Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD

[pinkcalla721]

I am going to add more to this as time goes on that may seem helpful. I get it all from the internet. I have searched high and low for all information to help me understand this.

I hope my sharing it with others can help someone else.

What they are suffering

The people you will be working with have experienced events that have permanently changed their lives. But they can heal. People who have been raped, who have seen their loved ones killed -- their lives will never be the same again. Yet no matter how great the horror people have experienced, they may recover emotional functioning, so that they are not feeling pain, terror, shame, fear, or horror all the time. Rape and murder may have robbed them of a sense of integrity and wholeness, but in time and with your help, they may be able to resume life with their sense of self restored.

People who have experienced rape or torture or who have witnessed murders of loved ones usually suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a psychological disorder that occurs when people have experienced life-threatening, shocking events. It has symptoms that are often the same for different people, regardless of the specific events they suffered.

With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), many normal processes are more intense, while many are deadened. People whose normal lives have been drastically changed by the sudden intrusion of horrifying and destructive events are experiencing more than they can integrate, and their sense of security and safety is shattered. In PTSD, some of people's responses are greatly heightened. The blow of a severe event has told them that the world is not the safe place they imagined. So they become ready for danger at all times: they have hyper-vigilance -- greater readiness to flee or fight. They live in emergency mode, and they have learned not to trust. At the same time as having heightened responses, they also shut down a great deal, so that many of their normal responses to life and to other people are not accessible to them. As a result, these are some of the symptoms you might see:

• Intense emotion and reactivity. People exposed to traumatic events feel intense pain, terror, shame, horror, grief, rage, and shock. They are activated and alert most of the time, ready to react. People may be jumpy, looking constantly for danger, and easily startled. They may have difficulty sleeping or even relaxing.
• Numbness. When hell suddenly breaks into a life, people become overwhelmed. They may experience shock and protect themselves through denial, disbelief, and dissociation (spacing out or splitting away from the terrible events as if they didn't happen to them). They feel numb, feel cut off from other people and from their own feelings, and as if they are no longer really alive.
• Flashbacks. People who have had terrible things happen to them will often re-experience the events over and over again, against their will. They will experience their minds invaded by thoughts of the events and will feel tortured by them.
• Nightmares. Like flashbacks, but these occur in sleep. As a result some people can be afraid to go to sleep and may develop sleep deprivation.
• Triggering. Often people will respond to events that remind them of the trauma with all the feelings that belonged to the trauma itself. Combat soldiers, for example, will respond to loud noises as if it meant incoming mortar; rape victims may respond to the smell of a man as if he were her rapist.