What Does It Mean to be Traumatized?

Despite the fact that Trauma is a word in very common usage today,

it is also a word that is sometimes misrepresented, even misunderstood in everyday conversation. A trauma, more than an experience, is a wound. It’s an involuntary reaction that some people have to extraordinary, and dangerous life-events.

This is why only some of the people who face such experiences as these will develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD): because PTSD is a reaction to an experience more than it is the experience itself. You might say, Well, what is the reaction?

PTSD is a combination of symptoms that includes, 1. the intrusive (and unwanted) recollection of one or more past experience; that 2. causes ongoing, clinically significant distress; and that 3. is associated with patterns of avoidance of both the memory in question and the significant distress that it causes.

And this set of symptoms becomes a self-sustaining system. Avoidance-patterns, in the context of PTSD, have been empirically demonstrated to perpetuate both the intrusive recollection of past experiences and the significant distress associated with them. Avoidance, in other words, is the very habit or pattern that keeps PTSD going.

The question is this: if a trauma-reaction is involuntary, then can the reaction be changed? Yes. As deeply upsetting as many traumatic experiences truly are, PTSD is a very treatable condition.

At Kentuckiana Treatment Center for Anxiety & OCD, we use Prolonged Exposure, a proven, or evidence-based treatment for PTSD.