What Is PTSD?
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
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What is Trauma?
A deeply distressing or disturbing experience. The bad things that happen in our life. Trauma is often the result of an overwhelming amount of stress that exceeds one's ability to cope with or integrate the emotions involved with that experience. A traumatic event involves one experience, or repeating events with the sense of being overwhelmed that can be delayed by weeks, years, or even decades as the person struggles to cope with the immediate circumstances, eventually leading to serious, long-term negative consequences. Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the psyche that occurs as a result of a severely distressing event.
There are as many levels of trauma as there are traumas. The list goes on endlessly regardless of what you may think trivial.
Pain and Suffering is still Pain and Suffering
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What does a traumatic experiences do to the brain?
Stressful or traumatic experiences can cause the body produces hormones that disrupt the heart’s pumping ability causing chest pains and symptoms similar to a heart attack. Losing someone we love is devastating. It is linked to higher rates of depression; the effects can last for months or even years.
Seeing or experiencing a trauma activates an area of the brain linked with cocaine addiction and physical pain. The bad experience can actually feel like physical pain or drug withdrawals. Grieving the loss of a loved one can much more likely lead to suffering a heart attack within the next 30 days than those who had not suffered a loss.
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The act of CBT is to help balance or keep in check the dramatic change in our body chemistry.
After a person experiences a trauma, happy chemicals like Dopamine and oxytocin levels can fall quickly;
as the levels of the stress hormone called “cortisol” increases rapidly! High levels of cortisol can cause anxiety, nausea, weight gain, headaches, and other symptoms. The physical pain doesn’t stop there.
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We all suffer; What measures its severity is how you cope with it.
Thoughts are fleeting and of the moment. What we do is take our thoughts and put them into something solid or stationary that we can build up or teardown. Believe it or not the most effective treatment for PTSD is talking about it!
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National Center for PTSD - U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs