 My name is Sam Battenin and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisitor. We know what abuse and torture do to the victim's soul, to her spirit, to her psychology. But what are the effects on the victim's body? There is one place in which one's privacy, intimacy, integrity and inviolability are guaranteed, and that is one's body. The body is a unique temple, it's a familiar territory of sense and personal history. The abuser invades, defiles and desecrates this bodily shrine. He does so, usually, publicly, deliberately, repeatedly, and often, sadistically, and sexually, with undisguised pleasure. Hence, the orcavasive, long-lasting, and frequently irreversible effects and outcomes of torture and abuse. In a way, the torture victim's own body is rendered her worst enemy. It is corporeal bodily agony and pain that compels the sufferer to mutate her identity, to fragment her ideas and principles, to crumble. Very few people can withstand pain. The body becomes the accomplice of the abuser, of the tormentor, an uninterruptible channel of communication of pain, a treasonous, poisoned territory of writhing agony. This fosters a humiliating dependency of the abused on the perpetrator. Bodily needs denied, such as sleep, toilet, food and water, are wrongly perceived by the victim as the direct causes of her degradation and dehumanization. As the victim sees it, she is rendered bestial, not by the sadistic bullies around her, but by her own flesh and blood. Beatrice Parcellidis described this transmogrification in her Ethics of the Unspeakable, Torture Survivors in Psychoanalytic Treatment. She says, As the gap between the I and the me deepens, dissociation and alienation increase. The subject that under torture and abuse was forced into the position of pure object has lost her sense of interiority, intimacy and privacy. Time is experienced now in the present only, and perspective that which allows for a sense of relativity is foreclosed. Thoughts and dreams attack the mind and invade the body, as if the protective skin that normally contains our thoughts gives us space to breathe in between the thought and the thing being thought about and separates between inside and outside, past and present, me and you. This skin, as though it were lost. Repeated abuse has long-lasting, pernicious, traumatic effects, such as panic attacks, hypervigilance, sleep disturbances, flashbacks, intrusive memories, and suicidal ideation. Diseases and survivors experience psychosomatic or real bodily symptoms, some of them induced by the secretion of stress hormones, such as cortisol. So there is increased blood pressure, racing pulse, headaches, excessive sweating, myriad, self-imputed or as I said real diseases. The victims endure shame, depression, anxiety, embarrassment, guilt, humiliation, abandonment, and an enhanced sense of vulnerability. See PTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, has been proposed as a new mental health diagnosis by Dr. Judith Herman of Harvard University to account for the impact of extended periods of trauma and abuse. In stalking and overview of the problem offered by Karen Abrams and Gail Early-Crobinson in 1998, the author's right. Initially, there is often much denial by the victim. Over time, however, the stress begins to erode the victim's life and psychological brutalization results. Sometimes the victim develops an almost fatal result that, inevitably, one day, she will be murdered. Victims unable to live a normal life describe feeling stripped of self-worth and dignity. Personal control and resources, psychosocial development, social support, prim morbid personality traits and the severity of the stress may all influence how the victim experiences and responds to it. Victims stalked by ex-lovers may experience additional guilt and lower its self-esteem for perceived poor judgment in their relationship choices. Many victims become isolated and deprived of support when employers or friends withdraw after also being subjected to harassment or when they are cut off by the victim in order to protect them. Other tangible consequences include financial losses from quitting jobs, moving and buying expensive security equipment in an attempt to regain privacy. Losing homes and jobs results in both material losses and loss of self-respect. Surprisingly, verbal, psychological and emotional abuse have the same effects as the physical variety. Abuse of all kinds also interferes with the victim's ability to work. Abrams and Robinson wrote in another article titled Occupational Effects of Stalking in 2002. Victims stalked by a former partner may affect a victim's ability to work in three ways. First, the stalking behaviors often interfere directly with the ability to get to work, for instance, for example, flattening tires or other methods of preventing leaving the home. Second, the workplace may become an unsafe location if the offender decides to appear there. Third, the mental health effects of such trauma may result in forgetfulness, fatigue, hard concentration and disorganization. These factors may lead to the loss of employment, with accompanying loss of income, security and status. Still, it is hard to generalize. Victims are not a uniform lot. In some cultures, abuse is commonplace and accepted as a legitimate mode of communication, the sign of love even, caring, and a boost to the abuser's self-image. In such circumstances, the victim is likely to adopt the norms of society and avoid serious trauma. Deliberate cold-blooded and premeditated torture has worse and low-lasting effects than abuse meted out by the abuser in rage and loss of self-control. The existence of a loving and accepting social support network is another mitigating factor. And finally, the ability to express negative emotions safely and to cope with them constructively is crucial to healing. Typically, by the time the abuse reaches critical and all-pervasive proportions, the abuser had already, spider-like, isolated his victim from family, friends and colleagues. She is catapulted into another land, cult-like setting, where reality itself dissolves into a continuing nightmare. When the victim emerges on the other end of this wormhole, the abused woman, or more rarely men, feels helpless, self-doubting, worthless, stupid, and a guilty failure for having botched her relationship and abandoned her family. In an effort to regain perspective and avoid embarrassment, the victim denies the abuse or minimizes it. People wonder that survivors of abuse tend to be clinically depressed, neglect their health and personal appearance, and succumb to boredom, rage, and impatience. Many end up abusing prescription drugs, or drinking, or otherwise behaving recklessly. Some victims even develop full-scale post-traumatic stress disorder. According to popular misconceptions, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, and acute stress disorder, or acute stress reaction, are not typical responses to prolonged abuse. They are the outcomes of sudden exposure to severe and extreme stressful events. Yet some victims, whose life or body have been directly and unequivocally threatened by an abuser, react by developing these symptoms. PTSD is therefore typically associated with the aftermath of physical and sexual abuse in both children and adults. And this is precisely why Dr. Herman suggested the diagnosis of C PTSD, complex PTSD, as we discussed earlier. So to summarize, victims are affected by abuse in a variety of ways. Ones or someone else's looming death, violation, personal injury, or powerful pain are sufficient to provoke the behaviors, cognitions, and emotions that together are known as PTSD. Even learning about such mishaps may be enough to trigger massive anxiety responses. The first phase of PTSD involves incapacitating and overwhelming fear. The victim feels like she has been thrust into a nightmare or a horror movie. We sometimes call it gaslighting. She is rendered helpless by her own terror. She keeps reliving the experience through recurrent and intrusive visual and auditory hallucinations known as flashbacks, or while she sleeps in dreams. In some flashbacks, the victim completely lapses into a dissociative state, and physically reenacts the event while being thoroughly oblivious to her whereabouts and surroundings. In an attempt to suppress this constant playback and the attendant exaggerated startled response jumpiness, the victim tries to avoid all stimuli associated, however indirectly, with the traumatic event. Many develop full-scale phobias, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, aversion to specific animals, objects, modes of transportation, neighborhoods, buildings, occupations, weather, and even people. Most post-traumatic stress disorder victims are especially vulnerable on the anniversaries of their abuse. They try to avoid thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities, situations, locations, or people who remind them of the traumatic occurs, these are known as triggers. And it is this constant hypervigilance and arousal, the sleep disorders, mainly in Sonia. The irritability, short fuse, and the inability to concentrate and complete even relatively simple tasks, these erode the victim's resilience, utterly fatigued, exhausted. Most patients manifest protracted periods of numbness, automatism, and in radical cases near-catatonic posture. Response times to verbal cues increase dramatically, awareness of the environment decreases, sometimes dangerously so. The victims are described by their nearest and nearest as zombies, machines, robots, or automata. The victims appear to be sleepwalking, depressed, dysphoric, unhedonic, not interested in anything or they can find pleasure in nothing. The victims' report feeling detached, emotionally absent, estranged, and alienated. Many victims say that their life is over and expect to have no career, family, or otherwise meaningful future. The victims' family and friends complain that she is no longer capable of showing intimacy, tenderness, compassion, empathy, and of having sex due to her post-traumatic fugidity. Many victims become paranoid, impulsive, reckless, and self-destructive. Others somatize their mental problems and complain of numerous physical ailments. All of them feel guilty, shameful, humiliated, desperate, hopeless, helpless, and hostile. PTSD need not appear immediately after the harrowing experience. It can, and often does, delay by days or even months. It lasts more than one month, usually much longer. Sufferers of PTSD report subjective distress. The manifestations of PTSD are ego-dystonic. They don't like it. Their functioning in various settings, job performance, grades at school, sociability, deteriorate marketing. The DSM Diagnostic and Statistical Manual criteria for diagnosing PTSD are far too restrictive. PTSD seems to also develop in the wake of verbal and emotional abuse, in the aftermath of drawn-out traumatic situations such as a nasty divorce. Hopefully, the text will be adopted to reflect this said and ubiquitous reality.