PTSD: Reclaiming Control

By: Robert ‘Bob’ Cuyler, PhD Psychologist and Trauma Expert

The impact of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder can be felt in every area of life, clawing away at your independence over time. The more knowledge you have on PTSD, the better equipped you will be to overcome it.

These associations cause ‘triggers’. Triggers are new sensations that are related to the original trauma and unleash a surge of panic, dread, and anxiety. As if this isn’t enough, those memories can emerge in the form of nightmares. In these nightmares, the images and feelings can appear almost as ‘instant replays’ of the original event, or sometimes manifest in subtle, but frightening ways.

There are four major ‘clusters’ of PTSD symptoms to be aware of: intrusive thoughts and memories, avoidance, changes in mood and thought patterns, and hyperarousal/hypervigilance. Over the next four months, we will dive into each cluster in more detail, beginning with intrusive thoughts and memories.

Reminders or re-experiencing of traumatic events is central to PTSD, and where we will begin. This pattern of re-experiencing the trauma is a ‘driver’ of many of the other life-affecting symptoms.

It is common that a person with PTSD will speak on trauma being ‘seared into my memory’. The memory is intense and painful, leaving a wound that does not heal, continuing to open up as though the event is happening again in real time. Contrary to what people say, no, time will not make the memory go away. Time has frozen, and the memory returns as vividly as the first time it was experienced.

This process of re-experiencing the events takes certain forms. The brain forms associations, and sensations through our five senses; visual, tactile, auditory, or smell that becomes ingrained with the original memory.

We see this subtlety in dreams with my client who experienced years of harsh verbal abuse from her step-parent. She often woke up from a deep sleep when this step-parent yelled at her during the night. Years later, she was having nightmares almost daily, and her step-parent was vividly ‘realistic’ in each. In sleep, our muscles are deactivated so we can not act out our dreams in real life, even though our deeply rooted reactions remain the same to danger: fight, flight, or freeze. Freezing in the form of sleep paralysis was her reaction during her nightmares, and when awake she would freeze and hold her breath when she heard the trigger of loud voices. To unfreeze her nervous system we practiced normalizing her breathing to counter her reflexive breath-holding.

A veteran who was robbed at gunpoint in a grocery parking lot late at night experiences intrusive memories in another way. His experience brought back memories of stressful active duty events. He could no longer shop by himself as reminders of the event kept him from shopping even in the daytime. The trauma caused him to keep expecting a gunman to jump from between parked cars, his trigger, and he became progressively more fearful of all parking lots. He would park on the far fringe of lots so he was not ‘hemmed in’ or trapped. Avoidance, irritability, and hyper-alertness came to dominate his life. In the columns to come, we’ll follow his experience with these symptoms.

Cuyler is chief clinical officer of Freespira, an FDAcleared non-medication treatment that helps people with panic and PTSD manage their symptoms by learning how to regulate their breathing. - www.freespira.com

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder does not always allow the affected to seek help. Lend a hand and provide them with methods of help, listen and be a friend.

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