When you experience a traumatic event or events, the stress chemicals activated in your nervous system alter the way that your brain is able to encode information about your experience. This makes sense as a survival mechanism, your body and brain should be prioritizing your safety, not your remembering.
While your brain and your body do everything on autopilot to keep you safe during the event, you can expect bit of a bumpy ride in the days or weeks afterward when you may relive moments of the event over and over, experience the feelings of the event again and again and feel anxious about yourself in the current time and this may also go on to impact your mood. This discomfort is normal.
Your brain is amazing, and it can usually reprocess the encoded information in the days and weeks after the event, in a way that you soon feel able to move on.
However, we see that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Complex PTSD develop when your brain’s natural ability to reprocess the experience becomes stuck, and the information remains unprocessed in the months and sometimes years after the experience. Instead of you feeling better with time, even just ordinary daily stress can reactivate the stored sensations and overwhelming feels of anxiety, despair and powerlessness in the unprocessed encoded memories again and again. Your ability to cope with this activation is likely to decline in time.
You may find yourself frustrated and confused, thinking, why am I no longer coping? I have coped with so much so well in the past.
This is because PTSD and Complex PTSD often have delayed onset, and can surface even decades after the traumatic event.
PTSD and Complex PTSD are very disabling psychological conditions. However, psychological trauma treatment for these conditions exist that is highly effective and brief, and does not involve learning strategies to manage the symptoms or extensive talking about your experience.