What is trauma?

Research shows that around 50% of people will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Trauma can affect anyone, regardless of age, background, or circumstances.

A traumatic event is one that overwhelms your ability to cope. It might evoke feelings of fear, helplessness, or horror, especially in response to danger or threat—either to yourself or someone else.

Examples include:

• Assault or abuse (including domestic violence and childhood trauma)
• Serious accidents or injury
• Natural disasters
• War or terrorism
• Traumatic birth
• Sudden or violent loss

You might be affected by trauma if you:

• Experienced the event directly
• Witnessed it happening to someone else
• Found out someone close to you was traumatised
• Regularly encountered distressing details (such as through your work)

A normal response to an abnormal event

In the aftermath of trauma, it’s completely normal to experience distress. You may feel on edge, have difficulty sleeping, or find that you’re constantly thinking about what happened. These are part of your body’s fight-or-flight response, designed to protect you in the face of danger.

People often describe feeling emotionally numb, hyper-alert, disconnected from others, or struggling with a sense of safety. These reactions usually settle over time. But if they continue for longer than a few months and interfere with daily life, it may be a sign of PTSD or C-PTSD.

Trauma reactions vs PTSD and C-PTSD

While many people recover from trauma on their own, around 20% go on to develop PTSD. In the UK, that’s approximately 6.6 million people—yet many still go undiagnosed or unsupported.

PTSD symptoms typically fall into four categories:

• Re-experiencing the trauma through flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive memories
• Avoidance of reminders of the event
• Negative changes in mood and thinking, including shame, guilt, or hopelessness
• Hyperarousal, such as feeling constantly on edge, anxious, or easily startled

Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) is a form of PTSD caused by prolonged or repeated trauma—such as ongoing abuse or neglect. It shares the same core symptoms but may also include:

• Persistent difficulties in relationships
• Negative self-image
• Emotional dysregulation

Everyone’s experience of PTSD and C-PTSD is unique. Symptoms can fluctuate, appear years after the trauma, or worsen over time if left untreated.

“When you have PTSD, the world feels unsafe. You may have upsetting memories, feel on edge, or have trouble sleeping. You may also try to avoid things that remind you of your trauma — even things you used to enjoy.”

PTSD is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation

The human body is a complex system with intricate feedback loops between its parts and the brain. Any disruption to these loops, as seen in traumatic experiences, can impact the entire system.

In simple terms, PTSD and C-PTSD are a memory processing error, stemming from the brain’s suspension of normal function during trauma.

When faced with intense fear or trauma, the body and mind switch on ‘survival mode’ actions like fight, flight, freeze, fawn and flop, and temporarily suspend regular operations to cope and survive.  Until the danger passes, many systems in the body are put on hold or adapted: your digestive system pauses, blood will flow away from your extremities and into your muscles ready to ‘flee’ or ‘fight’, your heart rate will increase, pupils dilate, reproductive systems pause, and the ‘unimportant’ task of memory creation is put on hold. This means that the mind does not produce a memory for this traumatic event in the ‘normal’ way.

Under normal/non-traumatic circumstances, when information comes into our memory system (from sensory input such as what we can see, hear, taste, and smell), it needs to be changed into a form that the system can cope with, so that it can be stored. If the encoding doesn’t take place due to a traumatic situation – the memory can’t be processed. Instead, it is stored randomly, in pieces, in a variety of places within the brain.

Eventually, when the mind presents the ‘memory’ of the trauma for ‘filing’, or it is triggered by a smell, a place, or a person etc, it does not recognise it as a memory. As it understands, ‘the brain is in the middle of the dangerous event – it is not ‘outside’ looking in at this event, and therefore the entire system is not easily subject to rational control.’ These flashbacks are incredibly distressing. Reliving the trauma as if it were happening RIGHT NOW. The elements such as the facts of what happened, the emotions associated with the trauma and the sensations touch, taste, sound, vision, movement, and smell can be presented by the mind as real time information. They may also present as nightmares, and intrusive unwanted memories.

These re-experiences and flashbacks are a result of the mind trying to file away the distressing memory, and understandably can be very unpleasant and frightening because they repeatedly expose the sufferer to the original trauma. This danger response also sets off other stress reactions in the body such as blood pressure and heart rate increasing, blood sugar is raised and digestion is affected. The body enters a state of hypervigilance so it is aware of other dangers around it, with increased startle responses.

Your body and mind are doing things they SHOULD do when presented with a threat. But your body is designed for this to be an immediate fix, for short term fix which allows the body to settle once the threat has been resolved. But with PTSD and C-PTSD, it is almost perpetual. A prolonged, extreme or repetitive trauma can physically injure the brain. ‘The best analogy is that the amygdala stays in the alert state so long that it gets ‘stuck’ there. It keeps the body from operating a healthy combination of… systems’.

Your brain (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis) is activated by the stressful stimuli, and the disruption that occurs with PTSD and C-PTSD can be conceptualised as a kind of “false alarm”. This ‘dysfunction’ of the HPA system is thought to produce hippocampal damage manifested as impaired memory. Simply put, PTSD and C-PTSD physiologically change your brain. The amygdala is responsible for fear responses and fear conditioning. Exposure to trauma can activate the amygdala and related structures inappropriately resulting in hypervigilance and inappropriate fear responses. Additionally, the part of your brain which regulates inappropriate fear responses (the medial prefrontal cortex) is impaired in people with PTSD and C-PTSD. You can find out more about the regions of the brain involved in memory processing that have been implicated (hippocampus, amygdala, and frontal cortex) here.

As the mind continues to try to repeatedly process the memory, and the brain keeps re-triggering itself into ‘danger’ mode, the individual also finds that their levels of awareness might change. People can become find it difficult to control their emotions and suffer intense symptoms of anxiety. This can present itself as both physical; shortness of breath, tight muscles, profuse sweating and a racing heart, as well as emotional: feeling on edge, hypervigilance (looking out for signs of danger all the time), avoidance of reminders of the trauma or feeling panicky.

The brain is programmed to process memories, and so the more the individual avoids things like thinking about the trauma, the less likely is it that any memory processing will actually occur, and the more likely it is that further attempts at filing a memory will occur automatically. This ultimately leads to further nightmares, flashbacks and intrusive memories which lead on to further hyper-arousal and emotional numbing, and this in turn leads on to more avoidance and so on. This is how the symptoms clusters perpetuate themselves in a vicious cycle which can go on for years – and when it goes untreated, PTSD and C-PTSD can last for decades.

‘The injury is real. The injury is physical. It is not mere confusions or misdirected thinking, or sign of a weak character. It most certainly is not a case of ‘Just get over it’.

Recovery is possible

The most important thing to know? You can heal.

There are evidence-based treatments that can help reprocess traumatic memories and reduce or even eliminate symptoms. These include therapies such as:

• EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing)
• Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
• Somatic therapies, mindfulness, and grounding techniques

Therapy helps your brain complete the memory processing that was interrupted during trauma. With support, many people are able to recover from PTSD and C-PTSD, or manage symptoms in a way that allows them to reclaim their lives.