PTSD 1: No, it’s not all in your head

Post traumatic stress disorder is a painful, frightening and complex condition,

No, It’s Not All in Your Head

Why Trauma Symptoms Feel So Confusing — and So Real

This article discusses common trauma symptoms in an educational, non-graphic way. You can pause or return to it at any time.

People living with trauma often struggle to describe what is happening inside them. The symptoms can feel vague, contradictory, or difficult to put into words — and when they try to explain, they are sometimes told that it’s “just anxiety,” “just stress,” or “all in their head.”

This response can be deeply invalidating. The symptoms aren't imagined: trauma affects how the brain and nervous system process sensation, emotion, and memory. The experiences are real — even when they don’t make logical sense.

Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a painful, frightening and frustrating condition. PTSD has debilitating psychological, emotional and physical symptoms. People come into my office with symptoms such as depression, anxiety, dread, fear, dissociation, body pains, headaches, joint pain, foggy thinking, feelings of general unease.

People will say that they feel overwhelmed with anxiety and depression and fear. And they feel collapsed with hopeless, helpless, paralyzed. PTSD often has a profound effect on one’s sense of self. My clients often say they don’t feel fully present or they don’t feel like themselves.

At Heartlife Holistic, trauma is understood within a broader integrative mental health framework that supports regulation, meaning-making, and recovery over time.

Lady Gaga Shares Her Example of Trauma Language

Lady Gaga has spoken openly about the aftermath of sexual trauma — not in graphic detail, but in terms of dissociation, bodily shutdown, confusion, and shame. In her music and interviews, she describes feeling disconnected from her body, losing a sense of safety, and struggling to articulate what was happening internally.

What’s important here is not the event itself, but how accurately her language reflects the long-term nervous system impact of trauma.

Lady Gaga, in her song “Alice,” she describes her PTSD symptoms:

“Where’s my body? I’m stuck in my mind.”

“I Don’t Feel Like Myself Anymore”

My clients voice similar feelings. They recognize their own symptoms in these descriptions, even if their experiences were very different.

They feel out of touch with their body and their interior selves. They are dissociated from parts of the self. They say things like:

• “I feel depersonalized”

• ” I don’t feel like myself”

• “I feel uneasy alot…”

• “I feel divorced from myself…”

• “I feel helpless. I feel hopeless…”

• “I feel like there are parts of my body that aren’t completely attached to me”

• “I feel like my hands are way over there…”

• I feel paralyzed, like I can’t move….”

• “I don’t feel real…”

• “I feel like I’m hearing from underneath the water..”

• “My eyes are cloudy…”

• “Sometimes I feel like I’m in a tunnel…”

• “I always feel like I’m on high alert…”

• “There are times I am literally frozen back in time, right in the middle of what happened…”

• “I feel like I am floating by the ceiling, looking down…”

• “I have tunnel vision, like everything around me is cloudy…”

• “I feel like I’m underwater, and everything is muffled…”

• “I feel like there is plexiglass between me and other people…”

Why Being Told “It’s All in Your Head” Hurts

When trauma symptoms are dismissed, people often turn the blame inward:

• “Why can’t I just get over this?”

• “What’s wrong with me?”

• “Other people had it worse.”

These questions arise because trauma responses are nervous system responses. They don’t respond to logic, reassurance, or willpower — because they are not chosen. They are learned survival responses encoded in the nervous system.

What Can Cause PTSD?

PTSD can be caused by a single incident or by an ongoing situation. A single incident is something such as: surviving a car accident, hurricane, wildfire, a severe illness or being the victim of a crime. An ongoing situation is something such as: chronic childhood abuse, witnessing multiple traumatic events (such as in first responder work, like police, firefighting or medical work). Complex PTSD (or C-PTSD) is the condition resulting from chronic trauma.

You Are Not Mistaken - It Can Take Years to Get a PTSD Diagnosis

As an aside: It might take a few years to get a diagnosis of PTSD or C-PTSD. Over a lifetime, PTSD symptoms may show up as depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, dissociation, derealization, flashback memories, nightmares, hypervigilance, fatigue and wandering physical pain and numbness. Over the years, these disparate symptoms might reveal themselves at different times. People end up going to different doctors and therapists for help with single symptoms. On top of the PTSD symptoms, substance abuse may occur as in the form of self -medication in order to numb the feelings with alcohol, marijuana or other substances. This further complicates the diagnostic picture.

Getting to the the diagnosis of PTSD/C-PTSD is sometimes not being able to see the whole forest because of the large individual trees in the foreground.

There Are Neurobiological UnderPinnings to PTSD Symptoms

So, why does PTSD carry so many disparate symptoms over a lifetime? For some insight, we need to take a look at the our new, current understanding of neurobiology and the human stress response.

The newer concepts that help us understand the biological underpinnings of PTSD are: neuroplasticity, neuroception, the polyvagal theory of the stress response and how memories (regular and traumatic) are processed and stored. Our enhanced understanding of how the brain and nervous system work help create more effective therapies to heal trauma.

The current somatic therapies, such as Somatic Experiencing or EMDR, allow you to develop your ability to mindfully observe, or track, your current somatic processes, which are the product of your current perceptions. Your perceptions and sensations usually occur below conscious awareness and are non verbal.

What This Series Will Explore

This article is the first in a four-part educational series that looks at how trauma lives in the body and brain.

In the following parts, we’ll explore:

• How emotion is processed under threat

• The role of the autonomic nervous system and vagus nerve

• Why traumatic memories feel fragmented, vivid, or present-tense

You do not need to understand neuroscience to heal. This series is offered for those who find meaning and relief in understanding why their symptoms make sense.

Gentle Closing Paragraph

If this article resonates, you’re not alone — and you’re not broken. Trauma symptoms are understandable responses to overwhelming experiences. They reflect a nervous system that learned to protect you the best way it could.

You can move slowly. You can stop here. Or you can continue when and if it feels right.

This article is part of the four-part series No, It’s Not All in Your Head, which explores how trauma affects the brain, nervous system, and memory.

If you’re looking for additional supportive information, you can return to the PTSD hub to explore resources at your own pace.

Bibiliography

Clancy, Deuchars, & Deuchars, 2013. The wonders of the wanderer. Experimental Physiology, Jan, 98(1) p. 38-45. https://rdcu.be/bZf00

Dana, D. (2018). The polyvagal theory in therapy. New York: W.W. Norton & Conpany.

Kain, K. and Terrell (2018). Nurturing resilience. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books

Hannaford, C. (1995), Smart Moves: Why learning is not all in your head. Salt Lake City, Utah: Great River Books

Levine, P.A. (2015). Trauma and memory: Brain and body in a search for the living past. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Rosenberg, S. (2017). Accessing the healing power of the vagus nerve. Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books

Van Der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. Penguin Books: New York.