Page 476 - Total War on PTSD Final

shifted to the periphery. In life, most peripheral awareness occurs at a subconscious level while attention is on something else. Testing needs to be modified!
Prolonged stress, shock, injury, or disease can affect spatial awareness, thereby impacting a person’s behavior, perceptions, and responses to environmental changes. For people suffering from PTSD, this shift in spatial awareness can be dramatic and oftentimes leads to abnormal brain and nerve activity. A common, compensatory mechanism to sensory overload is simply to ignore external environmental stimuli. The mind usually can tune out unwanted peripheral or background auditory and visual signals in a process called latent inhibition. This process disengages eye-aiming at targets in the surrounding environment, but this filtering capability is hindered when body systems are constantly in survival mode due to extreme stress, injury, or a neurological disorder. For a patient suffering from PTSD, sensory overload sets in far more quickly than it does for most, and its effects on the patient’s basic agency are wide-reaching. Certain patients actually deteriorate so far as to experience panic attacks or seizures, and sensory overload can actually lead to flashbacks.
It is important to understand that each person has different acceptance and tolerance levels to changes in their environments based on experiences, temperaments, perceptions, motivations and organizational skills. How much change is required to push a person over the edge varies with that individual’s “How am I” and “Who am I” pathways, which alters electrical and chemical signals in the retina. As we have established, these pathways are often damaged in those suffering from PTSD. Because sensory systems interact; each person has an optimal load and an upper threshold of tolerance before a breakdown occurs. In patients with PTSD, this threshold is far lower than it is for the
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