What are the 17 Symptoms of PTSD You Should Know?

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I’m an adopted, Southern California surfer kid who grew up with an explosive and emotionally unavailable mother who has worked as a lifeguard, paramedic, firefighter, Army Ranger, Blackwater security contractor, and spent over a decade deployed (over 2000 days/five years on the ground in Iraq), eventually resulting in overseeing the guard force at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and some other high-profile jobs.

And, as one might expect, after over a decade working in places like South Central L.A., Atlanta, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan—where, in one form or fashion, I’ve been attacked dozens of times, lost close friends, and generally dealt with a lot of violence—PTSD might become a problem.

Unfortunately, I never considered that. After all, I had passed numerous psych exams, even one given by a CIA evaluator. PTSD never entered my mind—until it did. And once it did, it slowly wrapped its tentacles around me until one day in Sept 2017, its body slammed me and hijacked my mind. In one day, I went from running a $1B diplomatic security program with hundreds of people to struggling to take a shower.

Life Fell Apart

That led to me losing my six-figure job, my career, my girlfriend, and almost everything I own. I went from living in a gated community to looking for a storm drain to live in. Eventually, in spite of weekly therapy, meds, and an endless playlist of America’s Got Talent Golden Buzzer Moments, I spiraled down to the point that I maxed out all of my credit cards to get me into a PTSD treatment center in Draper, Utah, called Deer Hollow.

It was that rock-bottom decision that led me on an incredible journey of discovery about PTSD, the mind, and myself—and that’s led me here, right now. And right now, I am in a better place than I could have ever gotten to had I not gone on this wild ride.

⚡️Disclaimer:I’m not a therapist, psychologist, or doctor. What I am is a person with a lifetime of trauma who came close to losing my battle with PTSD. I am a person who used lessons learned from years of therapy, a six-week stint in inpatient therapy, with teams of mental health practitioners, to figure out myself and what makes me tick over several years. The information here is based on personal experience and my successes in weathering the mental storm—eventually finding peace, happiness, and a life better than I could ever have imagined.

TL;DR: The 17 symptoms of PTSD fall into three groups: re-experiencing, avoidance and emotional numbing, and hyperarousal. They include intrusive memories, distressing dreams, flashbacks, strong reactions to reminders, avoiding trauma-related thoughts or places, emotional detachment, sleep problems, irritability, poor concentration, hypervigilance, and an exaggerated startle response.

Why is It Important to Understand PTSD?

It’s important to understand how trauma affects people because life does not happen without struggle. Many of us, or our family members, will live through catastrophic events, whether societal or personal. When that happens, many will be affected with PTSD and have their lives changed unimaginably. It will make some of us difficult to work with or around. Others may shut down completely and be unable to function. And depending on the circumstances, some may become violent toward others or toward themselves. It destroys lives, wrecks families, and it doesn’t have to. PTSD is something that can be prepared for, worked through, and recovered from.

What Is PTSD?

PTSD is a natural (systematic) response to events that the person with PTSD perceived as traumatic.

PTSD becomes an issue when our mind, usually unknowingly, begins to struggle with the unprocessed trauma-related memories from our past and our response to those powerful memories here in the present. Post-traumatic stress means just that: After the traumatic event, stress.

In effect, people who struggle with PTSD are doing so because their unprocessed memories of past traumas and/or their understanding of those past traumas prompt nervous system-based (fight, flight, or freeze) emotional responses in the here and now.

Our subconscious uses those past events to signal us when similar events happen in the here and now—it’s pattern recognition. If a set of circumstances was bad in the past, your mind assumes it’s bad now, and your subconscious will stress you out with nervousness, fear, anxiety, depression, etc., in the present, in an effort to force you to take action. Sometimes that’s good action—sometimes that’s not so good action.

How PTSD Manifested in Me

Case in point, my vehicle was hit head-on by another vehicle in Iraq in 2006. That event involved driving fast on a desert highway on a warm sunny morning and colliding with a red car coming the other way. My Kevlar helmet saved me when I bounced my head off the armored windshield. That sucked.

What also sucked was how much my mind remembers and how on the lookout it is for similarities between then and now. So, that explains why I felt like the bottom was going to fall out every day. I drove through the desert each morning to get to work. I had no idea what was happening and thought I was crazy and losing my mind. I’d get to work and be wiped out in a total adrenaline dump. Day in and day out.

If your past trauma gave you a healthy and safe respect for fire, that’s a good thing. If, however, you’re like me, my trauma’s method for keeping me safe was shutting me down, isolating me in my house, putting strain on my relationships, and generally making life so overwhelming that I didn’t deal with anything. The thought of opening an envelope, going to the grocery store, or even taking a shower was a Herculean task.

Totally Overwhelmed

My PTSD was so overwhelming, it felt like a bad electrical current that ran through my body non-stop. It frazzled my brain and wore me out. Every time I thought about doing something that was good for me, my mind would fight back.

If I thought about opening an envelope, my brain would assault me with a panic attack—after all, an envelope can have bad news. If I thought about going for a walk, my brain would make me feel a sense of doom and depression the closer I came to leaving the house. And, as my dad used to say, I was “as hot as seven pots of Mexican chili,” meaning I had a short fuse, and, once it was lit, it took hours at best to calm down.

Every day was a battle just to keep afloat. PTSD can be such a struggle that I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

That Trauma Whirlpool

While all of that sucks, what I realized when I understood it was that all the craziness I felt inside could be dealt with. Why? Because what was happening within me wasn’t some hocus-pocus.

No, it’s a system where we go from traumatic experience to trauma response, and in some cases, a very deeply ingrained trauma response that becomes a part of our personality and perspective. And because it’s a system, it can be hacked. When we learn to turn down the intensity in our internal system, we can, over time, move from the struggle bus to effectively managing it and, as a result, lead a life better than we could have previously imagined.

That’s important because it answers one of the big questions people with Post-Traumatic Stress have. Am I going to be like this forever? The answer is, no, you don’t have to be. But what people must be, to get better, is willing to do the work. That hard work involves rewiring our neural pathways so that we minimize and, in some cases, eliminate the problems that happen as a result of PTSD.

History and Recognition:

IMO, trauma has never truly been dealt with until the past 20 years following the post 9/11 conflicts. Up until recent years, PTS was looked at as a stigma on the person struggling with it. So, rather than getting root cause treatment, they were given pills and/or used drugs in an effort to dull the mind and mask the pain. I needed pills for a time to help me cope. Unfortunately, masking only works until it doesn’t, which, as evidenced by 22 veteran suicides per day, often results in catastrophic consequences.

A very sad aspect of those numbers is that they aren’t anything new. Human beings are human beings, trauma is trauma, and it’s been negatively affecting large numbers of people.

• 50% of sexual assault and abuse survivors have PTSD.
• 30% of people who experience severe violence.
• 16% of people who experience serious accidents.
• 15% of people who experience the sudden death of a loved one.
• 30% of childhood abuse victims experience PTSD

What makes the PTSD percentages more insidious is that every person with PTSD who has a family has the potential to pass that trauma onto their family members. Therefore, without root cause treatment, over time, the number of people who suffer from trauma and its aftereffects grows, and grows, and grows into generational trauma.

Generational Trauma

What happens when trauma goes unchecked and is passed down from grandparents to parents, to children? The result is generational trauma.

In my case, my grandfather, due to his treatment as a child, became an explosive alcoholic. So much so that even after they ‘cured’ him with shock treatments, he was still a hyper-explosive crazy man.

It was a childhood spent in that environment that put her on a collision course with my life. Although not a drinker, she was the recipient of my grandfather’s behavior, which she then submerged me in and put me on the course to my struggles.

Generational trauma is the devil’s gift that keeps on giving, until we as individuals stop it with us, and we as a society step up and do the right thing. And, while generational trauma can be passed from older generations to younger, society can likewise, by the nature of societal impacting events, pass on generational trauma en masse.

The World War Years

WWI: 4.6M Americans served in WWI (4% of the population). Based on the 30% estimates from Vietnam, it’s safe to assume 1M+ people came home from WWI with ‘Soldier’s Heart,’ as they then called PTSD.

The Great Depression: 25% of the population was unemployed. Family homelessness soared. Children went hungry, and people suffered.

World War 2: 16M people (12% of the population) served in World War II, while their friends and family struggled at home. The entire society was subjected to trauma.

The Post World War Years

1950s: The 1950s were a time of social clubs, suits, uniforms, and fear of nuclear war. Stay-at-home wives dressed up every day because neatness and order helped keep the millions with ‘Battle Fatigue’ (PTSD) calm. At the same time, as captured in the Rolling Stones song “Mother’s Little Helper,” there was the explosion of prescriptions of valium and Quaaludes for housewives. Is it any wonder? Early preppers began building bomb shelters in their yards out of fear of nuclear war.

Age of Aquarius: That led to the 1960s, when the kids of our regimented 1950s society exploded into the counterculture mayhem of the 1960s and 70s. Vietnam was at that time our longest war, with millions serving.

1980s: That led to the 1980s, when my generation, thanks to our Baby Boomer parents, became the Gen X latchkey kids. We were told to go outside, play, and go wild. Come home when the street lights come on. My uncle would use a thread to stitch up cuts in the backyard. Parents smoked in cars. Kids rode in the beds of pickup trucks.

Post 80’s: We Gen-Xers being wild and left to our own devices led to helicopter parents, hovering, and so on.

Trauma that leads to trauma responses, which leads to more trauma, and so on, generation over generation. It’s a vicious cycle we’re only now truly starting to address.

How PTSD Affects the Brain & Body

PTSD doesn’t just live in your mind—it physically rewires your brain and body. The amygdala goes into permanent overdrive, the hippocampus shrinks, and the prefrontal cortex’s ability to curb the emotional mind’s runaway impulses diminishes. So, the deeper someone goes into the PTSD spiral, the harder it is for them to pull out. Eventually, the imaginary world of the emotional feels real—so much so that hallucinations can happen. I know, because I’ve seen them—people who weren’t there. People whose minds I made up as a trauma response.

The result is a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight, flooding you with cortisol and adrenaline. This is why so many of us end up with secondary conditions: sleep apnea, chronic migraines, high blood pressure, IBS, autoimmune issues, chronic pain, and even faster aging of the body. In my own case, the daily commute triggers weren’t “just in my head”—they were my brain and body literally reliving that morning in Iraq every single morning. The good news? These changes are not permanent.

PTSD Truths

• Trauma is trauma: War, violent crime, childhood perceptions, etc.
• Trauma is in the eye of the beholder.
• Trauma does not discriminate. It is an equal opportunity traumatizer.
• Traumatic experiences as an adult are often rooted in childhood trauma: Prevalence, statistics (65%+ of public safety, military, ER nurses, etc., have childhood trauma). That’s why they become protectors. Everything I did to protect others—unknowingly protected myself.

Do I Have PTSD?

Now the question for many becomes, “Do I have PTSD?” My answer is: if you think you or someone you know might, it’s worth seeing someone about it. PTSD, if it gets bad enough, is literally playing Russian Roulette. A few bad enough days, and it’s lights out. So, when in doubt, go speak with someone.

There are quick online quizzes and self-assessments that can help.

A simple test I still use is this: when a sensation arises in me, I pause and ask whether it’s warranted for the occasion. If there is no rational reason in this exact moment to feel that way, it’s likely an old trauma pattern speaking. That’s a reminder to myself that, yes, I do have trauma—in my case, post-traumatic stress.

The 17 Symptoms of PTSD

Now that we understand what PTSD actually is, let’s talk about how it shows up in everyday life.

These 17 core symptoms (from the DSM-17 criteria most commonly referenced) are the language your body and mind use when past trauma overlays onto the present. They fall into three main clusters: re-experiencing, avoidance and emotional numbing, and hyperarousal.

Re-experiencing the trauma

1. Recurrent, intrusive, and distressing memories of the traumatic event
2. Recurrent distressing dreams related to the trauma
3. Flashbacks or acting/feeling as if the traumatic event is recurring
4. Intense psychological distress when exposed to reminders of the trauma
5. Marked physiological reactions (e.g., racing heart, sweating) to trauma reminders

Avoidance and emotional numbing

6. Efforts to avoid thoughts, feelings, or conversations about the trauma
7. Efforts to avoid activities, places, or people that trigger memories of the trauma
8. Inability to recall an important aspect of the traumatic event
9. Markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities
10. Feeling of detachment or estrangement from others
11. Restricted range of affect (unable to feel a full range of emotions)
12. Sense of a foreshortened future (no expectation of a normal life span or future)

Hyperarousal

13. Difficulty falling or staying asleep
14. Irritability or outbursts of anger
15. Difficulty concentrating
16. Hypervigilance (constantly scanning for danger)
17. Exaggerated startle response

While the 17 core symptoms are the same for everyone, they often look different depending on gender and age (women tend toward internalized symptoms; men toward externalized; children can show regression and physical complaints).

Treatment, Recovery & Reclaiming Your Life

The good news is that PTSD is highly treatable. Standard care includes trauma-focused therapies (EMDR, prolonged exposure, cognitive processing) and medications such as SSRIs. Emerging treatments like ketamine infusions and stellate ganglion block (SGB) are giving rapid relief for many.

The most powerful tool I’ve found is learning to work with your somatic signals instead of against them. Once you notice the sensations the moment they start, you can pause, check the Present Moment, and break the cycle. Recovery isn’t about erasing the past—it’s about processing the memories so they stop hijacking your today.

💬 Mr. Rogers Wisdom “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” ~Fred Rogers

How to Start Managing & Improving Your PTSD

• Tell yourself with conviction that Post-Traumatic Stress is a normal response to extraordinary conditions and that with work, you can and will get better.
• Cope Ahead: Visualize what triggers you the most happening. As you do, visualize telling yourself it will be okay. Practice it over and over again so you’re better prepared when it happens. The goal in the moment, when it happens, is to recognize it and pull back, or calm down the emotion that is prompting a poor response.
• Breathe: When you catch yourself getting mentally hijacked, shift gears by taking a deep breath through your nose, holding it, and letting it out through your mouth. Deep breathing initiates a parasympathetic nervous system response that slows your system and helps chill things out.
• Nature: Get outside and immerse yourself in nature. Go lean against a tree. Put your feet in the grass. Take a quick dunk in water. Nature is a great way to bring us back to the present by helping us let go of our worries about the future and our regrets about the past.
• Exercise: Vigorous exercise can help shift our minds out of PTSD mode and into a more chill, productive state.
• Focus: Take time to focus on something you enjoy. Maybe that is immersing yourself in a book, a task, or something else. What it does is prevent you from thinking about the things that worry you because you’re choosing to immerse your mind in something you enjoy.
• Sensations: Monitor what you feel within you when you get triggered. Over time, the more that happens, the more you’ll recognize what’s causing your problems. Because you recognize it coming on sooner, you’ll be able to get ahead of it and avoid the issues it causes.

Living With Someone With PTSD

Living with PTSD is a day-in, day-out struggle. Triggers can hijack your daily life in ways that feel invisible to everyone else. This deeply affects relationships—partners and friends often feel pushed away when you withdraw or explode. It makes you feel like you’re tap dancing in a minefield, just waiting for them to detonate.

How to support someone with PTSD:

• Be patient and present—listen without trying to fix it.
• Don’t take their triggers or withdrawal personally.
• Help create safety by asking what they need in the moment.
• Encourage professional help, but never shame them for struggling.

PTSD Myths vs. Facts

• Myth: “Just get over it” or “It’s all in your head.” Fact: PTSD is a real, measurable brain and body response to unprocessed trauma.
• Myth: PTSD means you’re weak or broken forever. Fact: It’s a normal reaction to abnormal events—and full recovery is absolutely possible.
• Myth: PTSD isn’t a disability. Fact: Yes, it is. The VA, SSA, and most employers recognize it as a legitimate disability that can qualify for benefits and accommodations.

The Bottom Line on Reclaiming Life Beyond PTSD

PTSD is a challenging and deeply personal journey, but it’s important to remember that it is not a life sentence. With understanding, effort, and the right tools, recovery is not only possible—it can lead to a life richer and more fulfilling than ever imagined. By recognizing the signs, seeking help, and embracing strategies to manage and heal, we can break the cycle of trauma for ourselves and future generations.

As we close, let’s hold onto this truth: PTSD is a natural response to extraordinary circumstances, and healing begins by facing it. Whether you’re on this journey yourself or supporting someone who is, know that you are not alone. Together, through awareness, compassion, and action, we can create a world where trauma no longer defines us but strengthens us.

Thank you for being part of this conversation and for taking the first steps toward understanding and healing.

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