Posttraumatic stress the cassette that rewinds again and again

Posttraumatic stress the cassette that rewinds again and again

Posttraumatic stress appears after a dramatic event that profoundly affects. Let's look at an example that can help you understand this disorder a little better.

Every time she heard the door slam shut, she was in the pharmacy again. No longer sleeping in the safety of her bed, where the wind had scandalously closed the door that her husband had left ajar when he went to the bathroom.

No longer at his nephew's birthday party, where the children had slammed the door while they ran. No longer in his office, where the door was heavy and he gave in to his assistant's attempt to hold it. Thus, his workplace, his sister's house, and his own room, safe places, had become a risk of death, like that day in the pharmacy.

That day, when he stopped to buy pills for a simple sore throat, while he was on his back, he heard the door slam shut. Then, the cold of a cannon on the head, which predicted death if he did not deliver all his belongings at that time.

And then, the sound of the shots when the clerk triggered the alarm under the counter. The blood on the gray tile floor. And a person whose life was spilled on that same floor, staining the tiles red.

Since then, life was no longer the same for her. Every place with a door that could slam shut constituted a danger of death.

Posttraumatic stress: symptoms of a cassette that rewinds

Posttraumatic stress disorder is classified within anxiety disorders. It can occur when we go through an intense risk experience and our mental defenses are unable to process it properly.

Thus, later, even if the danger has passed, the same sense of terror will return to the slightest signal that brings it to our memory and will trigger a severe emotional reaction. As a curse, we live the same experience over and over and over again.

And we live it through dreams and recurring memories that appear without us being able to control them, with such intensity that they can include hallucinations and flashbacks. And this discomfort can also manifest itself in a physiological way and include nausea, dizziness, headaches and other symptoms whose origins are in our psyche.

Just an internal or external stimulus is enough for everything to be repeated. For example, someone who has witnessed the events of September 11 in New York may feel anxious just by listening to a plane and will avoid having any contact with one at all costs.

When the event that causes post-traumatic stress is caused by humans, it can be much more serious than one caused by a natural catastrophe. That is where human evil comes into play: we feel more vulnerable in a world where there are six billion people that can cause the same damage, than in a world where there are not even six billion earthquakes of magnitude eight.

Treatment to turn off the video player

Among the treatments to relieve the symptoms of post-traumatic stress, psychological care plays a central role. Great progress can be achieved through cognitive behavioral therapy.

Also, the support groups of people who have gone through something similar can serve as a catalyst to vent that emotional load, which causes the cassette to rewind constantly. At the moment when the trauma happens, we cannot express it, we remain mute, in shock.

Having the support of people who have lived the same allows us to verbalize the experience and thus, to assimilate it in the present, giving us an opportunity that we did not have in the past.

Drugs, if necessary, help control anxiety and sleep better. Likewise, exposing yourself little by little and under control of the external factors that recall the event can make us improve our reaction to them.

For example, listening to a plane again and seeing it take off realizing that nothing bad happens this time can help cover the negative memory for a person who was present at the events of September 11.

All this will not cause the cassette to be completely erased, but its ability to rewind and make us live again experiences from which we can certainly learn a lot, but that we do not need to relive them until we suffer dozens of times an evil that no being human deserves.