Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

A trauma is when you experience an overwhelming and highly stressful event that makes it difficult to cope, diminishes your sense of safety and security, causes feelings of helplessness or horror and can even impact your ability to experience a full range of emotions. Traumatic events are often life threatening where there is death, threat of death, serious injury or threat to personal integrity, but can be any situation that leaves you feeling overwhelmingly frightened and helpless. Trauma can occur from an isolated, one time event, multiple events or ongoing events. It can occur from you experiencing the event yourself, witnessing the event happened to someone else or hearing about the event happen to someone you care about. Some examples of traumatic events are domestic violence, combat, abuse (sexual, physical or neglect), living in a crime ridden neighborhood, car accident, battling a life threatening illness, getting bullied, sudden death of someone significant, a humiliating or cruel experience, terrorist attack, break up of a significant relationship, separation from a parent in childhood etc.. Most people experience post traumatic stress symptoms after a traumatic event. In time, they may recover naturally, but when they don’t recover it means something is getting in the way of natural recovery and then they are diagnosed with Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).