Escaping Victimhood: How to Build a Meaningful Life After Trauma | Corey Richards

Harvard psychologist Judith Herman stated in 1995 that almost all psychological dysfunction fundamentally stems from trauma.

"Judith Herman, who's a Harvard psychologist, in 1995, she basically said, look, all psychological dysfunction is really one diagnosis, which is trauma. It's all an extension of trauma, for the most part." (said at 0:08:10)

Judith Herman, MD (a psychiatrist and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, not a psychologist), famously formulated the concept of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD / DESNOS) in the early 1990s and contributed to the DSM-IV field trials on post-traumatic stress. Herman and colleagues demonstrated that prolonged, repeated interpersonal trauma (such as severe childhood abuse) results in a multifaceted spectrum of adaptation involving PTSD, dissociation, somatization, and affect dysregulation, which frequently leads traumatized individuals to receive multiple separate diagnoses. However, Herman did not assert that all or nearly all psychological dysfunction in general is fundamentally a single diagnosis of trauma; her work established that chronic trauma produces a broad spectrum of post-traumatic adaptations beyond simple PTSD.

• context: Childhood trauma in borderline personality disorder. (The American journal of psychiatry 1989) · cited 1250x in the literature

  "Significantly more borderline subjects (81%) gave histories of such trauma, including physical abuse (71%), sexual abuse (68%), and witnessing serious domestic violence (62%)... These results demonstrate a strong association between a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder and a history of abuse in childhood." (abstract, results)

  pubmedfull study (doi)
• context: Dissociation, somatization, and affect dysregulation: the complexity of adaptation of trau… (The American journal of psychiatry 1996) · cited 894x in the literature

  "PTSD, dissociation, somatization, and affect dysregulation represent a spectrum of adaptations to trauma. They often occur together, but traumatized individuals may suffer from various combinations of symptoms over time." (abstract, conclusions, passage verified)

  pubmedfull study (doi)