Jasmin Lee Cori, M.S. - Author, Mind, Body & Spirit

Trauma affects us in many ways, leading to numerous mental health and physical health conditions, but the one you hear most about is PTSD. Here is a brief introduction.

Does everyone with trauma get PTSD? If not, why not?

It’s estimated that we will all experience events that can lead to PTSD, and yet a slim minority will actually develop PTSD. Whether or not you develop PTSD is a matter of a number of factors, most of them outside your control. These include:

• How old you were when the traumatic event occurred
• Amount of previous stress
• Psychological hardiness before the traumatic event
• How your nervous system is wired, what kind of innate sensitivity you have
• The nature of the traumatic stressor (some events more often lead to PTSD than others, generally when we are personally targeted and by someone we know and depend upon)
• Whether or not you had any control in the traumatic event(s) and could do anything to help yourself or others.
• The amount and quality of social support available after the trauma
• Appropriate intervention after the traumatic event or when symptoms appear

There can be a lag of years between traumatic events and actually developing the complex of symptoms known as PTSD. You might, for example, have had severe trauma in childhood, had a somewhat normal adolescence and then become overwhelmed by trauma symptoms in your thirties or forties. This may be the result of a stressor that parallels the original trauma or a pileup of stressors that surpasses your resources for coping.

What are the symptoms of PTSD?
 
PTSD is characterized by symptoms that cause significant disruption to normal life. Here are the three major categories of symptoms:

Re-experiencing the trauma

If you have PTSD, one of the ways you suffer is that you keep re-experiencing the trauma in some way, such as distressing memories, dreams, or flashbacks. Over-reacting to things that remind you of the trauma is also considered re-experiencing, even though you may not be aware of what you are reacting to.

Avoiding reminders of your trauma

Not being able to get beyond the trauma is so distressing that you naturally want to avoid anything that may remind you of it. Most of this is unconscious, like not understanding that you don’t like to do certain activities or be around certain types of people. You can also avoid by numbing out, including through addictions.

Increased Arousal Level

Unresolved trauma keeps your nervous system in a state of heightened arousal that can result in a number of symptoms like startling easily, hypervigilance, feeling irritable and reactive, having difficulty sleeping at night or concentrating during your daytime hours, as well as physical symptoms, such as your heart speeding up or breathing rapidly.

A more recently recognized type of PTSD is called Complex PTSD or complex trauma. It is not yet in the official diagnostic manual in the U.S., but is in an international one. Complex PTSD involves these same symptoms, plus a few others, and is connected to experiencing repeated trauma in childhood, often at the hands of attachment figures (parents and caregivers). Not feeling safe is sometimes tagged as a major characteristic of complex trauma, but you see it in the hypervigilance of all PTSD.

Understand that PTSD is a short-hand name for a complex of symptoms and that you can have some of these but not others and only if you meet a threshold of symptoms do you meet the criteria for having PTSD.

Can you recover from PTSD?

Fortunately, most people recover from PTSD, but it depends on both the load of trauma and what resources you had or can garner now. It’s worth trying to treat it. The field of trauma therapy has grown immensely in the last 30 years, and the odds are with you. It’s generally a longer-term effort but any relief makes life easier. You don’t need to live forever trapped in the feelings of trauma, as described in the next blog.