A post traumatic stress disorder / post traumatic stress syndrome can arise after experiencing a trauma. Traumatic experiences are divided into two types: type 1 trauma and type 2 trauma. Type 1 trauma involves experiencing a one-time traumatic event, such as a car accident or witnessing senseless violence. In type 2 trauma, a person is repeatedly exposed to traumatic experiences, such as a child who is physically abused or sexually abused at home.
Responding to danger
When you experience a traumatic event, your body goes into a stress state. Because danger threatens, your body ensures that you are alert and focused to respond adequately to the threat that has arisen. A completely normal reaction of the body to an abnormal event. However, for people with PTSD, they remain in this stress status, as it were, even when the danger has long passed. People with PTSD remain constantly alert to possible danger. Their body is constantly in survival mode, it feels like something terrible could happen at any moment. This also means they can no longer concentrate on other things, they are only focused on possible danger. Being constantly alert takes an awful lot of energy, and people with PTSD are often literally exhausted. They have chronic stress.
Can’t see a future anymore
People with PTSD often no longer have a vision of the future. They are so busy surviving in the now that they actually have no room to think about what the future should look like, about how they see themselves in a few years. There is a future, but people with PTSD no longer see that future. And this also makes sense when you consider that the body still thinks it needs to be constantly alert to danger. At such a moment, all relatively unimportant matters disappear and there is only room for survival.
Reliving the traumatic experience(s)
People with PTSD often suffer from re-experiences. For example, they suffer from nightmares, which can sometimes cause them to avoid going to sleep for fear of a re-experiencing. This in turn makes the body even more exhausted. Sometimes there are certain events, touches or behavior of people that cause a person to relive the experiences. For example, a gynecological examination can be very stressful for people who have experienced sexual abuse.
Is healing possible?
It is very difficult to get rid of PTSD, but it is possible. Especially for people with a type 2 trauma, the body has rightly been in a stress status for years. Consider, for example, a child who has regularly been physically abused at home. Perhaps his or her entire childhood. Being alert has, as it were, become second nature for such a person. Finding safety again or even for the first time will be a long, but not impossible road for these people. A type 1 trauma is often easier to process because it concerns 1 event. These people have often already developed basic safety, while some people with a type 2 trauma completely lack this safety. They know no better than to have to be constantly alert to danger, for some people there has never been safety. It is easier to recall something than to have to learn something completely.
Remember that these behaviors are a completely human response to an abnormal event.
