The Colonized Psyche: A Psychoanalytic Differentiation Between Complex PTSD and Borderline Personality Disorder
A Psique Colonizada: Uma Diferenciação Psicanalítica entre TEPT Complexo e Transtorno de Personalidade Borderline
Bruna Lima
Private practice, São Paulo, Brazil
ORCID: 0009-0006-1981-7522
Correspondence: Bruna Lima, Av. Paulista, 1149 – São Paulo, SP – Brazil. Email: psicbmoraes@gmail.com
©American Psychological Association, 2026. This paper is not the copy of record and may not exactly replicate the authoritative document published in the APA journal. The final article is available, upon publication, at: https://doi.org/10.1037/pap0000616
Author Note. The author thanks the patients whose deeply human experiences inspired the clinical reflections in this manuscript. All clinical material has been thoroughly disguised to ensure confidentiality. The author reports no external funding and declares no conflicts of interest.
Abstract
The present article proposes a psychoanalytic differentiation between Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), emphasizing that the former constitutes not merely a set of cumulative traumatic events but a structural colonization of the psychic apparatus. Drawing upon Ferenczi's concepts of identification with the aggressor and denial (Verleugnung), as well as Bion's notion of the unprocessed element, the author explores how the continuity of traumatic submission reorganizes the subject's internal world under a "foreign agency" of the introjected aggressor. While BPD is characterized by fragmentation and oscillation between idealized and persecutory object relations, C-PTSD reveals a psychic regime in which the subject's selfhood becomes subordinated to the aggressor's logic. The paper argues that in C-PTSD, the trauma is no longer merely remembered — it operates as the very environment of psychic life — a form of existence in which the ego has ceded authorship as a means of psychic survival. Clinical vignettes illustrate how the traumatic environment persists as a colonizing presence that shapes the subject's perception, desire, and sense of agency. Distinguishing C-PTSD from BPD is therefore not only diagnostically relevant but ethically and clinically necessary, allowing therapeutic work to focus on the restitution of self-authorship rather than mere behavioral regulation or adaptive functioning.
Keywords: Complex PTSD; Identification with the Aggressor; Ferenczi; Foreign Agency; Psychoanalysis.
The World Health Organization (WHO) included the diagnosis of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) in its classification system to fill a diagnostic and therapeutic gap, ensuring that individuals affected by prolonged and relational trauma are properly recognized and treated. Before C-PTSD was incorporated into the ICD-11 (International Classification of Diseases), the very clinical existence of chronic interpersonal trauma was often ignored or underestimated (Herman, 1992). Patients suffering in this way received diagnoses that failed to capture their complexity — many were labeled as having Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) or “simple” Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which resulted in misguided and often ineffective therapeutic approaches. This diagnostic overlap not only confused clinical listening but also reinforced the helplessness of these individuals, who were frequently discredited both for their symptoms and for their histories (Herman, 1992).
Therapies designed for Borderline Personality Disorder — such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Schema Therapy, and Mentalization-Based Treatment — have shown moderate effectiveness in reducing self-destructive behaviors and improving emotional regulation (Cristea et al., 2017; Storebø et al., 2020), but they may not sufficiently address the traumatic bond or the formation of an intrusive object. Meanwhile, classical models of “simple” PTSD, such as Prolonged Exposure Therapy, EMDR, and trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, have demonstrated strong results for single-incident trauma, with large effect sizes in samples without chronic trauma (Foa et al., 2005; Shapiro, 2018; Cusack et al., 2016), yet they have shown clear limitations in cases of repetitive trauma in which the perpetrator is also an attachment figure (Cloitre et al., 2014; Ford & Courtois, 2013). The medical-symptom model, in turn, reduced suffering to anxiety, depression, or impulsivity, neglecting the loss of coherence in one’s sense of self and the underlying relational collapse (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014).
The distinction between C-PTSD and BPD is not merely a matter of technical accuracy — it has direct implications for how this psychological suffering is understood, received, and treated. Misdiagnosing a complex trauma presentation as BPD, for instance, leads to a radical shift in the therapeutic frame, in the kind of relationship established with the patient, and even in the expectations for treatment. More than a label, the diagnosis in this context functions as a “meeting point” for those whose experiences of violence were hidden or masked — it offers a language to name what was previously felt only as chaos, collapse, or diffuse guilt. Through this recognition, the person can begin to see themselves not as someone fundamentally misunderstood, but as someone whose suffering is organized around a specific traumatic history, one that can be cared for and worked through.
This process opens the possibility of shifting suffering from a diffuse realm into one that can be named, thought about, and clinically accompanied, without leaving the individual condemned to the suspicion that “there is something wrong with me” while their traumatic history remains unseen. In this view, C-PTSD describes a mode of existence in which the axis of the self does not fully remain as the origin of experience (or remain only partially), because what organizes the psyche is the continuity of traumatic submission, converted into an identity reference. It is from this perspective that one can speak of a foreign agency of the introjected aggressor — an alien psychic presence that begins to govern experience as if it were the self. For this reason, in C-PTSD, suffering does not arise solely from traumatic memory, but from the impossibility of inhabiting one’s own subjective position without first crossing the foreign territory that has taken its place.
Certain forms of psychological suffering — deeply tied to interpersonal relationships marked by asymmetric violence — have existed throughout human history, yet remained outside diagnostic and cultural awareness. Perhaps this kind of experience is not new at all, but has simply become visible as we developed language to name it. As Herman (1992) emphasizes, the public recognition of trauma depends on specific social conditions — and diagnosis is one of them. It breaks the cycle of disavowal (Ferenczi, 1933/1949) and silence that, for decades, pushed such experiences into zones of indifference or inappropriate pathologization. The diagnosis of C-PTSD, far from fixing the patient’s fate, functions as an opening of horizons: it legitimizes an experience that previously existed only as a silent collapse, offering the person a way to recognize themselves without continuing to mistake survival for submission.
Clinical and Structural Differentiation Between C-PTSD and BPD
The distinction proposed in this article emerged from a question that arose in my clinical practice. In my work with survivors of domestic violence, as well as with adults raised by mentally ill or severely dysregulated parents, I often encountered patients who could describe traumatic facts with a certain degree of narrative distance. Even when they misinterpreted certain facts, could not fully understand what had happened, or remained deeply affected by the experience, they still spoke from a position that preserved some separation between the self and the traumatic experience.
This distinction became less clear in the treatment of a particular patient who sought therapy after identifying with C-PTSD, despite a previous diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. What stood out clinically was not only the presence of trauma, but the way the patient seemed to fluctuate between self-states and, at times, to embody the violence she had suffered. She did not simply remember or report the traumatic object; at certain moments, she appeared organized from within its logic. When narrative was possible, it often emerged as empty, offered merely in response to my question, rather than as an authored account of experience capable of acquiring a transformational function in Bollas’s sense (Bollas, 1987).
Although C-PTSD and BPD may both be associated with prolonged, asymmetric interpersonal violence (Herman, 1992; Cloitre et al., 2014), they represent clinically and metapsychologically distinct organizations. The distinction proposed here is not intended as an absolute separation, but as a differential emphasis useful for clinical listening. Their overlap in emotional instability, relational distress, dissociation, and negative self-image often obscures deeper differences in psychic organization (Cloitre et al., 2014). The decisive question is not whether trauma is present, nor whether dissociation occurs, but how the relational failure is metabolized by the developing psyche (Kernberg, 1975; Herman, 1992).
In borderline personality organization, caregiving figures are often experienced as unstable or oscillating, contributing to failures in ambivalence integration (Kernberg, 1975; Yeomans et al., 2015). In C-PTSD, what predominates is a sustained regime of terror, silencing, abandonment, or coercive adaptation, in which submission may become the condition for psychic survival (Ferenczi, 1933/1949; van der Kolk, 2014). It is this difference in the structure of the traumatic environment, rather than its mere intensity, that generates distinct defensive organizations and self-structures.
Psychoanalysis offers a rich conceptual framework for understanding these differences. For the exploration of C-PTSD, several concepts are especially relevant: Ferenczi’s (1933/1949) notions of identification with the aggressor, disavowal, and traumatic incorporation of the other; Winnicott’s (1965) concept of impingement; and Bion’s (1962a) theory of un-metabolized beta elements. The notion of psychic colonization proposed here is my own formulation. By psychic colonization, I refer to the installation of the aggressor’s logic as an internal law within a globally continuous self. It is developed in dialogue with Schafer’s (1997) and Bollas’s (1987) reflections on how alien internal demands may come to organize psychic life. By contrast, concepts from Kernberg (1975) and Yeomans et al. (2015) help clarify the grammar of bonds and defenses in borderline personality organization.
Central to the differentiation developed in this article is Ferenczi’s (1933/1949) concept of identification with the aggressor. When a person is subjected to violence, abuse, or chronic humiliation by a caregiver, or by someone who functions as a giver of meaning, a full psychological confrontation with that reality may become unbearable, and often impossible, because of the dependency involved. The psyche responds by incorporating elements of the aggressor. The underlying logic of identification with the aggressor is this: what cannot be survived as an external threat is made internal and familiar. Crucially, the elements incorporated, and the way they are assimilated, differ between C-PTSD and borderline personality organization.
In borderline personality organization, as formulated by Kernberg (1975), identity is organized through primitive defensive mechanisms, especially splitting and projective identification, which prevent the integration of self and object representations into a cohesive whole. Much like a mosaic composed of adjacent yet unintegrated pieces, borderline identity is constituted by irreconcilable fragments rather than by a unified structure. Identification with the aggressor operates here as a secondary organization superimposed on this pre-existing fragmentation: the intrusive figure becomes a dominant internal model, and the person reproduces that figure’s relational logic while remaining entangled with intensely contradictory partial objects (Ferenczi, 1933/1949; Kernberg, 1975). Because caregiving figures tend to be experienced as unstable, the same object may oscillate between idealization and devaluation, generating relationships marked by fusion, control, and fear of abandonment (Kernberg, 1975; Yeomans et al., 2015). Primitive defenses are not merely reactive in this structure: they are primary organizers of how the individual experiences themselves and others across contexts.
In C-PTSD, identification with the aggressor also occurs, but it does not occupy the same structural position. The person generally preserves some degree of psychic distance from the traumatic incorporation, experiencing it as intrusive, alien, or contaminating. There remains a residue of authorship that coexists with the traumatic incorporation without being able fully to govern it. This identification is often ego-dystonic, felt as foreign to the true self, and organized around submission, silencing, and survival rather than around the unstable management of contradictory object relations.
The predominant organizing threat is less abandonment as such than punishment, silencing, or annihilation within the traumatic bond. Unlike the structural fragmentation described in borderline personality organization, the sense of self in C-PTSD remains globally continuous, although interrupted by unintegrated traumatic states. Although psychic colonization may evoke structural dissociation (van der Hart, Nijenhuis, & Steele, 2006), it is not proposed here as a model of dissociative personality structure. Structural dissociation theory emphasizes divisions among dissociative parts of the personality; psychic colonization emphasizes the installation of an intrusive objectal logic within a globally continuous self. The central claim is therefore not that the personality is primarily divided, but that the self becomes occupied by a foreign law.
Table 1
Comparison Between Complex PTSD and Borderline Personality Organization
Axis | C-PTSD | BPD |
|---|---|---|
Reality testing | Globally preserved, but narrowed under trauma activation |
Relatively preserved, but vulnerable under stress |
Predominant defenses | Trauma-based survival defenses: dissociation, avoidance, emotional numbing, hypercontrol | Primitive defenses: splitting, projective identification, idealization, devaluation |
Flight state | Avoidance, hypervigilance, urge to leave triggering situations | Relational and affective escape in response to rejection, invalidation, or abandonment |
Self-concept | More stably negative | More oscillating self-image |
Core organizing threat | Trauma-related threat | Attachment-related threat |
Main psychic division | More stable division; parts may remain isolated for long periods | More fluid, rapid, and unstable shifts between ego states |
Metapsychological status | Linked to unintegrated trauma | Linked to structural non-integration of the self |
Dissociative tendency | Traumatic dissociation; compartmentalization of experience | Structural splitting and identity diffusion |
Status of selfhood | Occupied self | Fragmented self |
Relation to the aggressor | Subjection to the aggressor’s field and verdict | Identification with and reproduction of the aggressor’s relational logic |
Nature of traumatic incorporation | Colonizing incorporation centered on submission, silencing, and survival | Fragmenting incorporation centered on contradictory object relations |
Note. This table synthesizes the distinction proposed in this article as a set of metapsychological tendencies, not as absolute diagnostic criteria. It draws on Ferenczi (1933/1949), Kernberg (1975), Herman (1992), Cloitre et al. (2014), van der Hart et al. (2006), and Yeomans et al. (2015). The terms “occupied self,” “psychic colonization,” and “foreign agency” are the author’s own formulations, developed in dialogue with these sources rather than directly derived from them.
The dissociative phenomena listed in Table 1 represent distinct modes of psychic organization and different destinies of traumatic incorporation. In C-PTSD, compartmentalization emerges from unintegrated trauma and from the subject’s displacement toward the internalized logic of the traumatic environment. In borderline organization, rapid and unstable shifts reflect failures of ambivalence integration and identity consolidation. Conflating these two forms under a single nosological category obscures important differences in structure, phenomenology, and clinical implication (Cloitre et al., 2014; van der Hart et al., 2006).
The relational consequences of these organizations are equally divergent. The person with C-PTSD tends toward withdrawal and deep mistrust, shaped by prolonged exposure to silencing, control, or coercive adaptation (Herman, 1992; Cloitre et al., 2014). The borderline individual, by contrast, oscillates between demanding recognition and pushing away the one who offers it (Kernberg, 1975; Yeomans et al., 2015). While the borderline patient contends with the collapse of self-integration, the person with C-PTSD faces the collapse of symbolic existence itself: a nameless dread in which the misunderstood becomes incomprehensible (Bion, 1962a), and trauma has not been inscribed as a shareable psychic experience. Thus, the clinical picture of C-PTSD is not primarily one of affective instability as a structural feature, but of psychic collapse after years of forced adaptation, often masked by a functional outward appearance (Herman, 1992).
What is at stake in C-PTSD, then, is an occupation of the place of the self. Trauma continues to function not only as a wound or memory of what occurred, but as a mode of psychic operation in which the possibility of existing remains conditioned by the traumatic bond. This generates the characteristic symptoms described by Herman (1992): shame, paradoxical self-blame, anger, concern or feelings of revenge toward the perpetrator, chronic alienation, and disturbances in self-concept, relationships, and meaning. Clinical work thus requires addressing not only what was experienced, but the way traumatic incorporation continues to organize the subject’s relation to themselves, to others, and to reality.
C-PTSD as Psychic Colonization
When it comes to C-PTSD, the organizing function of the ego may become seized by a logic that is not originally its own. The person begins to perceive, interpret, and respond to life according to a law that once belonged to the traumatic environment, but has settled in as if it were an internal necessity. What occupies the place of subjective orientation is not simply a defensive formation generated from within, but the installed presence of the other: an objectal law that precedes, limits, and governs what can emerge as one’s own experience.
In dialogue with Bollas’s reflections on the idiom of the self, object relations, and subjective determination in The Shadow of the Object and Forces of Destiny (Bollas, 1987, 1989), this article conceptualizes psychic colonization as a condition in which the logic of the traumatic environment becomes installed as an organizing axis of selfhood. The proposition is that this regime of psychic submission constitutes one central metapsychological configuration of C-PTSD (Ferenczi, 1933/1949; Herman, 1992). Psychic colonization is therefore not the destruction of the self, but the installation of an alien objectal law within a self that remains, however weakened, globally continuous.
In Ferenczi (1933/1949), submission is not a single act but a psychic reorganization. Under the threat of psychic or existential annihilation, the self shifts away from its own axis and adopts the aggressor’s perspective as a condition for continuity. The subject does not identify out of desire, but because survival appears to require becoming an extension of the other’s will. Surviving comes to mean relinquishing oneself. Identification with the aggressor then becomes an internal principle of regulation, establishing a mode of functioning in which the self is guided by the other’s verdict.
This process is intensified when violence is combined with disavowal. In Ferenczi’s account, disavowal is not merely a denial of facts, but a relational act in which the perpetrator, positioned as the generator of meaning, denies, minimizes, reverses, or silences what occurred. The subject, not believed, incorporates the discredit and begins to doubt their own perception. Bohleber (2010) states that traumatic memories may remain relatively isolated in the mind, forming a kind of foreign body in the associative network. In this sense, trauma may be understood as psychically present but not fully recognized: known and unacknowledged at the same time. The person must deny what they perceived in order to preserve the bond, maintain psychic continuity, or survive.
For individuals with C-PTSD, traumatic experience is often linked to a chronic failure of environmental holding and psychic metabolization. There was no stable emotional environment capable of sustaining continuity of being, nor a receptive mind capable of helping organize internal experience (Winnicott, 1965; Bion, 1962a). When the environment fails to sustain the self, whether in childhood or adulthood, existence may become organized under emergency conditions (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014). In this mode, one learns to remain silent in order to endure, to doubt one’s own feelings in order to belong, and to structure psychic life around survival rather than desire.
In C-PTSD, what is incorporated is not only the aggressor’s position of power, but the judgment through which the subject was named, reduced, discredited, or silenced. Identification falls less on the figure itself than on the aggressor’s verdict. The person adheres to the labels they received, internalizes the disavowal, and converts it into self-concept. The result is an identity under the guardianship of insult, marked by low symbolization, diminished agency, and a weakened capacity to recognize oneself outside the imposed language of the other (Ferenczi, 1933/1949; Herman, 1992; Bion, 1962a).
Once internalized, the aggressor’s verdict begins to operate as an internal law that evaluates what is possible, believable, permissible, or forbidden. The person may no longer be living in the traumatic environment, but the psychic order derived from it continues to regulate affect, perception, desire, and reality-testing. Psychic colonization, therefore, is not a mere residue of memory, but an objectal occupation that reorganizes the subject’s relation to themselves and to the world.
At this point, the subjective configuration of C-PTSD becomes clinically visible. What appears in the clinical setting is not primarily neurotic conflict, but capture: a submission to the internalized logic of the other, which continues to operate as the matrix of experience. The intrapsychic space becomes occupied by elements originating from the environment, in a kind of intrusive objectal presence (Winnicott, 1965; Bion, 1962a). The traumatized subject comes to carry internally the other’s gaze, the judgment that named and disavowed them. The traumatic object no longer needs to be externally present in order to organize the conditions under which the person may feel, speak, desire, or exist.
The distortion involved here should not be confused with psychosis. In C-PTSD, the perception of reality is not delusional in the classical psychotic sense, nor does psychic colonization imply a primary collapse of reality-testing. The foreignness described here is objectal and identificatory. The person may know, at one level, that the traumatic world is no longer externally present; yet the internal order derived from it continues to determine what feels dangerous, shameful, forbidden, or impossible. Even so, something of the self survives: a small observing instance that perceives, questions, and sometimes doubts, even when it does not yet govern its own experience. This enduring presence sustains a minimal authorial awareness, located in the unstable space between believing and doubting.
The successive incorporations that occur in C-PTSD may gradually become the existential backdrop of the person’s life. They think, feel, and react according to a code inherited from the violent other, which may become the “mother language” of affect and thought. This colonization is not limited to a single traumatic episode, but to a prolonged mode of relation established when the self was still in formation or when psychic boundaries were insufficiently consolidated (Winnicott, 1965; Ferenczi, 1933/1949). The result is a way of living in which the person reacts less from their own idiom than from the internalized demands of the traumatic object.
When dissociative phenomena emerge in C-PTSD — depersonalization, fugue states, intrusive re-experiencing, or episodic compartmentalization — they should be understood not as the primary pathology, nor as a constitutive feature of personality organization, but as possible expressions of the colonizing regime. The concept of psychic colonization does not deny dissociative phenomena in C-PTSD. Rather, it distinguishes the phenomenology of dissociation from the metapsychology of colonization.
Dissociation describes possible states of discontinuity; colonization describes the objectal occupation that reorganizes self-perception, agency, and reality-testing under the aggressor’s internalized law. ICD-11 Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, code 6B41, is defined as a distinct diagnosis that includes the core symptom clusters of PTSD together with
disturbances in self-organization, including affect dysregulation, negative self-concept, and relational disturbances. It does not require a distinct dissociative symptom cluster for diagnosis (World Health Organization, 2023, 2026). C-PTSD may therefore occur with or without clinically significant dissociation. When dissociation is present, it may be understood as an episodic failure of integration under traumatic activation: moments in which the foreign agency intensifies its hold and temporarily suspends the subject’s already fragile authorial position. Dissociation is therefore not the essence of the structure, but one of the ways in which the occupied self endures what could not be metabolized.
Such crystallized environments describe a form of psychic coexistence in which symbolization becomes severely constrained. What repeats is not only the traumatic content, but the impossibility of transformation itself (Bion, 1962a; Bollas, 1987). Living within the emotional reality of the traumatizing other may feel like being confined to a closed system in which experiences do not evolve, circulate, or undergo meaningful transformation. These are worlds kept in secrecy; contact with the outside threatens to destabilize the system that preserves them, allowing it to persist across generations almost intact (Abraham & Torok, 1994).
In this sense, psychic colonization is not only the internal survival of the aggressor within the psyche. It is the preservation of an entire emotional order in which the subject remains partially exiled from their own experience. C-PTSD, in this reading, is not merely the persistence of traumatic memory, but the persistence of a foreign organization of selfhood — one that must gradually be recognized, contested, and transformed if the subject is to recover an authorial relation to their own psychic life.
Clinical Vignettes
It is common for patients to respond to the validation of traumatic experience with a kind of quiet recognition: what they lived through in childhood was not “normal,” even if, in some obscure and unformulated way, they had always known this.
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The full article includes two detailed clinical vignettes, download the complete PDF.
Conclusion
The distinction between Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is not merely diagnostic. It concerns two different ways in which suffering may become organized around the self, the object, and the possibility of subjective authorship. While borderline personality organization is structured around failures in the integration of self and object representations, with oscillations between idealization and persecution, C-PTSD may be understood, in the formulation proposed here, as a condition in which the subject’s psychic life becomes organized under the enduring logic of a traumatic environment.
This article has proposed the concept of psychic colonization to describe this specific metapsychological configuration. In C-PTSD, trauma does not remain only as memory, symptom, or affective residue. It may become an internal law: a foreign agency that defines what can be felt, thought, desired, believed, or feared. The traumatic object no longer needs to be externally present in order to govern the subject’s relation to reality. Its verdict has been installed within the psychic apparatus, shaping self-perception and limiting the possibility of existing from one’s own center.
For this reason, the treatment of C-PTSD cannot be reduced to symptom management, emotional regulation, or exposure to traumatic memories. These interventions may have value in specific contexts, but they are insufficient when the central clinical task is the restoration of subjective authorship. Therapeutic work must help the person distinguish their own experience from the law of the traumatic object, their own desire from the demands of submission, and their own perception from the disavowing gaze that once defined reality for them.
To recognize C-PTSD as psychic colonization is therefore to make an ethical as well as a clinical distinction. It means refusing to mistake survival adaptations for personality defects, and refusing to treat the patient as the origin of a violence that was first imposed from outside and then installed within. The task of treatment is not to adapt the subject more efficiently to a colonized psychic order, but to make that order visible, thinkable, and contestable.
Psychoanalysis was not originally developed to address these forms of externally imposed psychic domination. Its classical model was primarily organized around neurotic conflict, unconscious desire, fantasy, and the internal vicissitudes of psychic life. For this reason, the treatment of C-PTSD requires psychoanalysis to extend its listening beyond the intrapsychic register without abandoning it. In this expanded sense, psychoanalysis can offer a space in which what had been silently endured becomes narratable, and what had been lived as fate can begin to be recognized as history.
The differentiation between C-PTSD and BPD thus matters because it changes the clinical question. The question is not only how the patient regulates affect, manages relationships, or integrates conflicting states of mind. It is also whether the patient can recover the right to experience themselves as the author of their own psychic life. Where psychic colonization has transformed survival into submission, treatment begins by restoring the possibility of inhabiting oneself otherwise.
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About the Author
Bruna Lima is a licensed clinical psychologist (CRP 06/130409) in private practice in São Paulo, Brazil, where she works with psychoanalytic psychotherapy in person and online, including with Brazilians living abroad. Her clinical and research interests center on complex relational trauma and its subtler forms of psychic domination, such as gaslighting, experiences in which the victim's own perception becomes occupied by the aggressor's version of reality. This article grew directly out of that clinical work. Schedule a consultation →
