Most people have heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). People who have it often feel intense fear, panic attacks, and have sudden, explosive fits of anger. They find themselves avoiding crowds, loud noises, or situations that remind them of the traumatic experience. Many have terrifying nightmares and flashbacks. All of these are some common signs of PTSD.
Understanding the “Fight or Flight” response
It’s natural to feel fear or panic when traumatic things happen. When you believe you’re in danger, a very primitive part of your brain, the amygdala, takes over in order to get you out of danger and keep you safe. This part of your brain prepares you to either fight, freeze, flee, or faint, otherwise known as the “fight or flight” response. This happens instantly and involuntarily as a whole cascade of chemicals and hormones is released into your bloodstream when you feel afraid. This is what causes the all too familiar and uncomfortable bodily sensations like racing heart, profuse sweating, stomach tightening, nausea or vomiting, and feeling short of breath and an extreme sense of doom.
In most cases, these feelings and sensations go away within a short time after the traumatic event has passed. At that point, the amygdala realizes that you’re now safe, it stops the “fight or flight” response, and all of your bodily functions and sensations go back to where they were before the event. It’s kind of like a water faucet that gets turned on and off when necessary. Our bodies and brains are well-adapted and designed for this kind of temporary or acute stress.
What are triggers?
With PTSD, it’s as if the faucet never gets turned off all the way and you experience intensely unpleasant sensations and feelings seemingly out of nowhere. This can happen anytime you think about the traumatic event or are reminded of it by current situations or people, otherwise known as triggers. Triggers can be things that you see, hear, smell, touch, taste as well as things you remember about the event that make you feel as if the traumatic event is happening all over again. When triggered, the natural response is to try to avoid or get away from them. The trouble is, the more we avoid triggers, the more powerful and numerous they tend to become.
PTSD can happen following a traumatic experience or trauma, which is a shocking or dangerous event that either happens to you or that you witness happening to someone else. We can be traumatized even by watching or hearing about a dangerous or devastating event on the news or social media. If the traumatic event happens to you, your risk of developing PTSD is greater than if you watched it happen to someone else.
Trauma includes major events that occur in war, combat, violence, abuse, natural and man-made disasters, and terrorism. These events are often referred to as “big T” trauma. “Little t” trauma is also impactful. Examples of this kind of trauma include emotional and physical neglect, being cyberbullied, medical or dental mistakes, and being treated unfairly. Trauma affects each person differently. The same or similar event experienced by a group of people, for example, won’t have identical impact.
Unfortunately, trauma is not rare. According to the National Center for PTSD, 60% of men and 50% of women experience at least one trauma in their lifetime. They estimate that 7-8% of Americans will have PTSD at some point in their lifetime and about 8 million American adults have PTSD during a given year. About 10% of women and 4% of men will develop PTSD in their lifetime.
Researchers have wondered for decades since PTSD was first described why some people develop it and others don’t, given similar trauma histories. Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) have been widely researched over the years and continue to be associated with a variety of mental health problems in adulthood such as depression, PTSD, and dissociation. The types of ACE include things you might expect like verbal, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. ACE also includes things you might not think of. These include having a family member who is an addict, mentally ill or in jail, not feeling loved or cared about, and losing a parent to divorce or separation.
According to a 2016 study, the largest impact of trauma in childhood appears to be when it occurs during the pre-school years (ages 4-6) and right before the onset of puberty (ages 8-9). Researchers have also found that the number of traumatic events that a person experiences in childhood greatly affects their chances for developing PTSD and other serious mental health disorders in adulthood. In other words, the more traumatic events you experience, the greater your risk.
How is PTSD treated?
Therapists often use a combination approach of different treatment models and strategies to help the person with PTSD learn skills to help calm themselves, identify and change responses to triggers, and to communicate needs and wants more effectively. Learning how to identify and correct unhelpful thinking patterns, sometimes called “thinking errors”, and how they contribute to anxiety, anger, and depression is also very useful. Many therapists also use various other methods to help locate and process the trauma out of the brain and nervous system such as Thought Field Therapy (TFT) or Brainspotting.
For more information on PTSD, check out my PTSD treatment page here….