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From the article: People with and without anxiety disorders learn to fear a threat equally quickly, according to new research. However, people with anxiety disorders tend to have a harder time learning to stop being afraid on a physiological level (when the threat is gone) compared to healthy individuals. These trends can be detected by monitoring fear-potentiated startle responses.

The study was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology.

Learning to recognize threats is a capacity that is of extreme importance for survival. However, problems in these processes, such as situations when an individual easily learns to associate certain stimuli with danger but fails to extinguish this association once the stimuli in question are not longer associated with danger, have long been linked to the development and maintenance of pathological anxiety.

Some theorists have linked the fact that anxiety symptoms start developing in late childhood and early adolescence with variations in the maturation of neural circuitry supporting threat learning. This is often explored experimentally by using the so-called differential threat conditioning study plans.

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To a layman's ears, this sounds conspicuously like a PTSD response. How common is it that trauma survivors are diagnosed with anxiety disorders?

Alternatively, what share of those diagnosed with anxiety have suffered past trauma?

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The body keeps the score.

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Growing up and through my 30’s I never had an issue with anxiety or depression. Dealing with a divorce and subsequent issues with my kids had traumatized me to the point where I need meds to function. Without them I feel like I’m on the verge of a panic attack (which I didn’t even know what that really was until a few years ago.) I hate to diminish the significance of what PTSD is but I really feel like I have what I would call PTSD.

> How common is it that trauma survivors are diagnosed with anxiety disorders?

Very

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I have put off reading that book for too long

it could also be a downside of better memory

Personally I think the relationship is backwards to what you are implying. It's not that trauma causes anxiety disorders it's that people with anxiety problems are more likely to develop PTSD when exposed to trauma.

Lots of people experience traumatic experiences without developing PTSD so it seems like a result of some underlying pre-existing problem.

I never had a problem with anxiety prior to being in an accident that involved burns and skin graphs. However, I haven’t been able to snap out of the cycle since (11+ yrs). Diagnosed with PTSD

I would love to read some studies that support this hypothesis specifically. Can you point me towards any?

This makes me wonder if my wife has an anxiety disorder. She acknowledges she has lots of anxiety, but if she sees something scary on TV she can’t let it go unless the show is turned off and even then it takes her a good 20 minutes to settle down. She thinks I’m just “desensitized” to violence on TV, which may be true, but she seems to be trying to rationalize her irrational lingering anxiety after the threat is just a show and is off.

No one could ever make a diagnosis unless they are a psychologist or psychiatrist. If her anxiety affects her daily life, then she should consider seeing a psychologist. Also just because someone has anxiety. It doesn’t mean that they have an anxiety disorder. We’re humans and it’s our natural fight or flight response. One common treatment that is effective is cognitive behavioural therapy, there are lots of books.

You likely do. Ive worked in the legal field around divorce, partner and child abuse, neglect, abandonment, and a whole host of much, much worse things. Also had my own traumatic af divorce. Wanna know the weird thing? I see the same kinda of trauma responses coming out of bad divorces as I have cases where say, massive trigger warning btw, >!a kid was deliberately tortured.!<

Be gentle with yourself and take it slow. Believe it or not, there can be an after to the after that destroyed your before.

Could have told you that years ago

I’ve had bad anxiety most of my life, had a lot of regular emotional trauma/neglect + some other things growing up. Then I got roped into an extremely abusive relationship with an actual sociopath for two years. I feel like I “should” have developed PTSD from it, but afaik I don’t meet the criteria for it, but I do for trauma. Granted, it’s been 10 years since I went through that and I did quite a bit of self-therapeutic MDMA over the years, and I only got the PTSD test last year

Hmm that’s interesting. I have an anxiety disorder and I will get caught in a worst case scenario loop in my mind about something. After I work myself through it and everything turns out fine, I will have lingering anxiety even the next day. I’ll just wake up feeling anxious even though the thing causing my intense anxiety had already passed. My body just hangs on to that stress and treats that as its baseline and it’s awful.

CPTSD is the worst

It will never go away and I've accepted it

The science doesn’t support that view.

We are still learning about the relationship between trauma and PTSD or anxiety disorders. It is thought that the development of a disorder is influenced by what happens after the traumatic event. If a person has the agency to take action to protect themselves, and the opportunity to create meaning from the traumatic event (eg by spending time with people who make them feel safe, or speaking to a therapist) then PTSD is less likely to develop.

Everyone is born with a personality, and some people are more prone to anxiety than others. I know I am a born worrier.

Probably naturally anxious people are more likely to get PTSD after traumatic experiences ,but I'm sure it could happen to anyone after bad enough experiences.

Makes sense. In my anecdotal experience, at least.

At age 28 I was diagnosed with Asperger's, so as you can imagine I have a lot of built up anxiety and trauma. I can't recognise novel threats, understand why/how they're threats, or understand how to avoid/solve those threats. Early severe anxiety was rational and life saving, the problem was I had no one to put things into perspective. Usually just either dismissed, shamed me, or punished me. I also have black and white thinking and hyperfocus. It's a huge challenge to overcome lingering fear and overactive startle response, since there often is a legitimate basis for what others assume is irrational.

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like going to sleep before pissing levels of awful?

Have this and also have AD, but that doesnt mean much. Professional diagnosis would be needed but that also should be done only if she feels Like her anxiety is having a negative Impact on her Life.

The Body Keeps The Score

“However, people with anxiety disorders tend to have a harder time learning to stop being afraid on a physiological level (when the threat is gone) compared to healthy individuals.”

So a certain level of apathy about stimuli that would result in fear is “healthy”? I wonder how high this bar must be right now. Most of us in the U.S. and elsewhere have loved through a pretty traumatic pandemic and rapid-fire violence in our communities.

If our response is “yeah, this is fine” and we don’t have the kinds of anxious responses that the researchers studied that means we’re healthy? Can someone help me out here. As long as I have less emotional response to the violence of my society I’m considered healthy? Is that right? Is my mental health just my capacity to deal with the reality of my experience with minimal interruption?

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Right? I get that science confirming stuff is important, but damn recently every other topic is a case of "yes, we know, we told you"

having generalized anxiety leaves me constantly feeling like i'm in flight-or-fight mode so this makes a lot of sense to me.

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Oh really... 10 years on from the deployment and now you tell me.

As a teacher, some kids are so difficult to teach due to this. It could be something that happened at home or 3 periods ago, or something that they think will happen later in the day. Literally unable to learn

It is the capacity to detach from the problems of "society". You can't change society as you struggle to even change yourself.

You deal with problems that you have, not that others you dont even know have. That is healthy.

My kindle credit just renewed for the month aaaaaand this book is downloaded. Been looking forward to it.

A woman I dated for a bit learned about me and named dropped this book. Rather excited to get after 'it', not so much the book if you know what I mean

I feel like anyone with anxiety could have told you this without the study.

This is something my friends and family struggle to understand about me. I don’t feel better and accomplished after I face something that makes me anxious. The feeling lingers and it doesn’t feel good. I really do feel better mentally when I avoid situations that cause anxiety.

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It is. I’ll suggest it.

It wasn't until DSM V that PTSD was removed from an anxiety disorder, because it's not only that. Our lives suck: our brains were trained on cues in unpredictable homes/situations (most people who get PTSD from a Type I event were primed to get it from their chaotic social environment). So the brains develop or change differently and just go haywire and hopeless over what is usually benign stimuli once we are out of those situations.

Ok but you are still negatively reinforcing your avoidance behaviors. If you want to be less fearful you need some degree of gradual exposure or desensitization. The relief of avoiding fear is very reinforcing.

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Eh I know how to handle my anxiety, decades of therapy and stuff. I am a fully functional adult living on my own and successful in my (kinda stressful ) career. I was just saying this is one part of my anxiety people in my life don’t get.

That book is not worth reading and the author is a terrible human being. There are better books about trauma and anxiety

Because avoidance isn’t “handling” anything. It makes your anxiety worse. That is science and it is proven. The exception is if something just isn’t or doesn’t need to be part of your life. I am not suited to being a skydiver or one of those squirrel suit people. But that’s never going to come up. My fear of glass elevators was coming up all the time. I had to work on that.

Source: I’m a psychotherapist that specializes in the treatment of anxiety and OCD.

May I ask, did your doctor proactively recommend therapy or some sort of psychological evaluation after the accident, or did you seek it on your own after continued anxiety symptoms?

I not saying I avoid stuff that causes anxiety that i need to do, just that people in my life don’t understand that I still feel anxious and awful after completing a task. My mom always goes ‘you should feel accomplished and better now that it’s over’. No I don’t and she can’t wrap her head around it. What I mean by handling it Is I have a support system and focus on breathing and other techniques to get myself through the tough times. I still do things that make me anxious, just with certain ‘tools’ that people without anxiety wouldn’t need and it took me a few years to figure out what works for me.

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And just like that, confirmation of what i suspected was wrong with me for years. But i'm betting that some slight/tiny PTSD is the root cause of both responses.

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I sought out treatment on my own after a few years. It would be another 5 yrs before I was officially diagnosed with PTSD.

In hindsight I realize I should have been treated much sooner. The physiological trauma that comes not only from the accident itself, but from being unable to walk or perform basic tasks due to agonizing pain is quite severe. (Maybe It’s worth noting that I am able to walk and perform these tasks now. It was just a very long road to recovery. The only residual disability is chronic pain and PTSD)

I believe that seeing a therapist while in the burn unit or shortly after should be part of standard treatment.

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Do you have any recommendations? I am fascinated by neurology & biological responses to these things & I am also a recovering drug addict who has suffered a great deal of extremely traumatic events due to being married to an addict. I would love to get into it & have an Audible credit in the chamber.

How did you come to that conclusion?

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Yeah so, it's supposed to be standard practice to be evaluated for trauma after accidents, there's an abudance of literature showing, for example, over 20% of road traffic accident survivors develop PTSD. I study osteopathic medicine and they really emphasize the importance of this, one case study was similar to yours so I asked out of curiosity, it seems doctors will often brush off the possibility if they don't immediately detect signs of trauma on the patient, or might even assume those signs to be temporary as a result of shock. Hope you can achieve a full recovery soon.

If your doctor tells you that it will go away, you need a better doc...

Everything leaves a permanent mark on you, mental or physical, even if you don't notice it. It's how we managed to survive for so long, by adapting to new things constantly. The system is pretty crude, but evolution is crude and merciless, long term quality of life has never been it's primary 'objective', only making the species fit for survival. Mental stability isn't all important in the grand scheme of things, not when plenty of other things will easily kill you sooner and easier.

Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine is a very good book.

That's interesting I had read the opposite, well that the science behind the direct of the relationship was unclear, would you be able to point me to some research showing that there is no underlying difference in emotional processing before trauma between someone who ends up with PTSD and someone who doesn't?

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I've read more on it and people's ability to process strong emotions(like people with bpd) but I'm having trouble finding it right now. Here's an article I'll post more if I find it:

https://www.hiredpower.com/blog/why-are-some-people-more-vulnerable-to-ptsd-than-others/

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005791614000226

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.576553/full

Because of the nature of the illness it is very difficult to prove the relationship one way or the other. Because of this I would say the science is not clear on the issue but there are good theories both ways.

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To me it seems like you might have CPTSD. The C stands for complex, and has to do with how it is difficult to pinpoint the exact point where the situation became traumatic. It is used about situations that last longer than those that creates PTSD, and that for some reason seems impossible to get out of. A divorce proceeding and subsequent issues with kids sounds like it might check all the boxes, including how you seem to maybe have some sort of impostor syndrome regarding your trauma.

My own situation started making a lot more sense when I realized that I had CPTSD instead of PTSD. Maybe it will for you too.

It's made worse when the anxiety is sometimes correct.

May I suggest In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté. Heck, why not add Scattered Minds too, also by Maté.

+1, Maté is a legend

I'm guessing you're referring to his termination in 2017?

If so, worth mentioning that he accused the institution of making him the fall guy for their own failings, his colleagues unanimously resigned in support of him, and he won a defamation settlement against the institution.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessel_van_der_Kolk

(In the Career section, paragraph starting with "In 2017")

I made passing reference to that. But I work in this field. It is not at all unusual to cross paths with people in professional and public spaces.

“When people show you who they are, believe them the first time” ~Maya Angelou

Believe it even more if they keep showing you who they are when the spot light is not on.

I still don't understand what you're trying to say. You're saying you've met him and he said or did something bad to you personally?

I don't have a dog in the fight, I know nothing about the guy, but when you call someone a "terrible human being" I guess I think it's a good idea to be able to clearly articulate why

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That quote saved my life more than once and I tell it to everyone I meet who will listen.

That is just one part of a more robust post. And idk why you are focusing so much on that.

And this is vague because it has to be. There are professions that have many different rule sets they follow. Not everyone on Reddit is a 20 yr old boy. And not everyone on Reddit is without some level of reputation.

Yeah. I get it now. Didnt understand it before. Now i actually get it.

Trauma responses to events like a bad divorce can be similar to those from more severe trauma. Be gentle with yourself and take it slow.

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Ya probably that seems pretty in line with what I think too. Hopefully more studies are done to understand this issue better and how we can help people avoid it.

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Wow. That’s amazing. What are you hoping for? Something you can use to dox people?

You are out of your mind. And when you say “you have no skin in the game” you don’t know what that means.

Read the book. Write Bessel love letters. Start a subreddit for Bessel stans. Good lord.

I don't get it. Can you explain?

Book title or not, it’s true.

"Waking the Tiger" by Peter Levine is a great book about trauma and anxiety, especially for those interested in neurology and biology.

According to research, trauma survivors are commonly diagnosed with anxiety disorders. However, not all people with anxiety have experienced past trauma.

Anxiety is one of the symptoms of trauma/PTSD.

You mention imposter syndrome - that’s actually something elseI developed. I work in IT and always had the attitude that I could handle anything that was thrown at me. These days I feel useless and out of my element.

Research what whisper networks are and why they exist. Come back and tell us if you still think that last statement is a sensible and valid basis for all people to operate under.

Worth repeating, yes.

There is the interesting Venn Diagram overlap of people with pre-existing anxiety disorders who then experience trauma that vastly exacerbates mental issues.

Can't say I like it in this overlap, but anyway here we are.

Trauma survivors are commonly diagnosed with anxiety disorders, but not all people with anxiety have experienced past trauma.

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Studies have shown that up to 20% of accident survivors develop PTSD, so it's important to be evaluated for trauma after accidents.

PTSD is not just an anxiety disorder; it has a complex interplay with social situations and the environment. "The Body Keeps the Score" and "Waking the Tiger" are two recommended books for understanding trauma and anxiety.

No, that's exactly what you're saying. They stated it was vague because "it had to be," implying repercussions if they were too identifiable. The nature and purpose of whisper networks (which operate exclusively through gossip) is to allow important information and warnings to spread without such dangers.

By insisting that only those who can make clear accusations ever speak of issues, you are also stating anyone who faces jeopardy should either accept additional risks or not bother trying to pass any information. The worst this person's statement could lead to is others watching critically for a reason why or investigating further. That's a good thing, I think.

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"The Body Keeps the Score" is a great book that delves into the effects of trauma on the body.

Seeking therapy or psychological evaluation after traumatic experiences can help in managing PTSD and anxiety disorders.

"Waking the Tiger" by Peter Levine is recommended as it helps understand the effects of trauma and anxiety.

Trauma survivors can develop PTSD, which can lead to anxiety disorders. It's important to seek treatment as soon as possible.

Trauma from divorce and issues with kids can also lead to anxiety disorders, and it's important to seek treatment.

Complex PTSD is a difficult condition to manage, but acceptance and coping strategies can help to lead a productive life.

The body holds on to traumatic events, which can lead to anxiety disorders.

While "The Body Keeps the Score" is a great book, there are other options as well. "Waking the Tiger" by Peter Levine is recommended.

If you're functional and happy its ok to "avoid" optional things as its just another way to say "having a boundary".

I only know that it is common among people that struggle with mental health to worry that their issues aren't serious or severe enough to deserve the status of the actual diagnose. It does seems likely to me that issues from one part of ones life can affect another. Did your current struggles at work start after the traumatizing divorce?

Need to know why with proof so valid treatments and preventative measures can be systematically implemented. Otherwise it's just people saying 'i told you so' with nothing else to offer. And everyone loves that... Particularly in the science subreddit.