as i understand it, after a trauma as mild as meeting an unexpected figure in the hallway, you may experience shortness of breath and trembling. the shortness of breath and trembling are post traumatic stress. typically, this pts will pass quickly and life goes on the same as always. if months pass and that unexpected figure is still haunting your life and dreams, the pts has escalated to ptsd.

a common cycle i have witnessed more often than i would wish for is where someone with untreated ptsd meets with a life shock, such as a catastrophic medical dx, and the walls of denial come crashing down and all the symptoms they have been repressing come gushing out in a massive invasion from hell. could this be what happened with your mother?

PTSD is a normal reaction to a terrible or horrific event or series of events

If things went on in her childhood it's referred to as complex trauma

Im sorry that she's struggling Winter

Big hug...xo

There's no shame in having a mental illness sweetie
That's just an ugly stigma...xo

What you are saying Arfie is that my mom did not deal with her PSTD over the years, it was just laying in domant. Then one day when something happens, the pstd begin to gush out.

my own ptsd was too severe to ignore, so i started recovery at age 18 and have no personal experience of the phenom to share, but the sibs-in-healing who have shared this particular healing drama with me had been feeling their symptoms for their entire lives but had enough coping tools to stay reasonably functional in the prime of their lives.

it was the end of life challenges which triggered the downfall of those coping mechanisms which had helped them stay functional for so long.

That is what I am talking about. My mom was handling things quite differently during times before the health bull began. It would not have taken on Mom this severe as it is today. If she were active like before, things probably would not have gotten the best of her. During the good times, my sibling came to our home to visit us, while he was here he was trying to say things he thought would hurt my mom's feelings. It did not work :)

That's a good question, Winter, and as you know I've gotten a lot of benefit here from resources members have sent me to, especially the therapist Pete Walker's site. He defines trauma in a childhood like mine as a missionary kid abroad as Complex PTSD like this.

How Did I Get Complex PTSD?
The genesis of complex PTSD is most often associated with extended periods of ongoing physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood. My observations however convince me that ongoing extremes of verbal and/or emotional abuse also cause it. Moreover as an upcoming article on my website will explicate, long-term childhood emotional neglect alone can also create complex PTSD and a propensity to emotional flashbacks.

This can perhaps best be understood by noting the conditions that prevailed as the human brain evolved during hunter-gatherer times, which represents 99.8% of our time on this planet. Children’s vulnerability to predators caused them to evolve an intense, instinctual fear response to being left alone without protection. Fear became the child’s hard-wired response to separation from a protective adult, and linked automatically to the fight response so that the infant and toddler would automatically cry angrily for attention, help, cessation of abandonment - even at the briefest loss of contact with parental figures. Beasts of prey only needed seconds to snatch away the unprotected child.

In present time dysfunctional families, many parents disdain children for needing so much attention from them, and react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt can sometimes be more traumatizing than physical abuse. It is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of rage and disgust. Rage creates fear and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention, and before long from seeking any kind of help or connection at all. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt.

Moreover, as stated above, complex PTSD can also be caused by emotional neglect alone; (emotional neglect also typically occurs in most situations of prolonged contempt and physical abuse). Parents who systematically ignore or turn their backs on a child’s calls for attention, connection or help, abandon their child to unmanageable amounts of fear which over time devolve into the child giving up and succumbing to depressed, death-like feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. These types of rejection simultaneously magnify the child’s fear, and eventually add a veneer of shame to it. Over time this fear and shame cancerously begets a toxic inner critic that increasingly dominates the psyche with programs of endangerment and self-disgust (perfectionism), until a full blown case of PTSD is established. (See my articles on The Inner and Outer Critic).

This last comment about the Inner and Outer Critic resonated with what my PTSD therapist worked on with me. Here it's available for free online at Pete Walker's site, so I'll give you its link again in case you want to check it out like I did.

http://pete-walker.com/fAQsComplexPTSD.html#complexPTSD

Hope this adds a good resource to your search for the difference you mention here.

i feel almost gossipy talking about other people's experience, but. . .

an onset of geriatric health bull is among the classics for the sibs-in-healing i've supported through this dilemma. one of my more respected sibs theorated that the onset of catastrophic life changes overloaded the coping mechanisms by which she had remained functional for so long and? ? ? BOOM! ! !

and healing still hopes. we are never too old to heal the spirit.

any chance of your mother's health care provider referring her to a ptsd specialist?

Good question, arfie. Specializing in PTSD mattered in my experience. I monkeyed around weekly and paid general non-PTSD therapists for 12 long fruitless years until I moved to a new town and met an actual PTSD specialist after services one Sunday at my new church.

It totally changed things for the better with me, and I did 3 years of specific PTSD therapy with him and "graduated," as it were, so I could join DSPTSD here. Before him, I couldn't have. Now I've been here for 13 years and can benefit from peer support based on the specific therapy foundation he laid for me in our work together.

It mattered to have a PTSD specialist for me, just speaking for myself.