Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress

Most of us will have something scary or distressing happen to us at some point in our lives.

It’s normal to feel a bit more on edge for a while after something frightening happens. For example, if you are in a car accident you might find that you don’t want to get in a car again for the first few days. Then, when you do get back in a car you might find that your heart is beating more quickly, and you ask other people to reassure you that it’s safe. Pretty soon, you will find that you are singing along to the radio in the car again and not even thinking about the accident. This is a normal, healthy reaction to a distressing event.

Post-traumatic stress

Sometimes the thing that happens to you is so frightening and upsetting that, even after a month, you find that you can’t bounce back to feeling how you did before it happened. This is what we call post-traumatic stress.

Not everyone who goes through a distressing experience will go on to have post-traumatic stress, it depends on a lot of things. For example, it’s more likely that someone will have post-traumatic stress if the trauma was caused by another person. Symptoms of post-traumatic stress don’t always start straight away.

If you have post-traumatic stress, you might find that distressing memories of what happened to you pop into your mind when you are doing other things. These memories can be images like a short video clip, smells, sounds, sensations in your body, or bad dreams. Other common symptoms of post-traumatic stress are:

• being tense and ‘on edge’
• staying away from things and places that remind you of the trauma
• trying not to think about the trauma, or to let yourself have feelings about it
• difficulty sleeping
• being irritable
• feeling like you aren’t safe or can’t trust other people.

If the trauma was something that happened to you a number of times, or over a long period of time, it can lead to complex post-traumatic stress disorder, sometimes called c-PTSD.

If you are struggling to feel okay again after something distressing has happened to you, or you think you might have post-traumatic stress, you should visit your doctor. You could ask a friend or family member to go with you. You can also find support in the Get Help section below.