Dr. John A. King uses a filing-cabinet metaphor to explain PTSD: when the brain can't properly process a traumatic memory, it stays active instead of being filed away. The unfiled trauma resurfaces as triggers, recurring dreams, and involuntary fight-or-flight reactions that interfere with daily life.
So here's a simple way to explain post-traumatic stress disorder. It's like your desk is covered with files at the end of the day and you don't put things away, so you're just going to clear off your desk, you take it all and you shove it in the bottom of the filing cabinet and you get on with your day. That's a little bit what, like, post-traumatic stress disorder is. A trauma happens, say it's in battle, say you're a first responder, say it's childhood sexual abuse, and you've just got to take what's happened, the trauma, and put it away because you've got to go on living. Because you haven't processed it, filed it, been able to go through it, and you've just got to get on with living, that memory stays with you. It stays unfiled and it will come back. Often we call that triggering. Something will happen. It'll be recurring. It'll come up in a dream. You'll end up in situations where you're in fight or flight and you're not too sure what to do, so you get frozen. That's what is often post-traumatic stress disorder, is this inability for the brain to be able to file appropriately the events that have happened.
