Close your eyes and picture someone living with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). What did you imagine? Was it a veteran at a Fourth of July celebration or a firefighter who can’t hear a siren without reliving a traumatic call? While those experiences are real and deserve validation and support, they represent on a small view into the greater illustrations of a condition that affects people from every walk of life.
PTSD may look a whole lot more familiar than we realize. It can resemble the elementary school teacher who survived childhood abuse, the nurse who escaped a controlling religious community, the dentist who relearned how to walk after a devastating car accident, or the waitress who quietly rebuilt her life after leaving an abusive marriage with nothing but her safety. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (www.nimh.nih.gov), PTSD can develop after experiencing or witnessing a traumatic event and affects people of every age, profession, and background. The National Center for PTSD (www.ptsd.va.gov) estimates that approximately 6 out of every 100 adults in the United States will experience PTSD at some point in their lives, and many more may never receive a diagnosis. Researchers also recognize Complex PTSD (C-PTSD), a condition often associated with repeated or prolonged trauma such as childhood abuse, domestic violence, or living in an environment where escape was difficult.
What we don’t realize is that PTSD isn’t always loud or a grand display. Sometimes it’s a full-length movie playing in someone’s nervous system while they’re still teaching a classroom, taking your blood pressure, or finishing your dental filling. Sometimes it’s the person who quietly leaves a meeting, suddenly stops talking at a family gathering, or seems to disappear into themselves while everyone else assumes they’re simply tired. PTSD and how it may live out and leak out into one’s life doesn’t always look the same. Sometimes it may be as big as someone needing to frantically leave a holiday event or as small as someone asking you to repeat a question because they “dazed off,” for a moment.
As we learn more, we also need to change more. This includes how we talk about certain things like PTSD. We often hear the word “trigger” used casually, but trauma specialists understand these experiences as nervous system responses. They are often less like flipping a light switch and more like watching a weather system roll in. Sometimes there is an obvious cause, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes the body remembers before the mind does. The word “trigger” often comes with more of its own stigma and may be used to condescend or invalidate. Instead of saying, “I don’t want to trigger them,” what if we simply asked, “How are you doing?” Instead of assuming someone is overreacting, or “triggered,” what if we recognized that we may be witnessing a nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive?
The encouraging news is that healing is possible. There is hope for the weary nervous system. Research continues to show that the nervous system is adaptable throughout our lives. According to the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (www.nccih.nih.gov), mind-body practices such as yoga, meditation, breathwork, and mindful movement can help regulate stress responses and improve overall well-being. A term you may be hearing more of is somatic movement. This is the practice of noticing how movement feels rather than how it looks. Somatic movement has become a valuable tool for people to recover from trauma. Gentle walking, stretching, rocking, shaking out tension, or simply feeling both feet firmly on the floor can help reconnect the brain and body in ways that promote a sense of safety. Movement becomes somatic when attention shifts from accomplishing the movement to experiencing it. You allow the body’s sensations, impulses, breath, and internal responses to guide the practice rather than an external goal or ideal form.
Healing doesn’t stop there. Talk therapy remains one of the most effective treatments for PTSD. According to the American Psychological Association (www.apa.org), expressive writing and journaling can help process difficult emotions, while laughter, social connection, music, humming, and time spent in supportive relationships all contribute to a healthier, more regulated nervous system. Ideally, one might even layer these! Pairing talk therapy, somatic movement, journaling and taking time for music and laughter each day isn’t just healing for PTSD, it can help people manage different things from grief and anxiety to basic lifestyle management. You do not have to have PTSD diagnosis to benefit from these tools.
You will meet people every day whose stories you will never know; they are raising children, caring for patients, teaching students, serving coffee, coaching teams, volunteering in our communities, and smiling through conversations while carrying experiences invisible to everyone around them. Life doesn’t allow us to choose everything that happens to us. Yet,
when we are ready, we can begin to choose how we move through what happened, creating space for healing in the present and a future that belongs to us rather than our past. June 27th is National PTSD Awareness Day. Let’s take what we’ve learned and do better. Listen more, judge less and remember what PTSD actually looks like.