Understanding PTSD's Effects on Brain, Body, and Emotions | Janet Seahorn | TEDxCSU

and having that identical twin sister and my background in neuroscience is probably giving my husband more stress than he ever thought he knew when he married me he thought he was going to get one person he got two. They asked us this morning how we felt when we entered the hospital. TED Talks and one of my other very creative presenters said I feel like Katniss walking into the Hunger Games, that's what I feel and my topic is PTSD which I think I have today so I'll start with our poem . Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall Humpty Dumpty had a big fall all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put it back together Humpty at one point he is on the wall eating a hamburger drinking a beer talking about the game of Friday night football and The next minute he is a scrambled egg, his mind, his

body

and his

emotions

are very different, so this is our learning act.

I want you to look at the person on your right and the person on your left, and I want you to think, can you say it? person has gone through some really traumatic event. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand, but the answer is probably no because we call it the hidden wound. I like to refer to it as the Silent Scream because it's very much in that. person, but most of us can't see it, we can't hear it or feel it, but they can and they won't talk about it now. I have been married to my husband for over 40 years, he is Vietnamese. vet.

I didn't know him before he came, which is probably a good thing, on the other hand, I didn't know what normal was like for him, so he arrived in the country 3 weeks after his 21st birthday. He was one of the oldest. He was a second lieutenant and in his first week there he was sleeping in a tent with two other second lieutenants when a rocket exploded over his tent one person was killed one person lost an arm at Lake and was injured, but not serious enough to They sent him back home, it's like welcoming him to Vietnam and after a few weeks, when he was healed enough, they sent him on his first mission and it was in the jungles of Vietnam, where he stayed and lived day after day experiencing tremendous traumatic trauma dose. events that referred to life and death experiences, now we had no idea where some of his strange and exaggerated behaviors during the first 25 years came from, like if he opened the refrigerator door and there was a certain smell that he didn't like, he had a very abnormal event, having toys or materials on the floor that shouldn't be there, is not a good thing in their eyes, now our military and our first responders are highly trained to be at abnormal events. so that they have normal responses to be able to survive battle and even with all that training they cannot be inoculated against post-traumatic stress, by definition post-traumatic stress is an anxiety disorder that develops as a reaction to a physical injury or a mental injury or serious mental. emotional distress now I'm not going to name all the ways you can suffer from post traumatic stress all you have to do is look on your cell phone open a page turn on the news and there are a million different types of ways you can get a publication. -traumatic stress, but here is a fairly new one and it is happening to our young people.

It's called cyberbullying and cyberbullying to a young mind puts them in that mental and emotional distress in a broader county and we're not that big, we had 81 suicides. last year two of them were 11 years old one was 12 if it takes a village to raise a child it will take a village to help support and heal the wounded all the wounded of any age in our society and I'm going to take As for the word disorder, we are changing the language because post-traumatic stress from a neurological point of view is not a disorder, it is a rearrangement of your neural networks and pathways and your sensory pathways so that you can survive in a really dangerous situation, you I tell my students here at CSU that the only reason you have a

brain

is not to choose your girlfriend for a Saturday night date, it's much more Primal than that, although it may be quite Primal, but you get it to survive, the

brain

is organized so that when you get into difficult situations you can live through that difficult situation, it helps you overcome that and I also tell my students experience sculpts the brain good experiences bad experiences the brain doesn't care about everything you do It is taking information from the environment through our senses sight sound touch taste smell that lets us know that we have a green light everything is fine we have a yellow light that is tolerable stress it is actually supposed to help our immune system I understand it driving on the highway and at 80 miles per hour I see someone texting, it's fine and I'm no longer in tolerable stress.

I can enter that Red Zone, the toxic Zone. This is what's happening with the brain, is that our prefrontal cortex, which may not be fully developed anyway, is now starting to shut down. Can. I can't get information fast enough, the hippocampus is shortening, that's why we have short term memory. For example, today I got into the shower, turned off the tap and said: did I wash my hair? I'm Katniss in The Hunger Games and the Amydala and the Amydala is what I call the traffic cop, it's where you start getting information from all the senses and the mdala does this.

Oh God, we're in the red zone. I'm rallying the troops. I tell them to call the hippocampus. or the hypothalamus, the pituitary, the adrenal glands release those stress hormones, they prepare me to fight and flee, so I release adalin, norepinephrine, epinephrine, cortisone, glucose and it's not going to go up here so I think it's going to my extremities to to be able to fight until the end. of my exit or better yet, I'm going to run faster than any of you and I'll be safe now, eventually our sensory systems get a little overwhelmed, they think they become sensitized to what's happening so they get triggered easily, we hear things. that may not be there or we don't hear things that are there my husband blames me for not listening to what I told him Vision we see things that aren't there and we don't see things that are there and we drive down the highway that's not good to have that in that brain changes the sensory system when it is overloaded it looks like this you become hypervigilant and hyperaroused so we like to go on ski trips we started with our children when they were little and we had to be out of the house at 6:00 in the morning, since anyone Of you have had small children and are trying to wake them up, feed them and dress them at 6:00 in the morning, you better have a 1 minute miracle on hand. after 6 my husband is pacing back and forth at 2 minutes after 6 he is getting a little anxious at 3 minutes after 6 now he is irritable and at 4 minutes after 6 he has found language and It sounds like this, hurry up, you're going too slow, what's the Do you care, we planned this last night.

We will be in the car driving down the road at 6:00 in the morning. Well, we'll get there eventually, although I didn't want to be in that car with him and neither did. my children and walking down the road suddenly he is singing he is happy we are a disaster but now he is in control he does not worry we have overcome the danger now this is what we did not understand we did not understand that in combat if you are late, people died, but unconsciously he knew it and carried with it nightmares, night sweats, panic attacks, insomnia, which really ruins the brain for short term memory and also the immune system, you need sleep flashbacks, another story we like.

To go to you choose a big amusement park in Denver and my children and I normally went with neighbors and friends except this Saturday and my husband decided to go with us and we had a favorite attraction called the dragon. like a dragon and it went up some of you might know this went down fast pulling those G woohoo it went up it went down fast we love this we can't wait to take it on that trip so we got bored and it goes up and down and up and down and I'm looking at my husband and he should be laughing but he has turned white and Ash and colored and he is starting to say in a very anxious voice I have to end this ride you have to make it stop I have to get off this ride and you can't it has 10 more cycles funny as soon as he got off he ran to the bathroom he threw up he came back he still has this ashy color and says we have to go home.

I'm really sick and we thought it was that hot dog he ate for lunch. It makes sense to blame everything on hot dogs, but this is what was really happening. That trip triggered a flashback to when he was in Vietnam and onwards. On one occasion he was flying in right-wing helicopters and they had entered a hot combat zone to move some wounded soldiers. They were all loaded into the helicopter. They were beginning to take off 20 or 30 feet above the ground. He, being a right-wing man, had not fully buckled up. Seat Bel when the helicopter took a direct hit he went flying and when he landed he looked at himself and he was covered in oil, gas and blood from everyone in that health helicopter that was his meat, that's what made that trip fun.

It wasn't fun for him at all those overwhelming waves of emotion that you would do anything to get rid of to keep flowing the personality changes where you are more anxious you are more irritable you can get angry you can have feelings of detachment and I want to just isolate myself because they no longer fit into that normal world I used to fit in, but now I don't, and I try to be with all of you when I'm not normal. Hey guys, you are my triggers, there are days when you aren't. You want to be around people and you don't do it either eventually, that can make us feel different about who we are, how we live, how we proceed in our environment and if you can't control it, this is what happens, is that your brain and your

body

starts to wear out High incidents of hypertension you have chronic incidents of strokes and different types of heart attacks we know that we have obesity we have diabetes we have ulcers we have chronic fatigue syndromes there are so many problems in our body when it starts to wear out but this is what we can do, this is the good news, we can start to heal, but it is by doing something that helps us heal things like we know that cognitive therapy and biop feed feedback work we know that doing things like exercise helps us, we know that and we are becoming more Smart because if the information comes from our body, why not start working on our body first like massage, yoga, Taii meditation?

Because what they do is restore our breathing to normal. We do a lot of vet fly fishing because of the movement. That flying from one side to the other imitates that good heartbeat and that healthy breathing. We have our dog, he's a service dog, Bailey just pets him around the house, so there are all kinds of positive things we can do to heal and we've been practicing that for years. In the end, it is not hoping that we can heal, but doing it, that will help us move forward and I can tell you that at this point in our lives, my Angelo says that when we know better, we do better, we know better and we practice hard, we go to win the Hunger Games, we will be those survivors and, despite those traumatic experiences, we become stronger, we become more compassionate, not more doubtful, we definitely become more grateful for everything. that we have in our lives and our days versus anger about things that we do not have or that we may have lost and we have become wiser The probes Marshall says that in wisdom you do not receive wisdom, you discover it within yourself after a journey that no one can take for you or with you and in our silence we say the Serenity Prayer that calms us and we are learning to finally begin to endure what at one time seemed so unbearable and to heal what once felt so broken.

Thank you.