Intentional Touch™ can help a person experiencing PTSD:
1. Intentional Touch™ offers a safe nurturing environment to rest and regroup internally.
2. Intentional Touch™ offers a variety of methods that serve to reorient and reorganize, as well as sort through confusion and chaos.
3. Intentional Touch™ offers ways to achieve emotional balance during the actual session and in-between sessions.
4. Intentional Touch™ provides help with phobias, sleep disturbances, gastrointestinal problems and altered interpersonal relationships.
5. Intentional Touch™ complements medical treatment for depression and anxiety.
6. Intentional Touch™ soothes and heals the nervous system, decreasing startle response, irritability, and hyper vigilance.
PTSD is defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as a disorder sometimes referred to as a mental illness, in which an extreme traumatic event prompts the development of characteristic symptoms in an individual. Only a licensed medical professional has the legal scope of practice to diagnose PTSD. The traumatic stressor must involve one of the following:
Direct personal experience of an event that involves one or more of the following:
- Actual or threatened death
- Serious injury
- Other threat to one’s physical integrity
Witnessing an event that involves one or more of the following:
- Death
- Injury
- A threat to the physical integrity of another person
Learning that one or more of the following has happened to a family member or other close person:
- Unexpected death
- Violent death
- Serious harm
- Threat of death or injury
Some examples of directly experienced extreme traumatic stressors are:
- Sexual assault
- Physical attack
- Being kidnapped
- Being tortured
- Natural or man-made disasters
- Severe automobile accident
- For children, inappropriate sexual experiences without threat or violence
- Military Combat
Some examples of witnessed events are:
- Observing violent assault
- Witnessing sexual assault
- Unexpectedly coming upon a dead body
- Observing serious injury of another person
Some examples of events experienced by others that are learned about are:
- Sexual assault
- Violent personal assault
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- Serious accident
- Serious injury
- Unexpected death
- Diagnosis of life-threatening disease
PTSD is considered acute if the symptoms last less than 3 months, and chronic if the symptoms last three months or more. The onset of symptoms can be immediate or delayed for many months or even years after the traumatic event.
PTSD is not a universal stress response. The neuroendocrine alterations in the brain are not typical of those that are observed in studies of stress or major depression. Studies indicate that in terms of biochemistry, PTSD represents a situation where there has been a failure of the body to restore itself to the pre-trauma state. There may be biological risk factors that result in a PTSD syndrome. These risk factors are thought to be related to the prior stress history of the person experiencing the traumatic event.
Symptoms
According to Jaelline Jaffe, Ph.D., and Jeanne Segal, Ph.D., contributors to an article in Helpguide©. (Article last modified on: 11/18/05), there are four categories of symptoms. A diagnosis of PDST requires the presence of some symptoms from all four.
- Re-experiencing the trauma: flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive memories, frightening thoughts and exaggerated emotional and physical reactions to triggers that remind the person of the trauma.
- Emotional numbing: feeling detached, lack of emotions (especially positive ones), loss of interest in activities
- Avoidance: avoiding activities, people, or places that remind the person of the trauma
- Increased arousal: difficulty sleeping and concentrating, irritability, aggressive outbursts, hyper vigilance (being on guard), and exaggerated startle response.
Characteristic symptoms
- Re-experiencing the traumatic event (re-traumatization)
- Recurrent intrusive memories of the event
- Recurrent distressing dreams related to the event
- Dissociative states that last from a few seconds to several hours or even days, during which components of the even are relived and the person behaves as though experiencing the event at that moment.
- Intense psychological distress
- Physiological reactivity when the person is exposed to triggering events that resemble or symbolize an aspect of the traumatic event
- Persistently avoiding stimuli associated with the trauma
- Deliberate efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings or conversations about the traumatic event
- Avoidance of activities, situations or people who arouse memories of the event
- Amnesia for important aspects of the traumatic event
- Psychic numbing or emotional anesthesia – diminished responsiveness to the external world
- Significant interest or participation in previously enjoyed activities
- Feeling detached or estranged from other people
- Reduced ability to feel emotions, especially intimacy, tenderness and sexuality
- A sense of foreshortened future
- Persistent symptoms of anxiety or increased arousal that were not present before the trauma
- Difficulty falling or staying asleep
- Hyper vigilance
- Exaggerated startle response
- Irritability
- Outbursts of anger
- Difficulty concentrating or completing tasks
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