Understanding and Managing Your PTSD Symptoms

Understanding and Managing Your PTSD Symptoms

  • You are not sick, ill or pathological. You are over-adapted and hyper-vigilant.
  • All PTSD responses are adaptive and make good sense when viewed in the context of the survivor’s life.
  • Trauma is an injury, not an illness. After trauma, the brain never again follows the same neural firing patterns that it did prior to the trauma. Trauma damages the brain of the survivor and can lead to ongoing dysregulation.
  • Trauma can happen when you are too scared, too quickly and for too long.
  • Trauma symptoms are a normal response for a normal person to an abnormal life event.
  • Ask yourself, “What would any normal, rational person think about the world, themselves and others if they had these events happen in their life?”
  • Your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is your symptom generator. (high blood pressure, rapid heartbeat, sweating, agitation, anger, compulsive behavior, loss of rational thought, etc.)
  • Past trauma = past learning = perceived threat = sympathetic (SNS) dominance.
  • Old learning kicks in, creating a perceived threat (when there is none), which then contaminates the safety of the present moment, thereby re-engaging the SNS and leaving us symptomatic.
  • Perceived threats activate the SNS.
  • Instinctual adaptation keeps you locked in this cycle of sympathetic dominance.
  • After time, with continuous, ongoing stress, sympathetic dominance becomes the “default setting” in our autonomic/involuntary nervous system, leaving us caught in an endless loop of trigger and sympathetic reaction, which can be referred to as an anxiety state.
  • It is not our software (what we think) that is the issue, but rather the hardware (autonomic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system) that is creating our stress symptoms. Trauma/stress symptoms are hardware-based and not software-based.
  • PTSD symptoms are driven by the sympathetic nervous system.
  • Self-regulation interrupts sympathetic dominance.
  • Self-regulation will move you from sympathetic dominance to parasympathetic dominance.
  • Parasympathetic dominance will allow your body to rest and relax, feel moments of peace and serenity as the PNS creates and secretes your body’s own natural opiates, endorphins, throughout your nervous system.
  • The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems cannot run concurrently. It’s either one or the other.
  • You cannot have traumatic stress symptoms while actively disengaging the sympathetic nervous system.
  • The practices of reflexology, trauma sensitive yoga, Chi Kung, acupuncture, acupressure, diaphragmatic breathing, thought field therapy trauma relief, the Relaxation Response or other physiologic techniques are the means to achieving parasympathetic dominance.
  • The single most important intervention is to move into parasympathetic dominance.
  • Your PTSD symptoms no longer have to interfere with your life. You have within you the means to take control back and to live with intention.