ABSTRACT
Posttraumatic stress disorder is the quintessential mind/body disorder that alters physiological, biological, and psychological homeostasis. People who have been traumatized often present with distressing and frequently intractable psychosomatic symptoms, often without knowing consciously that the source of their symptoms is the trauma they experienced. The stress response may be considered to exist along a continuum: eustress, stress, and traumatic stress. Traumatic stress precipitates a condition of physiological and psychobiological imbalance in the nervous system and in the endocrine, immune, and neuropeptide systems. Some evidence suggests that discrimination may constitute a stressor and contribute to a greater lifetime allostatic load. Conversely, social relationships mitigate the effects of allostatic load. This intersects with a new model of stress response called "tend and befriend." Learned helplessness intersects with the central assertion of state-dependent memory, learning, and behavior: what we learn and remember is dependent on our psychophysiological state at the time of the experience.
