Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) can occur in many forms and can be from many different life experiences. After the Vietnam war the term PTSD began to appear in regards to the traumatic experiences veterans were having after coming home from battle.

These same kinds of symptoms can occur with anyone who has been traumatized, but especially if your life was threatened, you witnessed someone being harmed or killed, or you were brutally attacked.

PTSD symptoms can include intrusive thoughts similar to the traumatic incident, nightmares about or related to the incident, general feelings of being unsafe or at risk, intense distress when presented with cues or triggers of the event, avoidance of things associated with the incident and some symptoms that seem less directly related such as trouble falling or staying asleep, irritability or anger outbursts and difficulty concentrating, among others.

If you struggle any of these symptoms, it’s important to note that one of the most used and most effective tools for working through PTSD is a therapeutic technique called EMDR. The basic premise of using EMDR for trauma is to revisit the memory (memories) in a safe environment and reprocess the memory – using this technique to understand the memory differently than when you first experienced it.