This is a book about the symptoms of complex trauma: loss of meaning and purpose of life, flashbacks, feeling different from other people, and where these experiences come from. About what trauma is, how PTSD and cPTSD differ from each other. About dissociation as the essence of trauma. That it is not only the threat to life that traumatises, but also lack of freedom, isolation and betrayal. On the difficulty of diagnosis: cPTSD is usually subtle, not necessarily associated with extreme experiences but always with chronic stress, and very common: one leading trauma therapist, Janina Fisher, estimates that 40 per cent of people have trauma. Many disorders, including borderline personality disorder are essentially variants of solutions to cPTSD as a problem. On collective trauma: the repression and wars of the 20th century as periods of the most intense violence, the USSR as artificially created captivity within a country, the trauma of the 1990s and 2000s, and what is happening to us in the present.