PTSD Post Traumatic Stress Disorder - Is their help?

Do you suffer from:
• Unexplained Panic Attacks or Anxiety Attacks?
• Recurrent Terrifying Nightmares?
• Outbursts of Rage or Grief that you cannot explain?
• Flashes of memory of childhood emotional, physical, or sexual abuse?
• Heart stopping Terror when nothing is occurring to cause it?

If you are, you may have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
In simple terms, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is any debilitating or highly stressful emotional disorder or condition that occurs some time after the original event that caused the condition. This event was always emotionally traumatic and may or may not have involved physical trauma to the person suffering from PTSD. PTSD is a prolonged series of intense and possibly delayed reactions to an overwhelmingly stressful event; the reactions may be so intense as to cause spontaneous outbursts of emotion or emotional shutdown and may include partial or complete memory blockage.

What kinds of events cause PTSD?
Once called shell shock or battle fatigue, PTSD was first thought to affect only war veterans, but it is now realized that PTSD can be caused by any overpowering traumatic incident. These include car, ship, or train wrecks, airplane crashes, or collapse of a building, natural disasters such as floods, tornadoes, or earthquakes, personal violence such as a mugging, rape, kidnapping, or torture, or being trapped in a cave-in, an elevator, or held captive. The triggering event may be something that threatened the person's life or the life of someone close to him or her. The original terms for PTSD were War Neurosis and Acute Stress Disorder. Other conditions closely related to PTSD that affect our bodies and psyches in similar ways are: Anxiety Disorder, Somatization Disorder, Severe Paroxysmal Hypertension, Pseudopheochromocytoma, non-epileptic attack disorder
All of these involve hidden emotional trauma, trauma that can be released with ERT.

What are some of the indicators of PTSD?
Unexplained outbursts of: anger, aggression, grief, and/or irritability are common. There may be persistent depression, despair, shame, guilt, feelings of betrayal, deep loss, and/or hopelessness.

PTSD may include persistent anxiety, irritability, inability to be close to people, fear of innocuous places or things, loss of ability to feel emotions, consistent overreaction to insignificant events, insomnia, and/or poor concentration.

There may be flashbacks or half images of the event or episodes of overwhelming anxiety, Panic Attacks and/or terrifying nightmares where the sufferer is helpless. Sometime there are unexplained physical problems, such as eating disorders or unreasonable physical pain, with or without any emotional condition. Physical symptoms such as headaches, gastrointestinal distress, immune system problems, dizziness, chest pain, or discomfort in other parts of the body are common in people with PTSD.

According to the World Health Organization, symptoms of PTSD generally surface within six months after the trauma however, this is not always true; some traumas do not become recognizable until many years later.

Is it possible to have PTSD and not remember the event?
Sometimes the originating event was so terrifying or shocking that the conscious portion of the brain completely blanked out any memory of it. Sometimes the memory will begin to surface during therapy focused on one's past. Often the cause may be vaguely remembered but the details in and surrounding the event are not. Sometimes the connection between PTSD and the original causal event is not evident, or the symptoms may not surface until years after the event.

If I remember the event, will my symptoms go away?
Not necessarily, the brain has little control over the emotions or over physical pain that has an emotional basis, or where physical pain was part of the emotionally charged event. Residual Chronic Pain, pain without current medical cause is common.