ABSTRACT
Many adult psychiatric patients report childhood histories that have been plagued by traumatic experiences, sometimes quite severe, during a long period of their personality development. These patients are often diagnosed as suffering from a dissociative disorder or from borderline personality disorder (BPD), but they may also present other DSM-IV disorders (Davidson and Smith, 1990; American Psychiatric Association, 2000). A characteristic pattern of personality changes shared by many patients with a traumatic developmental history includes feelings of emptiness and hopelessness, hostility and distrust, social withdrawal and shame, dissociative feelings of alienation and unreality, loss of coherence in self-representations, irritability, pervasive problems with self-regulation, vulnerability to self-harm or to harm in¯icted by others, and clinging dependency paradoxically coexisting with attachment avoidance (complex post traumatic stress disorder PTSD, Herman, 1992). The diagnostic label of complex PTSD may be instrumental for studying all trauma-related disorders as a continuum with PTSD (Classen et al., 2006). It will be often used in this chapter, the aim of which is to evaluate the relationship between metacognitive de®cits and all trauma-related psychopathology.
