One of my first experiences of PTSD came as a psychologist working with African and Kurdish refugees.Many had fled oppressive regimes and been referred to our service by their GP suffering severe anxiety, depression and stress. We discovered the root of the problem often lay in terrible personal experiences including rape, torture and witnessing the murder of loved ones.
These mental scars have a long and insidious reach in the shape of PTSD whose victims can repeatedly relive a traumatic event years after the original incident took place.I remember my shock the first time I worked with a woman who, as she described what had happened to her, lost all sense of where she was. She verbally and physically tried to fend off an imaginary attacker as well as crying and shaking with fear as part of her episodic ‘flashbacks.’
The problem can be complicated by people having great feelings of shame and guilt about what happened as if they were somehow to blame. PTSD’s victims can also include perpetrators of violence who, on reflection, feel enormous regret for their actions.Soldiers are the most high profile casualties of PTSD but it is even more prevalent among the civilian population.It can affect anyone involved in a near death experience and includes ‘single incident’ traumas, such as a car crash, earthquake or tsunami.The recent sinking of an Italian passenger ship that made headline news is another example as were the terrorist bombings on London’s transport network.
It’s important to recognise that PTSD symptoms are a perfectly normal part of the healing process when they occur immediately after a trauma. Our mind is often too pre-occupied with survival to process what happened at the time so revisits the experience helping us make sense and gain perspective on what happened. In the normal process of producing memories the mind knits the various strands of an experience together based on our senses, such as sight, sound, touch and taste as well as other aspects of what we were experiencing at that time.
It also puts a ‘date stamp’ on the memory so we know when and where something has happened. When a trauma is occurring the mind is using all of its energy to keep us alive so memories often don’t get properly formed.In the hours, days and weeks following the trauma bits of the semi-formed memory will ‘pop’ into consciousness. This can be upsetting but gives the mind the opportunity to link the various fragments together to form a normal memory.In cases of PTSD, the healing process effectively gets stuck and, like a scratched CD, the mind repeatedly replays the trauma.
This produces a vicious circle in which the distress generated by the memories continues to stop the brain’s ability to process the memories to a level that they cause less discomfort. As a result, patients find themselves vividly reliving the experience over and over with the same intense feeling of fear they experienced during the original incident. These ‘flashbacks’ can be triggered by something that the victim associates with the original trauma, such as a sound, colour or smell.
Sensory triggers can create powerful positive and negative anchors in our minds. You could be having a bad day at work when an old friend rings and your mood switches in an instant because the sound of their voice triggers a past association of feeling good. Likewise, hearing a favourite song on the radio often makes you feel better because you associate it with a previous experience of wellbeing.
This is also true of traumatic experiences, particularly when the ‘date stamp’ has not been associated with the memory so rather than being reminded of the events it can feel exactly as if they are happening again.A refugee suffering PTSD may link the sound of footsteps echoing down a corridor with those of events years before when their protagonist came to torture them. The smell of burning rubber and smoke may bring back the experience of watching the family home burnt to the ground by soldiers or a family member killed in front of you.
PTSD creates a vicious circle in which the distress caused by the partially formed memories stops the brain from processing them to a level where they are less intrusive. This round-robin can lead to a number of associated conditions including anxiety, depression and stress as well as ‘avoidance’ where someone will increasingly isolate themselves to avoid triggering a flashback.
Flashbacks or vividly ‘re-living’ aspects of past events are one upsetting response to trauma. Another is ‘disassociation’ where the victim’s mind psychologically removes them from an experience. This can be emotionally protective at the time but if this dissociation happens when memories of the trauma are triggered it can be hugely upsetting and disruptive to normal day-to-day life. People experiencing this can often ‘lose’ pieces of time from their day and have no recollection of what happened to them unless someone tells them.
In our clinical work we tend to see this type of response in people who have gone through repeated trauma as a child, such as prolonged periods of sexual or physical abuse.You can imagine that to ‘remove’ themselves mentally may be the only way that a child is able to escape what is being done to them. It serves to protect the child when nothing else can but also leads to problems later in life.
Medication can help reduce stress in some patients but the main treatment for PTSD is a ‘talking therapy’ in which the patient works with the therapist to help their mind find a way process the bits of trauma memory in a more complete way.A number of question marks remain. Why are some of us more resilient to the effects of PTSD than others? And what role do the corrosive effects of guilt, grief and shame have on recovery?
It is an often distressing area to work in as a therapist but also incredibly rewarding in helping patients first understand what is happening to them and then interrupt the cycle of PTSD symptoms.It is, for some, the start of the long journey back to more ‘normal’ day-to-day life helping them regain control over aspects of their lives they thought they may have had lost forever.
By Doctor Ed Freeman, for the Independent
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