Well Trace, I have not yet found a book written for individuals who are family members that need to learn how to understand and support someone who struggles with PTSD or Complex PTSD. As I have personally experienced myself, it's hard to even find a therapist that understands how to provide therapy for a trauma patient. As you have stated in another thread, there is a huge need to clone Pete Walker type therapists. I myself have had to have therapy for bad therapy that only traumatized me more than I had already been traumatized.

One of the challenges that a trauma patient struggles with though is not actually knowing themselves what they need that would help them. It often depends on what stage the individual is experiencing, there "are' stages of PTSD. It can go from "I don't want to talk about it", to "I need to talk about it".

Human beings are designed to thrive in spite of and each human being develops their own way of thriving too. It's very much like building your own house where on a subconscious level you know where everything is so you don't have to stop and think about where everything is constantly. Human beings prefer finding how to "predict" even if that human being faces some big challenges in their life. Human beings learn by "doing" too, and once a human being learns to do certain things it becomes part of their own "house design" where they can actually do a lot automatically without having to think about each part of whatever they are doing.

A person can get past several traumas too, especially if they learn how to manage whatever it is to where they can "predict" and develop a way to work around whatever it is. However, a major trauma can most definitely reek havoc in anyone and cause a major disturbance in "how they had built their own house".

The average individual can't understand what this challenge means, often the response offered is "well just or don't allow", and as you know, that can most definitely be a trigger because someone stuggling can't seem to "just like they used to" and that is a big part of the challenge itself.

What you experienced was especially traumatic ((Trace)), I actually thought of you because just the other day I happened to see a documentary on HBO about alcoholism and what that challenge actually means and what the individual who is an alcoholic experiences in how long term alcoholism changes the brain. What happened to you with your father is not about him being selfish or not loving you, but because of his disease and the level of damage it had done that he could not handle anymore.

http://video.foxnews.com/v/525402327...#sp=show-clips

When someone experiences a family member or loved on that is challenged, it's hard and can also leave deep hurts that can really go way back to early childhood challenges.