PTSD

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is most commonly associated with the witnessing of an event involving death, threatened death or serious injury, causing intense fear, helplessness or horror. Typical examples include assualts, muggings, robberies, car crashes, natural or man made disasters, war zones (previously called 'shell shock').

Symptoms include the experiencing of recurrent intrusive images or thoughts, dreams, a sense of reliving the event or intense mental or physical distress when something triggers (often unconscious) associations with the event, such as significant anniversaries, hearing a particular sound, the sensation of intense bodily heat.
Persistent avoidance of anything associated with the trauma, such as thoughts, feelings, activities, places or people, amnesia for aspects of the event, sense of detachment, loss of warm feeling and loss of interest in life. In addition there tends to be difficulty falling or staying asleep, irritability and outbursts of anger, difficulty in concentrating, hypervigilance and exaggerated startle response.
Symptoms must have occurred for at least a month and have significant adverse effects on work, social life or daily functioning to be formally diagnosed with PTSD.

When an individual is traumatised, they experience such strong emotions that it is thought to overwhelm the brain. Normal brain functioning or processing is interrupted and the memories of the trauma seem to become "frozen in time" or stuck. The memories become locked in traumatic memory as opposed to the normal narrative memory. That means that when the traumatic memory is triggered and accessed, the emotions attached to the memory can be as intense and vividly recalled as they happened yesterday as opposed to 10, 20 ,30 or more years ago. In contrast, in narrative memory, emotions become more diluted and distant with the passing of time.
Most talking therapies rendered ineffective due to the mechanical nature of the trauma as a problem. If anything talking about the problem over and over again to reinforce insight tends to unwittingly retraumatise the person and reinforce the memory neurones in the brain. For this reason only certain therapists that work on a mechanistic level are recommended. They allow the client to access their traumatic memory while inducing a state of low emotional arousal, allowing the memories to be processed, unblocked and converted into narrative memories, where the accompanying emotions can become detached.

Recommended Therapy: - EMDR, NLP, Clinical Hypnosis.

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