it effects, and likewise had any idea how to react to it in a way other than ultimately condemning since they feel inadequate to help. But most of all, the suggestion that any of it has comparative prestige seems like an unfortunate idea to support at all, for all involved. All these conditions deserve attention in their own right. Are some people going to be misdiagnosed? Of course. That's true of every condition under the sun for which there are not affordable diagnostic tests. All we can do is keeping talking about what these things are. And definitely not continue the punishment of those who never had a voice as children, by suggesting that their trauma doesn't count, or makes them delicate (I'm about as far from that as can be imagined), or is lesser or even needs to be compared. Although I confess that's already my general experience of people's perceptions. I'll likely be re-punished for the rest of my natural born life for having been a helpless victim; a 4-year old who somehow could not protect herself from a six-foot psychopath with a cultural license to abuse. If only I could re-bury the history deeper in my body, since the likelihood of anyone caring enough about it to be of help at this point is little to none, but.. sadly it's quite chronic for me now. There's just nowhere left to put it. Tipping point reached.

Of course that's just my individual perspective, which clearly cannot help but be colored by my all-too-colorful personal experience. But, I'm sure I'm not alone in being someone for whom CPTSD represents the result of considerable trauma. I've never had a personality disorder, and my complex PTSD is just that.. some very complex and difficult post-traumatic stress disorder, with 40 years of shrapnel embedded and trapped in my body.

I can certainly imagine some nudnik suggesting I had a personality disorder along the way, in lieu of having been able to accurately figure anything out. People love to be right about things, so it's a miracle I haven't been more misdiagnosed. I suppose I should consider that blank gaze most psych practitioners have given me over the years to have been a blessing.