Pete Walker

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving names a fourth response alongside fight, flight and freeze: fawn, the reflex of appeasing whoever is dangerous, which develops in children who had no other option.

Walker practises psychotherapy in California and has written that his own childhood is where the interest began, so the book reads as description from inside rather than clinical distance.

Complex PTSD is not a separate diagnosis in the American manual, which matters for anyone seeking treatment, though the ICD recognises it. The emotional flashback material is the part readers most often say they had never seen written down.