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@anne-of-lothlorien

I don’t have PTSD, but because a lot of my stories are war stories, I have researched it quite extensively. Most of my research has been in military cases of PTSD/Combat Stress Disorder/Shellshock, but anyone can get PTSD, so I imagine the symptoms and experiences are quite similar.

There’s a few things I would consider researching. One would be flashbacks/dreams another would be triggers. Triggers can be anything–the obvious ones would be things such as fire, gunshots, mentions of terrorism and terrorists, in the case of your character. But there could be a lot of less obvious triggers as well, such as anything that remotely reminds them of that incident (a big, almost stereotypical, but nonetheless true, one would be fireworks). I personally have a terror of venomous  snakes, due to the fact that I live in Australia and have had a lot of really close calls with them, and know of other people who’ve had their dogs, horses, cats killed by snakes. I can’t walk through long grass without being on hyper-vigilance. And (this is where I was actually going with this paragraph) I also can’t see a lizard, a hose or my dog’s stripy tail when it’s in long grass, without immediately thinking of a snake and having a momentary panic attack, before my brain convinces me that this is a lizard and not a snake (strangely enough, this doesn’t apply to pythons, and snakes I know are non-venomous. I don’t know why. it’s just lizards). So I imagine PTSD triggers are a lot like that, only much worse.

I’d also research panic attacks and anxiety and all those other things that can come from severe psychological damage.

Here’s a good interview with a lady with PTSD http://storitorigrace.blogspot.com/2016/09/so-your-character-has-post-traumatic.html

Here’s some more, particularly from a writer’s point of view (I haven’t read them all, so I can’t comment on how factual they seem to be)

https://psychwriter.com.au/2016/12/04/the-psych-files-ptsd-for-writers/

http://www.writerology.net/blog/post/2015/02/getting-it-right-writing-about-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-part-i

https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-write-a-character-that-has-PTSD-from-something-terrible-that-happened-to-her (Quora also has quite a number of other good questions about PTSD which you could explore if you don’t mind falling down the Quora rabbit hole)

SO hopefully that made somewhat sense and was somewhat helpful 😀