I absolutely agree with you, Gus, both from what I've read and also my personal experience: that PTSD is very much physiological in nature, at least as its basis... and it's certainly traumatic injury! I just read the first 6 chapters of The Body Keeps the Score (and it surely does) by Bessel van Der Kolk, and although I've been familiar with his work for a long time, it was really enlightening to get book-sized insight into his findings. I can't think of a researcher who's had a more profound effect on my understanding and compassion, both towards others and to myself.

There is also all kinds of research that points to memories existing everywhere in the body, not just in the brain -- a situation which surely informs the phantom limb effect -- so it stands deeply to reason that just because traumatic impacts are experienced psychologically, doesn't mean that they only exist within patterns of thought.

Specifically though, the fight-or-flight response is a hardwired part of us, and in my own experience it is the impact of trauma on its functioning that most contributes to the development of a PTSD. I woke up this morning realizing at that deeper level that comes courtesy of being informed by deeper layers of consciousness, that the feelings I struggle with of being emotionally shut down have absolutely everything to do with the traumas I've sustained, with being in situations where I couldn't show any weakness, had to brace myself for too long against the unthinkable.. so that eventually those situations disabled my fight-or-flight, like a set of brakes that have been stripped down from too much overbraking at high speeds.

(The brakes metaphor I just came up with now.. pretty concurrent, though, I think..)