Got mugged. Depressed skull fracture with subdural hematoma. I woke up with a metal plate holding the pieces of my skull together.
About a year later, I had a dream about the mugging. I awoke with an intense feeling of . . . . annoyance that my subconscious had done something so damn stereotypical.
A few years ago, I had surgery to remove a tumor in my colon. A couple of weeks after I got home, I got sick and started vomiting violently. My stitches split open. (I literally spilled my guts! )
These were actually a lot rougher on my parents than they were on me. It’s a lot easier to be in pain, than to watch someone else in pain.
My parents were in their forties when I was born. I had a lot of elderly relatives, and growing up, I went to a lot of funerals. At the time, I didn’t like them, but in retrospect, I think they were valuable learning experiences. When my brother died of a prescription overdose, and when my father died of cancer, I could cope. In my opinion, people who don’t take their children to funerals are doing their children a disservice.
I’m going to say, not yet. I think it’s much less about the event than about how (and why) one reacts to it. Both of my parents have died, but neither event was traumatic for me. If I outlive my older sister, I doubt that will be traumatic for me either. I was simply never close to my birth family.
Other than that, I think I have been pretty lucky. I was mugged once, but I didn’t lose much (my folding money was hidden in my sock) and all they did was push me down, with no injuries. I’ve never had any close calls with my life, so far, or had any major property losses. I believe, if I outlive my husband, that will be the most likely to be a traumatic event for me – we’ve been together over 31 years, and I’m not sure how I would survive that loss, nor even whether I would want to.
I will say growing up with an abusive stepdad, although it was my brother he focused on. One.
Two, abusive boyfriend (years long relationship).
Three, abusive husband (years long relationship). Guess I’m a slow learner. This one included his attempt to take my life.
Four…uh, certain animal deaths. Bad things my kids have gone through.
Looks like I still have some trauma coming. No one very close to me has died yet, so there’s that.
Same. The closest was when my uncle died at 30 years old, just five years older than me. He had very big brother vibes because of the small age difference and us growing up together, but our relationship was terrible. He tormented me all through childhood and was such a dick to his family. He died of a drug overdose and left behind a 10 year old and a 6 year old. It was a shocking event and I felt awful for my grandmother, to whom I am very close, but it wasn’t my trauma. The worst part of that for me is my mother got involved and tried to make it all about her despite her almost nonexistent relationship with him. She decided I was the worst granddaughter ever for stupid reasons and she refused to attend the funeral if I didn’t apologize to my grandfather for something he wasn’t mad at me about that I didn’t do. I and everyone else had to deal with her bullshit while the family was grieving, which is really the most memorable thing about that for me.
Beyond that I have almost no experience with death.
Pretty sure that used to be called “bereavement”, which was removed in one of the more recent revisions to the DSM.
In my work, I often encounter people who seem unable to get beyond something unfortunate that happened to them in the past, whereas other people seem to just sail through some really major shit. Really hard to judge any one person by any other person’s standards/perspectives/experiences.
I feel like a lot of stuff gets shoveled into the “Adjustment Disorder” category. I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s not terribly helpful to create a billion little categories for every single issue, but there seems to be something qualitatively different between starting a new job and losing a spouse.
YES. I am NOT going into great detail but I have experienced the following: (for reference I am 48 year old male.)
As a pre-schooler I was molested and sexual assaulted by a female babysitter. Disturbingly this is the first clear memories I have as a child.
I was bullied and shunned in elementary school all the way through high school.
When I was ten my father had a massive heart attack in front of me and the rest of my family. He recovered after undergoing a coronary bypass.
When I was a freshman in high school I was physically and sexually assaulted by four other males. (Only one of them sexually* assaulted me.)
My father died in his sleep when I was 20 of another heart attack, I was the second one to find the body after my mother and I was the one who had to call 911 and my three older siblings to inform them because she was to out of it in shock to do anything
In my 20s I was in a car accident when the lifted pickup truck I was in slid on sheer ice on the Interstate and bounced off one guardrail then off the guardrail on the other side before finally flipping on its side. Both me and the driver were belted and escaped without any serious injuries. Remarkably the pickup was able to be righted and slowly driven off the interstate to the next exit.
These events have left me with PTSD and social anxiety disorder from which I have never fully recovered,
When I was eight years old, I tripped in the back yard and smashed my forehead on the concrete sidewalk. Major concussion and all it entailed. The syringes in my head to drain the fluid were the worst. I always wondered if there were further issues (psychological?) that no one looked into, but what did I know? I was just a stupid, clumsy kid. You know what else was fun? Wearing the bandage around my head like a Revolutionary War fifer and, this being 1968, the other kids in school screaming It’s Bobby Kennedy back from the dead! Ah, good times.
When I’m really down, I sometimes wish I hadn’t woken up from the “accident.”
I endured abuse of multiple varieties, from multiple people, severe and ongoing, throughout my childhood. It has had a profound effect on me throughout my adulthood, including living with an anxiety disorder.
All good and relatively under control now, thanks to excellent therapy and lots of love and support.
Caretaking my terminally ill husband for 18 mos., watching the decline and waking up one morning on the floor next to his hospital bed just in time to watch his death throes.
Aside from the deaths of family members and friends (and an unusually high number of school teachers), of which I did not experience anything actually traumatic directly, I think the closest I have come to trauma includes:
A house fire at age 6
A car accident at age 8
Anxiety leaving me feeling inadequate and helpless
Like @Spice_Weasel, I had severe childhood abuse, to the extent that one sibling eventually developed major mental illness and another had debilitating emotional illness, and the remaining children all have PTSD, which continues to affect our ability to control emotions, do various degrees.
Not only was my father, physically, emotionally and sexually abusive, my mother is narcissistic and was unable to nurture children after the age of five or so.
On my recent trip back to the States, my sister and I were talking about the abuse and compared notes on various events, such as when he had sexually abused my sisters (age 14 and 13) and he had told me at the time what he had done (I was 12), in graphic detail. We also talked about the various times we felt that he was actually going to kill one of us and the craziness in general.
A new story I heard this time was when my father, a man who never, ever apologized for anything, told my sister (she thinks it was when she was 16) he was sorry for something. She wasn’t appreciative enough of his apology so he grabbed her by her hair and violently shook her head (a typical action for him). Just crazy things like that.
The sexual abuse hit home because it’s the same age that my daughter and son are now. I look at my kids and it’s incomprehensible how someone could do that.
About that same time period my older brother raped me as well as well as our younger brother and several other boys.
Four days from now will mark the 17th anniversary of when I had an infant son die in my arms shortly after birth from fatal birth defects.
Pro tip: Coping by self-medication isn’t a great idea, even if the self-medication is alcohol and not something illegal. Giving up the self-medication makes things worse before they get better, but now 13 years later, things are definitely on the better side.
I am extremely fortunate in several aspects. First, I found a support group for quitting alcohol which also helps me learn to cope with life better. Second, I have a good family and ending the cycle of abuse means my kids are growing up as normal adolescents.
Finally, I found a great therapist who specializes in trauma recovery which has completely changed my life, and has really helped me learn to manage my emotions and such much better, although I still have more things to work on.
I’m certain that both of my parents also suffer or suffered from childhood trauma, but there weren’t the mechanisms in place (such as specialized therapy and public awareness of trauma) to help them, which means that they were unable to stop the cycle of abuse. In this way, I’m very lucky to have been born when I was rather than in a previous generation.
QFT.
One of my aunts has been a perpetual victim her whole life and another aunt was always cheerful and positive, despite the problems that from the outside problems the latter on the face of it seems to be worse.
Too numerous to count. Dealing with the trauma of my patients has at many times been traumatic for me in the aftermath. Strong professional boundaries don’t always prevent that.
I’ve been lucky, and haven’t had much bad happen to me. But i want to separate “trauma” from PTSD, because while they are obviously related, they also aren’t, entirely.
I think the most traumatic thing that’s happened to me was watching my mother die. She died from covid, in fear and pain. And part of what made it traumatic was that i failed her. I was her medical proxy, and i was supposed to let her die rather than experience pain. But a couple months earlier, when she had internal bleeding and could have died painlessly, i let my brother and her doctor bully her into accepting treatment. And even when she caught covid, i delayed putting her into hospice care because my brothers desperately wanted to treat her.
But that hasn’t resulted in PTSD. The thing that gave me PTSD (waking in the middle of the night with obsessive thoughts, inability to concentrate on other stuff, sweats, weird fear for no reason, a conviction I’d been violated) was a completely routine endoscopy. I think it was a bad reaction to the sedation. But i was a total wreck for a few weeks.
(A friend asked if i could have been violated, by which she meant sexually violated. And that seems incredibly unlikely. There were two doctors and two nurses in that room. But of course i WAS violated. The gastroenterologist shoved a huge tube down my throat, and my mouth was propped open so far and so long that my jaws were sore for days.)
Anyway, it’s hard to say that a routine procedure that was completely successful is traumatic. And yet, somehow, it was.
)