UPLAND, CA, UNITED STATES, February 26, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — According to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, about 12 million American adults experience PTSD in any given year. Among military personnel who served in combat, the VA reports that 11-20% will experience PTSD. Yet most people don’t realize they have it.
Dr. Stephanie Johnson, a clinical psychologist who’s spent 17 years treating trauma survivors, sees it constantly. “PTSD often goes undetected because people normalize the symptoms,” she says. “They don’t realize their nervous system never powered down.”
Johnson points to hypervigilance as the first sign. She sees it all the time—people sitting with their backs to walls in restaurants, automatically scanning for exits, mapping escape routes without thinking. They don’t even notice anymore. “It’s just become their normal,” Johnson says.
The second warning sign is intrusive thoughts and flashbacks that feel like you’re reliving the trauma, not just remembering it. If you’re constantly expecting the worst, if you assume danger at every turn, that’s your nervous system telling you it hasn’t recalibrated yet.
Third is what happens to relationships. People either isolate completely or shut down emotionally. Connection feels unsafe. Even small conflict feels overwhelming. Johnson watches people withdraw from their lives trying to protect themselves from threats that aren’t really there.
She’s also seen trauma develop from watching traumatic events unfold on the news. The DSM-5 doesn’t classify that as official trauma, but Johnson treats it the same way in her practice. Your nervous system doesn’t distinguish between witnessing something directly or seeing it happen. If you’re repeatedly activated by what you see on screens, your body registers that as a real threat.
The fifth sign is a body stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode. Shallow breathing, constant tension, hyperarousal. A nervous system still fighting a war that’s long over.
The good news is that healing works. Breathing techniques are powerful because they activate the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digest state. If you’re fighting a bear, you’re not breathing into your belly. You’re breathing shallow and fast. Most people with PTSD are locked in that pattern years after the threat is gone.
Recovery also needs rest. Johnson breaks stress into three phases: acute, restorative, and exhaustion. If people never get that 24-to-48-hour restorative window where cortisol drops back to baseline, the body breaks down. That’s when inflammation shows up, immunity tanks, digestion fails, burnout sets in.
Beyond breathing, Johnson recommends vitamin C to reduce cortisol, B vitamins, especially B6, to support stress response and help produce serotonin and GABA.
Massage significantly lowers cortisol. Restorative yoga helps retrain the nervous system to feel safe in relaxation again, which sounds strange but many trauma survivors, especially veterans, actually struggle with it. “For some, calm feels unsafe because hyperarousal became their baseline,” Johnson explains.
EMDR, cognitive behavioral therapy, and ego state therapy all work. They all aim at the same thing: helping the body feel safe again. “I focus heavily on recalibrating the nervous system,” Johnson says. “Remission happens when it learns flexibility again, the ability to move between activation and relaxation.”
Dr. Stephanie Johnson is a former U.S. Army Military Police officer. She holds a doctorate from the University of La Verne and a postdoctoral master’s degree in clinical psychopharmacology.
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