By Dr. Christina DiChiara, PsyD
June is Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Awareness Month, a time to shine a spotlight on a condition that affects millions worldwide. Amidst the conversations surrounding PTSD, trauma exposure and PTSD often find themselves lumped together under the same umbrella. While they share a common origin in the experience of life-threatening events, it's crucial to recognize that trauma exposure and PTSD are distinct entities with unique manifestations and implications.
This June, we’d like to help raise awareness of this important distinction: trauma exposure and PTSD are not one and the same. Understanding this difference is paramount in fostering empathy, awareness, and support for those impacted by trauma and those suffering with PTSD. Let's explore the nuanced delineation between trauma exposure and PTSD.
Trauma Exposure: Threatening Life or Life As You Know It
“Trauma exposure” encompasses a broad spectrum of adverse experiences, ranging from natural disasters and accidents to interpersonal violence and warfare. These experiences are life threatening, or threaten life “as you know it.” Whether it's the aftermath of a car crash, the horrors of combat, or the scars of childhood abuse, trauma exposure disrupts our sense of safety and security, shatters our assumptions about the world, and leaves us grappling with a myriad of complex emotions and reactions.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD): The Lingering Echoes
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is the lingering echo of trauma exposure that reverberates through the corridors of our mind long after the event has passed. It's not merely a collection of symptoms; it's a profound and often debilitating response to the harrowing specter of trauma. PTSD can emerge in the wake of any traumatic event, leaving individuals grappling with a myriad of intrusive memories, avoidance behaviors, negative changes in thinking and mood, and hyperarousal and reactivity.
Unlike trauma exposure, which is a transient experience that may or may not lead to lasting psychological sequelae, PTSD is a clinical diagnosis that requires a specific constellation of symptoms and impairment in functioning. It's a complex and multifaceted disorder that can profoundly disrupt every facet of daily life, from relationships and work performance to physical health and overall well-being.
Bridging the Divide:
Trauma exposure lays the groundwork for PTSD, but not everyone who is exposed to trauma will develop the disorder. After trauma exposure, most people will recover naturally, while others will develop clinically significant PTSD (O’Donnell et al., 2020).
Natural recovery after trauma exposure is possible, and is best achieved through typical, daily activities that help people come to terms with what they have survived. Rauch and McLean (2021) describe several common activities that contribute to natural recovery from trauma exposure, including trauma survivors allowing themselves to think about the trauma and talk about it with supportive people, allowing trauma-related emotions to be felt, and returning to reasonably safe people, places, and things that are reminders of the trauma without avoiding or escaping.
For people who have been exposed to trauma and developed PTSD, effective trauma-focused therapies exist to help facilitate recovery. Prolonged Exposure and Cognitive Processing Therapy are two of the frontline treatments for PTSD that have the most robust empirical support and offer the best chances at recovery. We’ll share more about these treatments in an upcoming blog later this month.
Clarifying Understanding Clarifies How to Help
As we commemorate PTSD Awareness Month, we hope to contribute to raising awareness of the important difference between trauma exposure and PTSD. Why does it matter? Because clarifying our understanding of these differences clarifies what people might need to recover and how we can best help. Together, let's pave the way toward a future where survivors can reclaim their agency and embark on a journey of healing and wholeness, or get the effective help that they deserve and need.
O’Donnell, M. L., Pacella, B. J., Bryant, R. A., Olff, M., & Forbes, D. (2020) Early Intervention for Trauma-Related Psychopathology. In D. Forbes, J. I. Bison, C. M. Monson, & L. Berliner, Effective Treatments for PTSD: Practice Guidelines from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (pp. 117-131). Guildford Press.
Rauch, S. A. M., & McLean, C. P. (2021). Retraining the brain: Applied neuroscience in exposure therapy for PTSD. American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000242-000