This biochemical reaction is termed as the “fight-or-flight” mechanism, which temporarily protects people against danger ( Kozlowska et al., 2015).

Fear and stress are triggered predominantly in response to a dangerous event followed by a series of bodily changes, including increased blood pressure, heart rate, and breathing due to the release of adrenaline. These patients persistently experience overwhelming stress responses beyond the traumatic period. These formulations have implications for both the psychotherapy and the pharmacotherapy of PTSD.Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is defined as a psychiatric disorder in an individual who has experienced or witnessed a devastatingly traumatic event ( Bufka et al., 2020). The effectiveness of this inhibition depends, in part, on physiological arousal and neurohormonal activity. Cortical activity can inhibit the expression of these subcortically based emotional memories. Animal research suggests that intense emotional memories are processed outside of the hippocampally mediated memory system and are difficult to extinguish. The inability of people with PTSD to integrate traumatic experiences and their tendency, instead, to continuously relieve the past are mirrored physiologically and hormonally in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli as potential threats.

Although memory is ordinarily an active and constructive process, in PTSD failure of declarative memory may lead to organization of the trauma on a somatosensory level (as visual images or physical sensations) that is relatively impervious to change. Continued physiological hyperarousal and altered stress hormone secretion affect the ongoing evaluation of sensory stimuli as well. Intense emotions at the time of the trauma initiate the long-term conditional responses to reminders of the event, which are associated both with chronic alterations in the physiological stress response and with the amnesias and hypermnesias characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response.

The body keeps