People with PTSD struggle with a variety of symptoms, including re-experiencing traumatic memories via nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and unwanted repetitive patterns of behavior; depressive symptoms and cognitive clouding; difficulty with excessive reactivity and hyperarousal; sudden shifts into states of panic, fear, and rage; and, often, symptoms of avoidance, dissociation, and emotional numbing.

With PTSD, both classic PTSD after discrete traumatic experiences and complex PTSD (cPTSD) following years of trauma and distress, sudden shifts from positive to negative emotional states create terrible difficulties in terms of both personal suffering and destruction of personal and professional relationships and performance.

Emotional dysregulation also impacts people surrounding those with PTSD. For example, research on intergenerational transmission of trauma, as from parent to child, has found that moments of disorganized emotion when parents "lose it" are an important factor in passing along trauma. What does this mean? What is the "it" that people lose during such interactions?

Parents with unresolved trauma may have a disorganized attachment style, shifting unpredictably from secure to insecure modes, from overly close to suddenly distant. In particular, intergenerational transmission of trauma may occur when parents in the throes of disorganized attachment, such as when frustrated with a child's behavior, express their helplessness and hostility (H/H) toward the child.

This typically occurs without the child understanding what is happening or why. If that understanding isn't there from the parents, or perhaps another adult who can mentalize with the child, the behavior interferes with the child's development and causes or contributes to future mental health problems, substance use disorders, and personality disorders. In such states of mind, people don't slow down and talk through what is happening with those around them.

Disruption doesn't happen only between parents and children. It's sadly familiar in many personal and professional relationships, and, for many, may even be normalized in the form of endemic abuse and harassment in relationships.

For the above reasons, it's important to understand what drives the sudden shifts from positive to negative emotion in people with PTSD. Identifying the........

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