BY DEREK DEVOS
Most people believe they would recognize PTSD if they saw it. They picture flashbacks, panic, or someone unable to function day to day.
But, in real life, it rarely looks like that.
Sometimes it’s the person who always sits where they can see the door. The one who slips out of a gathering a little early without making a scene. The one who wants plans clear ahead of time and doesn’t love last-minute changes. The one who’s quiet in crowded rooms but talkative one-on-one. The one who hardly eats all day but is still awake late into the night.
From the outside, that can look like attitude.
A lot of times, it isn’t.
What you may be seeing isn’t a personality difference. You may be watching a nervous system doing its job. The brain’s first job is survival. When it goes through something overwhelming, it learns fast and it learns deeply. But it doesn’t neatly file that learning in the past. It keeps it in the “might matter again” drawer.
So sometimes the body reacts before the mind has a chance to weigh in.
A smell. A sudden change in a room. An unclear situation. The body shifts into readiness automatically. And readiness quietly turns off things you don’t need in an emergency, appetite, digestion, and emotional control included.
That’s why a person can seem fine one moment and distant the next.
They didn’t decide to withdraw. Their system was prepared to do so.
There is a name for this pattern.
PTSD isn’t mainly a memory problem.
It’s a nervous system problem.
You are not stuck in the past. Your nervous system is functioning correctly for the rule set it believes you still live under.
When people say, “you’re safe now,” they mean well. But safety is something the thinking brain decides. The reacting brain works off patterns, not reassurance.
So what can look like irritability, over-planning, withdrawal, or unusual routines is often someone trying to make the world predictable enough to finally relax.
Once you see it that way, a lot of things start to make sense.
You may not have had a name for it before.
You may have never noticed it before. After today, you probably will.
Derek DeVos is the founder of PTSD, a nonprofit based in Statesville. Learn more at https://theptsd.info