Cumulative trauma and PTSD, Trauma Accumulates: Dam Wall Model 🚨 

The model of cumulative PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress disorder) as experienced in high trauma professions such as police, emergency services and the military (occupational trauma).
The notion is that traumatic events accumulate behind a wall of resilience. Some events (specific injuries) leak through and traumatise us. What affects us depends upon our unique vulnerabilities, that's why an given event will traumatise one person, but not another. we may find ourselves exposed to a vulnerability to which we were unaware. or we may have discovered that we were susceptible to an something getting at our vulnerability.
As we accumulate trauma, a pressure accumulates which increases our sense of tension and makes us more fragile - until something smashes our wall of resilience. When that happens there's a painful loss of identity which accompanies the flood of PTSD symptoms.
The wall cannot be easily rebuilt. Skills to deal with the distressing PTSD symptoms need to be acquired and then these skills can be utilised to face and process the trauma. It's hard work. Processing the trauma usually entails understanding exactly what happened, understanding the meaning of what happened, understanding why we were vulnerable to that trauma and patching our vulnerability so as to silence the alarm that is PTSD.
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