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What Is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?

Life crises
Ms. Rona Ackerman, Social worker and psychotherapist, treats PTSD, loss and bereavement
30 July 2026

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, is a long-lasting response to a traumatic event that puts a person's physical or mental health at risk. To put it another way, a situation in which stress lasts long after the event is over.
PTSD may manifest in a variety of unique symptoms, some physical and some mental:

  • Invasiveness: you repeatedly relive the traumatic event through dreams or flashbacks.
  • Excessive arousal: difficulty sleeping and concentrating, feelings of guilt and shame, and low mood.
  • Aversion: tendency to avoid things that remind you of the traumatic event, making you emotionally detached.

That is one way to describe the tension that people with PTSD feel: on the one hand, they want to forget about the traumatic event, but on the other, they have an overwhelming urge to do it again.

Most people recover on their own after a traumatic event. For some with PTSD, symptoms may quickly subside, but for others, PTSD can persist. This disorder significantly affects not only the individual but also their family, friends, acquaintances, coworkers, and employers.

It's important to remember that there is hope for recovery. Despite being distressing, the experience can lead to positive change and personal growth. When someone with PTSD struggles to see a path to healing, a supportive environment plays a crucial role. Recognizing symptoms, offering support, understanding, and helping the person seek therapy are vital steps in aiding recovery and preventing further trauma.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a long-lasting reaction to a traumatic event that threatens a person's physical or mental health. It can happen after things like a serious physical attack, terrorist attack, natural disaster, or car accident.

Symptoms

PTSD can show up in many different ways, both physically and mentally. If you notice any of the following symptoms in yourself or someone close to you, it's important to seek a professional diagnosis:

Repetitive, involuntary thoughts about the event can affect the mind, making it feel as if the event is happening again. These thoughts can appear in various ways:

  • Dreams: reliving all or part of the event in dreams. These dreams may include representations or images from the traumatic event and express the associated feelings and sensory memories.
  • Flashbacks: recreating the event or any part of it in your mind.
  • Memories: remembering the event through sights, sounds, smells, or tastes.
  • Distress: experiencing distress when a "trigger" causes you to relive the event.

A trigger can cause a response linked to the traumatic event, activating the body’s alarm system (such as a noise, smell, or sight). This leads to a heightened state of alertness, where the person feels the need to stay "on guard," resulting in several symptoms:

  • Difficulty falling and staying asleep
  • Trouble focusing or concentrating
  • Irritability, impatience, or outbursts of anger
  • Feelings of guilt and shame
  • Low mood, possibly leading to depression

A tendency to avoid triggers, such as situations, people, events, places, actions, thoughts, and feelings that may bring back the traumatic memory, is common. This avoidance can include:

  • Sense of alienation and detachment (feeling disconnected or numb from others)
  • Emotional numbness (a lack of emotional response, including difficulty experiencing positive feelings)
  • Lack of enjoyment and motivation (feeling unmotivated or unable to engage in activities)

Important: Sudden Noises and PTSD

Sudden explosive noises, like firecrackers on Purim, fireworks on Independence Day, or celebratory gunfire, can be a trigger for people coping with PTSD and may cause an acute arousal response. This is not "oversensitivity"—it’s a real physical reaction of the nervous system, which remains on high alert after trauma.

Therefore, even during festive times, it’s important to remember veterans and people with PTSD, avoid using firecrackers and fireworks, stay away from residential areas at night, and consider festive alternatives that don’t involve loud, sudden noises.

Our thoughtfulness and sensitivity toward people around us who are coping with PTSD is very meaningful and can truly make a difference for them.

A Normal Reaction to an Abnormal Situation

To recognize PTSD, it's important to understand what trauma is and when it turns into PTSD. When someone experiences a traumatic event that overwhelms them, they may face a variety of physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms. Feeling this way is a "normal response to an abnormal situation." While the intensity and severity of the event can influence the likelihood of developing PTSD, they are not the only factors. Multiple events of varying severity can also lead to PTSD. Each person's reaction is unique, meaning different individuals may respond differently to the same event.

Possible Responses to a Traumatic Event

  • Physical Responses: nausea, tremors, dry mouth, rapid heartbeat, difficulty breathing, weakness, chest pain, vomiting, abdominal pain.

  • Cognitive Responses: intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, confusion, trouble concentrating, memory issues, feeling disconnected from time, difficulty thinking clearly.

  • Emotional Responses: anxiety, fear, depression, denial, panic, feeling overwhelmed, anger, guilt, uncertainty, irritability.

  • Behavioral Responses: withdrawal and detachment, avoidance, suspicion, sleep problems and nightmares, changes in appetite, restlessness, constant alertness, even aggression.

When trauma becomes PTSD

Most people who are traumatized will get better on their own, and the traumatic event will become a painful but distant memory over time. Some people, though, will have symptoms that do not go away and may even become chronic, meaning they will last for a long time. Not everyone with PTSD has symptoms right away. For these people, the trauma does not affect them, but the symptoms start months later, usually because of something.

To better understand the stages of PTSD development and gain insight into your condition (or that of someone close to you), it's important to consider how long it takes for symptoms to emerge:

  • Within 48 hours
    Stress reaction
  • Within one month
    Acute stress reaction
  • Over one month
    Post-traumatic stress disorder
  • Up to 48 hours after the event: This is considered an acute stress reaction (ASR). Almost anyone exposed to a traumatic event may experience this type of response.
  • Up to one month after the event: Symptoms during this period are typically diagnosed as acute stress disorder (ASD).
  • More than one month after the event: If severe symptoms continue for more than a month, the diagnosis is likely post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In some cases, the response to a traumatic event does not appear immediately after the exposure. Instead, it may be delayed and emerge months or even years later.

Major, ongoing events such as wars can make these timelines less clear, especially when they are accompanied by experiences of betrayal, such as feeling abandoned, experiencing brutality, or losing faith in humanity. In these situations, an estimated 30% of those affected may develop post-traumatic symptoms.

Because it is impossible to predict who will develop post-traumatic symptoms, it is important to seek professional mental health support as early as possible after a traumatic event. Early treatment can help people process the trauma and may reduce the risk of developing PTSD.

In summary, people with PTSD often experience a constant struggle between two opposing forces: a desire to avoid memories of the traumatic event and a powerful, uncontrollable urge to relive it.

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD)

While PTSD typically develops after a single traumatic event, complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) develops after prolonged, repeated exposure to traumatic experiences that threaten a person's physical and emotional well-being. These experiences may include captivity, physical or emotional abuse, slavery, sexual abuse, chronic neglect, and similar situations.

The symptoms of CPTSD can affect many important areas of life, including personal, family, social, educational, and work functioning. In addition to the PTSD symptoms described above, people with CPTSD often experience ongoing difficulties in three main areas:

  1. Managing intense emotions and calming themselves.
  2. How they see themselves, often accompanied by deep feelings of shame, guilt, or worthlessness.
  3. The ability to trust others and build close relationships, which may lead to withdrawing from people or difficulty maintaining relationships.

Important to know

Important to know

Not everyone who is exposed to prolonged trauma will develop complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD).

Healing and recovery are possible

Trauma, whether it is mental or physical, is an existential threat that changes the way a person sees the world. When someone else causes the trauma, it can shake our most important moral and religious beliefs, leaving the person feeling alone, empty, and without faith or trust for others. The person may feel helpless and unable to take back control of their life because of their fragmented memory of the event.

It is important to remember, though, that trauma can also bring about change and give you a chance to grow and develop as a person. If the person is having a hard time seeing that they can get better, the support of their environment becomes very important. This includes providing the tools for effective communication, showing recognition, offering empathy, and encouraging the person to seek professional help from a therapist.

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