What is PTSD?

PTSD is a whole gamut of symptoms, which come under the umbrella of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The symptoms of PTSD are specific to each person.One person might be deemed to have PTSD because of certain symptoms, whereas somebody else may have completely different symptoms, and another person may have a whole other set of symptoms entirely. The symptoms depend on what happened to the person to create the autonomic response in the body.
The most important thing to know about PTSD is that symptoms are generally unexplained. If you lose somebody that you love, and you feel enormous grief, then that wouldn't be termed PTSD. You are aware of where that feeling is coming from, and it's generally a rational response.
However, when people have PTSD, they have emotions, feelings, or thoughts, which seem to come out of nowhere, with absolutely no reason, which makes it even more disabling because there's no context by which to understand it. It’s also very difficult for the people around that sufferer to understand it, because they are suddenly angry, or crying, or grief-stricken, or bedridden, but the day before they were fine.
These symptoms do not make sense to the sufferer, or to the people who live with them. But they are a clue, a flag, trying to make the person realise that something happened in the past, something that has been forgotten or the person did not realise what kind of impact it had. Those feelings, those sensations, those thoughts, are rushing up inside a PTSD sufferer, almost hijacking them.
Sometimes the symptoms are not severe. It might be irritation rather than anger. It might be sadness rather than depression. It might be nervousness rather than anxiety. Equally, it might be rage, black cloud depression, or a panic attack where the heart is pumping so fast the person fears they are having a heart attack.
This brings us to the question, is PTSD physical or psychological. It is both. Sometimes it is both together, sometimes separately, but it is possible for a chronic pain, or disability, to be PTSD.
I give you an example from World War II, where a soldier was in a trench, advancing towards the German lines, and his friend was the scout ahead. The friend was kidnapped by the Nazis. The soldier was in the ditch with three or four other soldiers. He took a grenade, intending to throw it towards the Germans, but was afraid he might kill his friend. He was also afraid he would reveal their position, which might mean that everybody would die rather than just his friend. So, he didn't throw the grenade and his friend was killed.
Over the next few months, his hand closed into a painfully tight closed fist. It was impossible to open his hand, and he had absolutely no idea why. He visited a trail of doctors and nobody understood. Eventually he tried clinical hypnotherapy, and in a deeply relaxed state, he was taken straight back to that ditch and shown that he felt enormous guilt about letting his friend be killed to save himself, and others.
His body showed him he had never processed the guilt, and so it had closed his hand up painfully tight, until he paid attention, until he understood. By going back to that ditch, in that deeply-relaxed state, he was able to understand that it was Hobson's choice. There was nothing he could do. He may well have thrown the grenade and killed his own friend, but equally, that may have meant that the people who were with him would also die. The closed fist was PTSD guilt.
Just being able to rationalise it, being able to understand that he had had to make a split-second decision, was enough for him to release the guilt of the dilemma. All paralysis in his hand disappeared. This is a case history from a book called ‘Hypnotherapy of War Neuroses’ by Jack Watkins.
I, myself, have had similar cases. In one, a lady who was in a cult as a child, developed a tremor in her hand. She was a dental assistant so she could no longer work. Her body was disabling her, saying there's something here that you need to process first. Sometimes a PTSD sufferer may have severe pain in the ears, or constant migraines. Sometimes it might be something that person endured as a child, in a particular part of the body, and the same symptom is being recreated as a flag, a clue.
Through the use of clinical hypnotherapy, where one can be taken back to whichever moment caused that symptom, or symptoms, whether it's psychological or physical, one can be shown what it means, and why one has felt a certain way for so long.
Just by bringing the reason, the feeling, the sensation, the pain, into the conscious state, it is moving from the subconscious to the conscious, and everything in the conscious can be rationalised and understood. As soon as it is understood, it no longer plays this game of charades with the PTSD sufferer.
Hypnotherapy is really ‘psychological archaeology’. PTSD sufferers are searching for the root cause of their symptoms.