Is PTSD Ruining Your Life? 5 Signs to Watch For

As one of the most overlooked emotional disorders, PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, can happen to anyone who experiences a trauma that’s overwhelming in effect. For someone affected by PTSD, the traumatic event leaves him or her with residual feelings of helplessness that manifest in different ways.

When left untreated, PTSD can disrupt a person’s daily life just like any other emotion-based disorder. The question “is PTSD ruining your life” tends to come up when a person can no longer overlook the symptoms and the effects had in his or her daily life.

If you’ve reached the point where you’re considering getting help for PTSD or have questions about available treatment options, please feel free to call our toll-free helpline at 888-647-0051 (Who Answers?) .

5 Signs to Watch For

1. Relationship Problems

Is PTSD Ruining Your Life

Untreated PTSD can lead to hypersensitivity.

The emotional impact of an unresolved trauma interferes with how a person perceives self and others. According to the National Institute on Mental Health, changes in thinking and emotional state interfere with how one interacts with others on a daily basis.

Consequently, PTSD sufferers often experience a distorted sense of guilt and blame that makes them feel alienated or detached from friends and loved ones.

2. Difficulty Fulfilling Work Responsibilities

It only makes sense to ask is PTSD ruining your life when it becomes difficult to fulfill daily work responsibilities. Unresolved trauma often leaves a person in a hypersensitive state that only gets worse with time.

Signs of hypersensitivity may take the form of:

  • Sleep problems
  • Uncontrollable outbursts of anger
  • Feeling on edge most of the time
  • Easily startled

These effects can make it difficult to function effectively at the workplace.

3. Withdrawing or Isolating

PTSD aftereffects produce an overall sense of anxiety towards anything that’s a reminder of the traumatic event. Under these conditions, it’s not uncommon for a person to start avoiding anything and everything that relates to the trauma in some way.

These types of avoidance-based behaviors include:

  • Avoiding certain people, places, activities or objects
  • Avoiding or ignoring thoughts and feelings associated with the traumatic event
  • Changing one’s routine, such as driving routes or daily activities to avoid trauma reminders

https://www.disorders.org/learning-how-to-recover-after-a-traumatic-event/

4. Flashback Episodes

When asking is PTSD ruining your life, perhaps one of the most distressing signs that it is takes the form of recurrent flashbacks of the trauma. Flashback episodes can occur at any time, forcing a person to relive the event on both a physical and emotional level.

Trauma reminders, such as place or objects can trigger flashbacks. Flashbacks can also cause you to have nightmares or entertain frightening thoughts that have no basis in reality.

5. Substance Abuse

According to the Journal of Addiction, in the absence of needed treatment help, PTSD suffers may resort to substance abuse as means for self-medicating distressing PTSD symptoms. If you find yourself taking a drink or popping a pill during stressful times or after a flashback episode, this practice will actually worsen PTSD symptoms over time.

Is PTSD Ruining Your Life? – Treatment Considerations

While hoping you’ll eventually “get over” a traumatic event may seem like a viable option, PTSD won’t go away until you’re able to regain a sense of safety and security. For many, this entails getting needed treatment help.

If you suspect PTSD may be disrupting your daily life and are considering treatment, please don’t hesitate to call our toll-free helpline at 888-647-0051 (Who Answers?) to speak with one of our phone counselors.

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