Trauma

“PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.”
― Susan Pease Banitt

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Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is one of the few mental health issues that comes from the outside.

Certain traumatic events can be so brutally frightening and overwhelming that they can cause changes to how we physically and psychologically respond to stress in our lives. Any unexpected violation to our physical and mental well-being can be considered a trauma. Many of the most common traumatic events that may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder include:

  • Sudden death of a loved one

  • War

  • Rape

  • Kidnapping

  • Natural disasters (e.g., tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes)

  • Terrorist attacks

  • Car or plane crashes

  • Assault

  • Sexual or physical abuse

  • Childhood neglect

Not everyone who experiences a traumatic event will suffer from PTSD. It’s normal to have nightmares, be fearful, and find difficulty “forgetting” what happened. But over time these symptoms will go away.

The

problem is when you get stuck in a state of fear and shock and your symptoms don’t improve or get worse, because your body is having problems restoring itself to equilibrium.

Getting professional help can help your brain and body get balanced again.

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“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”
― Susan Pease Banitt