My Trauma Wasn’t Bad Enough for PTSD

“My trauma wasn’t bad enough for PTSD!” I can hear you saying that. Your trauma was just a little trauma. It happened long ago. Or, it didn’t last long. It doesn’t begin to compare with the horror of war. Surely, what happened to you isn’t PTSD.

Well, there are so many things to consider other than what happened. When did it happen. Who was there with you? Who protected you? Who betrayed you? Who abused you? Who neglected you?

One of the predictors of trauma becoming PTSD is trauma which occurred when you were a child (under 18). Children have no way to protect themselves. Take, for example, a little girl who tells her mother that her uncle, her mother’s youngest brother, touched her vagina. “Don’t say that. You can’t say that. Are you trying to get him in trouble? Where’d you even hear about that? You just forget about that, and I don’t ever want to hear you say another bad word about your uncle.”

The stage has been set. She can’t tell, or she’ll be the bad one. She has a secret. And now she has to swallow what she knows and forget that secret. Her uncle has just been given free reign. His victim has been rendered voiceless. 

Children are no stronger and no safer than the adults who protect them. If you, as a child, had unaware, un-protective parents, or even worse, neglectful or abusive or drunk or drugged parents, then you were a target for trauma.

Children who are abused or neglected sexually, physically, or emotionally, or children who are introduced to age-inappropriate materials, like drugs, alcohol or sex, or children to whom horror happens without a responsible adult around to protect them, are children who will come into adulthood with posttraumatic stress disorder. Guaranteed. If this is you, PLEASE be gentle with yourself. You were not kept safe as a child, and now it is up to you to learn to be your own safe keeper.

 

If this short blog was helpful, come back every week. I’ll be talking about PTSD and its cousins, anxiety and depression. A set of symptoms accompanies each of these and a range of coping skills and healing techniques helps diminish the negative consequences.

Each week I’ll tell stories and share ideas from my professional and personal experiences with PTSD and PTSD sufferers — or, as we prefer to call them: survivors.