Brokenhearted,
Behind your question there's an assumption that increasingly violent abuse is more likely to result in traumatic responses like PTSD. I guess there is indeed something to that, but at the level of the individual case it can get very complicated.
There are in fact a lot of other inputs, I think. For example, can the survivor link back to a happy childhood when he was cherished and safe, or was his entire childhood a mess? Does he have a solid support group now? Is he under pressure and stress at work? Were there aspects of the abuse that were especially traumatic for him? How coherent are his memories? And so on.
In my own case I was diagnosed with PTSD, and my T's thought was that this went back to the fact that the abuser was a sadist and loved to invent new and shaming things to make me do or submit to. But as we talked, she soon figured out that I was having flashbacks for a more specific reason: I felt I was still in danger and feared the abuse could start again at any moment, even though I knew the abuser had been dead more than a decade. By dealing with that she was able to reduce and finally eliminate my flashbacks and panic attacks - even though many other and equally serious issues still remained unresolved.
So as usual ... the answer is yes, okay, but ... followed by pages and pages!
Much love,
Larry
