PROGRESSIVE RESEARCH PAPER 002

THE AMNESIC PHOENIX

An AI-Assisted Academic Analysis of Short Stories and Poems

Literary Congruence with WHO ICD-11 Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Amnesia

Brian “Happy” Bryanson, LCSW

CPTSD Cold Case  |  The Philosophy of the Wounded Witness

Corpus: 26 unique works • 92,082 words • 46 source files reviewed

CENTRAL LIMIT: This report evaluates patterns in writing. It does not independently diagnose Brian HAPPY Bryanson, authenticate recalled events, identify offenders, or prove a cold case. Clinical diagnosis requires a qualified clinician; investigative conclusions require independent evidence.

Reader Orientation and Authorship Legend

This document is a framed narrative of academic inquiry into Brian “Happy” Bryanson’s written psyche. The short stories and poems are treated as a longitudinal self-observation archive: they show how the author names, organizes, resists, and assigns meaning to experiences over time. The analysis asks a limited question: how closely do the recurring literary patterns correspond to the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 descriptions of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD; 6B41) and dissociative amnesia (6B61)?

AUTHOR VOICE — GEORGIA ITALIC: All blue italic quotations reproduce Brian Bryanson’s language. Minor typographical errors may be silently omitted only when needed for a short excerpt; the underlying source files remain unchanged.

AI PROFESSOR VOICE — TIMES NEW ROMAN: All black analytical prose, classifications, inferences, graphs, and conclusions are the AI professor’s contribution. They are interpretive and educational rather than medical or forensic findings.

AI Professor’s Introduction

Brian Bryanson’s corpus is not merely a sequence of stories about the past. It is a record of the mind attempting to build continuity when continuity has repeatedly failed. Across poems, essays, dreams, family narratives, and cold-case writings, the author returns to three linked tasks: recovering autobiographical sequence, regulating the emotional cost of return, and converting private suffering into public witness. The writing therefore functions at once as testimony, self-study, memorial practice, and an improvised external memory system.

The most academically important feature is not the sensational content of any single recollection. It is the architecture repeated across the corpus: a cue or mood shift; a sensory or dreamlike return; partial information; bodily and emotional destabilization; writing; hypothesis formation; relief; and renewed advocacy. That recurring sequence is highly relevant to ICD-11 trauma and dissociation concepts. Yet the same sequence also requires epistemic restraint. A text can be clinically congruent with trauma symptoms without establishing the historical accuracy of every remembered scene.

“OUR PAST NEVER LEAVES US / ITS SCARS RUN DEEP”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, HAPPY’S SHORT STORIES OF TRUE CRIME

The strongest scholarly reading, therefore, is neither dismissal nor automatic confirmation. It is compassion joined to method: preserve the author’s language, identify patterns, compare those patterns with explicit diagnostic requirements, examine alternative explanations, and keep external claims open to independent corroboration.

1. Corpus and Method

1.1 Corpus construction

The review covered 46 uploaded files whose titles identify them as 2025 works. Content hashing and title normalization reduced these to 26 unique texts totaling approximately 92,082 words. Files marked “(1),” “(2),” or “Copy” were retained as provenance but were not double-counted when their extracted text matched another file. The collection includes long autobiographical essays, compact reflections, dream reports, poems embedded in prose, mission statements, and an anthology front matter draft.

1.2 Analytic procedure

·         Close reading of all unique texts for narrative sequence, self-description, bodily states, interpersonal themes, memory language, and functional impact.

·         Keyword-assisted screening across eight domains: re-experiencing, avoidance, current threat, affect regulation, negative self-concept, relational disturbance, autobiographical amnesia, and impairment.

·         Criterion-by-criterion comparison with WHO ICD-11 CDDR descriptions, followed by a confidence judgment: strong textual congruence, moderate/partial congruence, mixed or insufficient literary evidence, or not assessable from writing.

·         Separate evidentiary treatment of author report, literary metaphor, author inference, and independently testable cold-case detail.

METHOD WARNING: Keyword counts are navigation aids. A term such as “memory,” “alone,” or “cannot” may occur outside a diagnostic meaning. No numeric threshold in the graphs equals a WHO diagnosis.

2. WHO ICD-11 Framework

WHO classifies CPTSD as a disorder specifically associated with stress. It requires exposure to an event or series of events of an extremely threatening or horrific nature, most commonly prolonged or repetitive events from which escape is difficult or impossible. The full requirements include all three core PTSD clusters—re-experiencing in the present, deliberate avoidance, and a persistent sense of current threat—plus three disturbances in self-organization: severe affect-regulation problems, persistent negative self-concept, and persistent difficulty sustaining relationships or feeling close to others. Symptoms must also cause significant impairment.

Dissociative amnesia is a separate ICD-11 dissociative disorder. Its central feature is inability to recall important autobiographical memories, usually traumatic or stressful, beyond ordinary forgetting. The memory loss must not be better explained by another mental, neurological, substance-related, sleep-related, or medical condition. CPTSD does not itself require dissociative amnesia; the two diagnoses may be conceptually related but must be evaluated separately.

CRITICAL DIFFERENCE: Writing about flashbacks does not automatically establish CPTSD; reporting forgotten trauma does not automatically establish dissociative amnesia. WHO requirements are syndromic and differential: the whole pattern, functional impact, duration, and competing explanations matter.

3. Color-Coded Criterion Grid

Domain

Corpus expression

Literary status

Boundary

Trauma exposure

Extensive self-report of prolonged/repeated childhood threat and abuse

Strong at narrative level

Exposure history still requires clinical assessment; crime allegations remain unverified.

Re-experiencing

Flashbacks, recurring dreams, sensory fragments, “time travel,” present-tense return

Strong textual congruence

Many passages explicitly describe reliving; phenomenology should be clinically clarified.

Deliberate avoidance

Running, hiding, withdrawal, resistance to reminders; writing itself approaches rather than avoids

Moderate / mixed

Amnesia is not identical to deliberate avoidance; current intentional avoidance is incompletely documented.

Current threat

Hypervigilance, freezing, scanning mood shifts, panic, “on guard” language

Strong textual congruence

Repeated across childhood and adult reflections.

Affect dysregulation

Rage, sadness, despair, overwhelm, exhaustion, crisis waves, delayed grief

Strong textual congruence

Both hyperactivation and attempts at self-regulation are visible.

Negative self-concept

Shame/deficit language appears, but phoenix, helper, witness, and survivor identities counter it

Mixed / incomplete

Persistent defeated or worthless self-view cannot be established from this corpus alone.

Relational disturbance

Isolation, mistrust, family estrangement, betrayal sensitivity, difficulty with closeness

Moderate-to-strong

Also contains enduring care, foster-parent identity, “my kiddos,” and advocacy—evidence of relational capacity.

Functional impairment

Exhaustion, disrupted sleep, concentration/memory difficulty, recliner-bound work, distress

Strong self-report

Degree and causes require clinical corroboration and differential assessment.

Dissociative amnesia

“Amnesic box,” missing names, gaps, lost sequence, later return of autobiographical material

Strong textual congruence

Not sufficient for diagnosis; head injury/LOC and other causes must be assessed.

4. Criterion-by-Criterion Literary Analysis

4.1 Exposure to prolonged or repetitive threat

At the level of self-report, the corpus consistently describes chronic childhood conditions characterized by danger, coercion, inability to escape, family-based abuse, institutional betrayal, and repeated exposure to feared adults. DEPTHS OF AMNESIA attempts to stratify environmental threat, neglect, and abuse into “depths,” while BORN INTO A CRIME FAMILY and HAPPY THE PHOENIX extend the account across childhood, school, family, work, and adult advocacy. This is structurally congruent with the kind of prolonged, repetitive, difficult-to-escape exposure commonly associated with CPTSD. The report cannot independently establish that every described event occurred.

“They begin to plot I begin to withdraw. They are moving toward an objective, and I am floating away from reality.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, DEPTHS OF AMNESIA

4.2 Re-experiencing in the present

This is the clearest PTSD-domain signal. Twenty-five of 26 works contained at least one screening term connected with memory return, dreams, flashbacks, or present-tense reliving. The writing repeatedly treats recall as an event that happens to the current self rather than as neutral historical narration. Titles such as I KNEW A FLASHBACK WAS ON ITS WAY NOW ITS HERE, THAT GYMNASIUM DREAM REPEATS, and THE BLOOD SNAKE APPEARS AGAIN encode recurrence before the body text begins. The prose frequently shifts from retrospective explanation into sensory immediacy and then back into analysis.

“The amnesic part of me continually allows the current self to re-experience these traumas and add them to my core knowledge.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, THE MULTIPLICITY OF ME

For ICD-11 purposes, a clinician would still need to determine whether these experiences have the “here-and-now” quality of reliving and whether they are accompanied by strong emotion or bodily sensation. The corpus strongly suggests that quality, but literary language alone cannot complete the assessment.

4.3 Deliberate avoidance

Avoidance is present but diagnostically complicated. The texts describe running, hiding, withdrawing, resisting certain places or people, and attempts to stop rumination. Yet the corpus as a whole is an approach behavior: Bryanson repeatedly enters painful material, writes it, organizes it, and publishes it. The “amnesic box” is portrayed as an involuntary protective process, not necessarily deliberate avoidance. WHO’s PTSD criterion focuses on intentional avoidance of internal memories or external reminders. Therefore, the literary evidence is moderate and mixed rather than definitive.

A clinical interview would need to ask what reminders are currently avoided, how consistently, and at what functional cost. Without that information, this is the principal core PTSD cluster that cannot be confidently inferred from writing alone.

4.4 Persistent sense of current threat

The corpus contains a stable threat-monitoring vocabulary: watching faces and mood shifts, freezing when voices rise, remaining “on guard,” scanning escape routes, anticipating betrayal, and interpreting subtle environmental changes as precursors to danger. DEPTHS OF AMNESIA offers an unusually explicit model: the author compares preconscious threat detection to ripples appearing before a predator is visible. This is literary congruence with hypervigilance and heightened threat appraisal.

“My psyche has been honed to something represented by the half full glass in Jurassic Park.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, DEPTHS OF AMNESIA

4.5 Severe and pervasive affect-regulation difficulty

Affective disruption appears across sadness, rage, panic, despair, delayed grief, physiological collapse, exhaustion, and extended recovery after triggers. THE LAST 72 HOURS HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT and THE PROGRESSION OF TRAUMA WHEN ITS NOT DONE are particularly valuable because they describe not only dysregulation but attempted regulation: resting, writing, reframing, “counting my blessings,” and rebuilding function after a “crisis wave.” This shows both symptom burden and developed compensatory skill.

“I have found that with my trauma I need to be able to stop the dysfunction and maximize my function.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, THE PROGRESSION OF TRAUMA WHEN ITS NOT DONE

4.6 Persistent negative self-concept

This is the most qualified CPTSD domain. Some works use language of shame, deficits, rejection, being unwanted, or being treated as defective. WHO AM I NOW THAT SHE DIED asks an identity question shaped by loss. However, the dominant mature narrator is not persistently defeated or worthless. He constructs counter-identities: phoenix, clinician, foster father, witness, writer, advocate, shepherd, and restorer. HAPPY THE PHOENIX explicitly converts injury into a survivor emblem.

“I chose to put the phoenix on my arm since I consider it a survivor statement.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, HAPPY THE PHOENIX

This does not disprove a negative self-concept; resilient public identity may coexist with private shame. But a literary analysis should not force the criterion. The corpus supplies mixed evidence and a clinician would need direct assessment of persistent beliefs about worth, failure, guilt, shame, and defeat across contexts.

4.7 Persistent relational difficulty

The texts repeatedly describe betrayal by caregivers and institutions, estrangement from family, mistrust, loneliness, social exclusion, and difficulty knowing whether others are safe. Man of Mothers, INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF SADISTICALLY INCESTUOUS SEEDS, and BORN INTO A CRIME FAMILY frame relationships as the main channel through which danger and trauma move across generations. At the same time, THAT CAT GIRL WHO SAVED MY LIFE, references to “my kiddos,” clinical work, foster care, and the mission to memorialize victims show capacity for attachment and care. The best conclusion is moderate-to-strong relational disturbance, not absence of relational ability.

4.8 Significant functional impairment

The corpus self-reports effects on sleep, energy, mobility, concentration, memory, school performance, work, finances, and the ability to remain oriented after intense recollection. Several works portray writing as both necessary and exhausting. Functional impairment is therefore strongly represented in the narrative. A formal diagnostic assessment would need to separate trauma-related impairment from physical disability, neurological history, learning disability, medication effects, grief, and other conditions.

5. Dissociative Amnesia Analysis

The dissociative-amnesia signal is direct, repeated, and metacognitive. Bryanson does not merely say that he forgets. He theorizes layers of memory exclusion, describes names or sequences that remain unavailable, reports later return of autobiographical fragments, and uses writing to stabilize material after it appears. DEPTHS OF AMNESIA is essentially a phenomenological taxonomy; THE MULTIPLICITY OF ME distinguishes recovered content from a separate-personality interpretation; WHO AM I NOW THAT SHE DIED describes amnesia as protection from grief.

“My dissociation buffered the impact of this loss and then my amnesia rescued me from a grief that I don’t believe I could have endured.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, WHO AM I NOW THAT SHE DIED

5.1 Features congruent with ICD-11 6B61

·         Important autobiographical material is described as inaccessible rather than merely vague.

·         The inaccessible material is repeatedly linked by the author to traumatic or stressful experiences.

·         The author describes discontinuities in names, sequence, context, and emotional ownership.

·         Later recall is portrayed as fragmentary, cue-linked, sensory, and gradually integrated through writing.

·         The gaps and returns are described as distressing and functionally consequential.

5.2 Why the writing cannot establish the diagnosis

ICD-11 requires that the memory disturbance exceed ordinary forgetting and not be better explained by other conditions. The corpus itself reports unconsciousness, head injuries, concentration problems, sleep disruption, intense emotion, and a past hypnosis experience. These factors do not invalidate the author’s experience; they make differential diagnosis essential. A clinician would need neurological and medication history, the temporal pattern of memory gaps, collateral information, standardized dissociation assessment, and evaluation of ordinary forgetting, post-traumatic intrusion, traumatic brain injury, seizure or sleep phenomena, substance or medication effects, depression, and other dissociative disorders.

IMPORTANT: CPTSD and dissociative amnesia are not synonyms. The corpus is strongly congruent with both trauma-related and amnesic phenomena, but the second diagnosis requires its own exclusion process.

6. Longitudinal Model: What the Writing Shows Over Time

1. Threat cue

A mood, sound, place, dream, disappointment, anniversary, or interpersonal event changes the internal field.

2. State shift

Hypervigilance, freezing, panic, exhaustion, dissociation, or sensory narrowing appears.

3. Fragment return

Images, scenes, names, bodily sensations, or story fragments become available with uneven sequence.

4. Written externalization

The author writes a poem or story, names the experience, compares it with prior entries, and builds chronology.

5. Meaning and hypothesis

The author interprets motives, relationships, spiritual meaning, and possible cold-case implications.

6. Regulation and mission

Writing provides relief, continuity, and renewed commitment to advocacy: “Send the Dead Home.”

This sequence is the corpus’s central research contribution. It presents writing as a prosthetic continuity system: the journal holds what the mind cannot reliably hold in sequence. The archive thereby becomes an external autobiographical scaffold. That function can be therapeutic and historically valuable while still requiring safeguards against suggestion, retrospective over-interpretation, and confirmation bias.

7. Relationship to the Cold-Case Corpus

Bryanson’s trauma writing and cold-case work are linked by a common moral structure: fragment, witness, name, organize, and restore. The poems often move from the injured child-self toward the imagined victim or missing person. The writer’s personal continuity project becomes a public memorial project. “Send the Dead Home” is therefore not an ornamental slogan; it is the ethical endpoint through which private suffering is converted into service.

7.1 What the clinical congruence can support

·         It can explain why recollections may arrive nonlinearly, with sensory fragments, uneven chronology, and intense affect.

·         It can explain why writing and repeated organization feel necessary for continuity and emotional regulation.

·         It can justify trauma-informed, disability-accessible interviewing and preservation of the author’s earliest wording.

·         It can identify testable details for comparison with records without asking a reviewer to accept the entire narrative first.

7.2 What the clinical congruence cannot support

·         A CPTSD or dissociative-amnesia diagnosis does not prove that a recalled crime occurred.

·         Vividness, repetition, emotional intensity, and narrative coherence do not independently establish historical accuracy.

·         A literary hypothesis about a named person is not an investigative finding.

·         Recovered or newly interpreted material should not be the sole basis for legal conclusions; external corroboration remains essential.

7.3 Evidence ladder for responsible use

Level 1 — Original author record

Dated journal, poem, dream report, or first recollection in the author’s own words.

Level 2 — Later interpretation

The author’s subsequent theory about meaning, identity, motive, or sequence.

Level 3 — Internal cross-reference

A repeated detail appearing in independently dated writings; useful for consistency, not proof.

Level 4 — External corroboration

Records, maps, contemporaneous witnesses, photographs, school or agency documents.

Level 5 — Investigative confirmation

Official case-file match, forensic evidence, verified identity, or adjudicated fact.

8. Overall Academic Finding

FINDING: The 2025 short-story and poetry corpus shows strong literary congruence with five major domains: trauma re-experiencing, persistent threat sensitivity, affect dysregulation, relational injury, and functional impairment. It also shows strong phenomenological congruence with autobiographical memory gaps associated by the author with trauma. Deliberate avoidance and persistent negative self-concept are present less clearly and require direct clinical assessment. Accordingly, the corpus is clinically meaningful supportive material, but it cannot by itself establish that every WHO diagnostic requirement is met.

The corpus’s deepest contribution is not that it “proves” a diagnosis. It demonstrates a longitudinal lived pattern that a competent clinician could assess. It gives vocabulary to state shifts, memory gaps, threat detection, delayed grief, bodily cost, and compensatory writing. It also documents resilience: Bryanson repeatedly transforms fragmentation into chronology and isolation into advocacy.

AI Professor’s Conclusion

Brian “Happy” Bryanson writes from the border between absence and return. His poems compress unbearable experience into image; his short stories expand the image until sequence becomes possible. Across the corpus, dissociation is represented as both injury and former protection, while writing becomes the bridge by which the present self approaches what the past self could not continuously hold.

Read academically, these works are consistent with the architecture of complex trauma: the past is not securely past; danger remains active in perception; emotion arrives in waves; identity and relationships carry the residue of prolonged threat; and daily functioning bears a continuing cost. Read more carefully, however, they also resist reduction to illness. The phoenix, the clinician, the foster father, the witness, and the advocate are not decorative identities. They are the author’s organized response to fragmentation.

The appropriate lesson for the world is therefore twofold. First, a survivor’s nonlinear account deserves trauma-informed attention rather than ridicule merely because it is fragmented. Second, compassion does not remove the need for method. The author’s health narrative deserves clinical evaluation; his historical recollections deserve preservation; and his cold-case claims deserve comparison with independent records and evidence. These are different forms of truth-testing, and respecting their difference protects both the writer and the people he seeks to remember.

“I will continue with these exercises of writing in different forms, analyzing myself and then sharing with those that wish to know.”

— Brian “Happy” Bryanson, WHO AM I NOW THAT SHE DIED

VICTIM  →  SURVIVOR  →  WITNESS  →  TRUTH-TELLER  →  ADVOCATE  →  RESTORER

SEND THE DEAD HOME

Appendix A — Unique Works Reviewed

The table lists the 26 unique content files used in this paper. Duplicate filenames were retained separately in the upload archive but excluded from the unique-work count.

No.

Work

Words

1

BORN INTO A CRIME FAMILY 2025

24,278

2

CANNIBALISM IN MY PAST AND PRESENT LIFE 2025

1,799

3

DEPTHS OF AMNESIA 2025

1,915

4

HAPPY THE PHOENIX 2025

4,042

5

HAPPY'S SHOR STORIES 2025

1,714

6

HE WILL MAKE THIS INNOCENT SING HIS SONG 2025

3,000

7

HEY MIKEY AND REESE SHELTON 2025

2,793

8

Hey Montana and Mica Reynolds 2025

825

9

I KNEW A FLASHBACK WAS ON ITS WAY NOW ITS HERE 2025

2,372

10

INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION OF SADISTICALLY INCESTUOUS SEEDS 2025

2,015

11

Man of Mothers 2025

2,942

12

ON YOUR KNEES 2025

2,461

13

PHILLIP PANTUSO WROTE ME AN EMAIL ESSAY 2025

690

14

THAT CAT GIRL WHO SAVED MY LIFE 2025

723

15

THAT FARM ALSO TOOK LIFE 2025

7,956

16

THAT GYMNASIUM DREAM REPEATS 2025

3,719

17

THE BLOOD SNAKE APPEARS AGAIN 2025

5,864

18

THE CREATION OF A NEW COLLUM 2025

2,565

19

THE FARM THAT ONLY GREW DEATH 2025

10,032

20

THE LAST 72 HOURS HAVE BEEN DIFFICULT 2025

3,514

21

THE MULTIPLICITY OF ME 2025

977

22

THE PROGRESSION OF TRAUMA WHEN ITS NOT DONE 2025

886

23

THE PURPOSE OF THEIR CURSE 2025

1,599

24

THE SHADOW MAN HAD A FRIEND 2025

1,203

25

THE VICE PRINCIPAL OF SEX SLAVERY 2025

1,204

26

WHO AM I NOW THAT SHE DIED 2025

994

Appendix B — Interpretive Questions for Clinical Review

1. Re-experiencing: Do the reported flashbacks and dreams involve a felt return to the event in the present, and what bodily/emotional activation accompanies them?

2. Avoidance: Which internal memories, conversations, emotions, people, places, or activities are deliberately avoided now?

3. Threat: How often are hypervigilance, startle, scanning, freezing, or panic present outside active recollection?

4. Affect regulation: Are there persistent patterns of emotional flooding, shutdown, prolonged recovery, self-harm, or difficulty returning to baseline?

5. Self-concept: Are beliefs of worthlessness, defeat, shame, guilt, or permanent damage persistent across settings despite the survivor/advocate identity?

6. Relationships: Is closeness persistently difficult, and how do mistrust and isolation coexist with caregiving and professional relationships?

7. Amnesia: What exact autobiographical periods or events are inaccessible, when were gaps first noticed, and how does recall vary by cue or state?

8. Differential diagnosis: What roles may be played by TBI/LOC, sleep, medications, depression, learning disability, neurological conditions, hypnosis, or ordinary forgetting?

9. Impairment: What measurable effects occur in daily living, sleep, concentration, mobility, social functioning, work, and health care?

Selected References

World Health Organization. (2024). Clinical descriptions and diagnostic requirements for ICD-11 mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders. Geneva: WHO. ISBN 978-92-4-007726-3.[link]

World Health Organization. ICD-11 for Mortality and Morbidity Statistics: 6B41 Complex post-traumatic stress disorder; 6B61 Dissociative amnesia.[link]

Brewin, C. R., Cloitre, M., Hyland, P., et al. (2017). A review of current evidence regarding the ICD-11 proposals for diagnosing PTSD and complex PTSD. Clinical Psychology Review, 58, 1–15.[link]

Cloitre, M., Garvert, D. W., Brewin, C. R., Bryant, R. A., & Maercker, A. (2013). Evidence for proposed ICD-11 PTSD and complex PTSD: A latent profile analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 4, 20706.[link]

Reed, G. M., First, M. B., Kogan, C. S., et al. (2019). Innovations and changes in the ICD-11 classification of mental, behavioural and neurodevelopmental disorders. World Psychiatry, 18, 3–19.[link]

American Psychological Association. Questions and answers about memories of childhood abuse.[link]

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Position statement on therapies focused on memories of childhood physical and sexual abuse.[link]

Brewin, C. R., & Andrews, B. (1998). Recovered memories of trauma: Phenomenology and cognitive mechanisms. Clinical Psychology Review, 18, 949–970.[link]

FINAL SCHOLARLY BOUNDARY: This paper may accompany clinical or academic review. It should not be represented as a WHO diagnosis, forensic validation, expert testimony, or proof of any alleged crime.