This kind of thinking- that there are objective differences between experiences that mark them as traumatic or not- is not useful or correct. If folks are correctly referencing the DSM-V, it sounds like that book encourages this thinking, and is pretty retrograde in its approach.
A traumatic event is any event that causes a trauma response. Some people can go to war and come back without experiencing trauma, and some people can go to school or work and experience trauma multiple times in an afternoon.
Just because an event registers as an “obviously” worse experience than another doesn’t mean it’s going to be traumatic for the person experiencing it.
You seem to be mischaracterizing what I actually said. One of the purposes of the DSM-V is to categorize constellations of symptoms for the purpose of conducting research on potential interventions. The field of trauma treatment is rife with pseudoscience, which includes overly broad definitions of what trauma is, to the point of meaninglessness, or, more to the point, unhelpfulness. If someone is dealing with what is now called prolonged grief disorder, say, due to a death of a loved one, and if that is characterized by certain symptoms, then treating them as if they have a whole different constellation of symptoms is not going to help them. It is a disservice to them to call what they have PTSD.
If someone is exhibiting the symptoms of PTSD and they did not have a life-threatening experience, by all means, use the most empirically supported treatment for PTSD. That particular definition is used because those are the experiences most likely to result in PTSD. I do think, as I clearly stated, that the current definition of trauma in the DSM-V is overly narrow. However, if we let every bad experience into the gate, we inevitably will dilute the accuracy of research and the effectiveness of treatments. The reason, for example that emotional abuse, despite the demonstrated long-term harm it causes, is not considered under the formal definition of trauma is that it rarely results in PTSD. It might result in permanently damaged self-esteem, chronic depression or something else, in which case, it needs a different treatment.
All that being said, I have PTSD in part from what I can only describe as psychological torture as a child. I am plagued with nightmares and flashbacks, avoidance behaviors and hyper-vigilance to the point that they affect my ability to function. But I don’t know how to extricate the psychological component from the constant threat of death or the sexual abuse. It’s all just one interconnected jumble which is why it’s so difficult to treat.
And I think there is a difference between characterizing trauma for the purposes of treatment and talking about hard experiences in general. I’m hammering this point because I got useless treatment for the first six years I was in therapy, it was all bullshit but I trusted the experts in their judgement of what would help. What they were doing was groundless and I’m still mad about it. So I want my things to be as defined as possible and I want my treatments to be as evidence-based as possible.
That’s different than saying this or that experience always leads to trauma, or this or that experience is objectively worse than any other. I wouldn’t do that.
5 years ago I lost my mate of 25 years. I did love her very much and I was very sad when she passed but it was not traumatic. 3 weeks ago my 1st wife passed away, we have been divorced since 1990. I always wondered how that was going to feel when it happened because we have always remained close. It didn’t have much effect on me at all. Maybe watching her suffer with dementia the past 10 years made her death easier. I believe things hit us the hardest when we feel we are losing a part of ourselves.
We had a honest doctor, that said that the my Mother was only getting out of the hospital on a miracle. She died two weeks later. So sadness, but spread over two weeks (and she was sick before that) meant no trauma. My Dad also had heart issues, etc, so again, no trauma.
Right.
I did get shot at once. It didnt seem to cause trauma, but who knows? No PTSD.
True.
I can tell you something weird. My Dad fought in the Pacific front for all of WW2. No shell shock or PTSD- except he went crazy if there was a mosquito in his room or tent = maybe the malaria, etc? Fireworks didnt bother him at all… but skeeters did.
So, in my case, scary things, tragedies, but nothing I consider trauma.
I was quite late in my life when I realized how much suffering is a universal human experience. I rather myopically thought I was just unlucky. When I was 32 I had a miscarriage. Despite everything that came before in my life, I was wholly unprepared for the unique nature of that grief, and then I considered how many women have miscarriages and I thought, “Huh. I guess life just hurts sometimes.”
For me having a miscarriage was a rather simple and straightforward kind of grieving process. I thought I had gotten over it until I became pregnant with my son and then I think I cried every day for the first eight weeks because I was terrified of losing the pregnancy. But that pregnancy went to term and I have a son now, so I really don’t think of the loss that much any more, except I admit to be relieved, because while I really wanted a baby at that time, I wasn’t as well-equipped to care for it as I am now.
Twice I’ve been sedated for surgery and twice that’s exactly the reaction I had afterwards; also panic attacks.
Yeah, my mom didn’t as much die as she faded away. First her personality went: the person I had grown up with vanished and was replaced by someone who did nothing but complain about everything and argue with everything you said. Then my wife and I had to put her in a nursing home after a stroke left her incommunicative. By the time her heart and lungs stopped working she’d been effectively dead for over a year.
My sympathies to everyone in this thread. There are some horrific things chronicled here, and I’m in awe of some of your strength to get through it.
This definition makes sense to me. Mine are:
Childhood
and
Adjuncting (contract academic employment in colleges & universities without job security)
Childhood trauma was, I think, just being raised by two people who grew up in abusive households + my being non-neurotypical and gay. My parents were nice people who did their best, but in some areas their best wasn’t very good, though certainly they were never abusive. Given their own past and the resources available at the time, they did really well. I think a more neurotypical child in that environment would probably have been fine, and certainly not traumatized. A psychologist once diagnosed it as “neglect,” which is as close as I’ve come to a satisfactory explanation. Still, in my 50s, I’m only mostly over it.
Oddly, #2 was a choice, but the trauma came from the nature of the employment: a lot of stress from overwork, and a lot from uncertainty, and the pressure of living in an expensive. A change in the terms of my job, and it took just about a year to recover from maybe 15 years’ worth of stress.
Edit: I’ve also had a number of experiences that ought to have been traumatic, but haven’t suffered as a result once the actual event was over.
My husband would probably describe his experience as a PhD student as one of the worst things he ever has gone through. He almost became a different person during that time, especially when he was turned down for internship not once, but two years in a row. It was a fiasco among clinical psych students at the time because they were competing for too few spots with PsyD farms, even though the internship was not a requirement for PsyD students. There is a lot more to it than that, but it didn’t help.
By the time he actually got his PhD he wasn’t sure it was worth it, and neither was I, given the strain on our marriage during those six years. In the end, he left academia for private practice.
We managed to recover well enough, and I don’t think either of us can deny it placed us in a better position financially.
But I’m not surprised you got thrown into the adjunct meat grinder. At one point I considered a PhD myself until I considered the average salary of an adjunct professor and realized I’d do better as a social worker.
My first trauma happened when I was 32. My dad died suddenly, unexpectedly of a heart attack at the age of 54. My BIL called me at work telling me I needed to go home. At the time I was laughing it up with my co-workers. I asked him why I needed to go home. He told me my mom found my dad dead in his recliner. I can still feel the feeling that washed over me. I remember asking him, “what?” “what?”. I told my co-workers that my dad had died and that I had to go home. My boss asked if I wanted him to drive me. But I drove myself and I remember the surreal feeling I had. Then I had to pick up my 15 yo daughter at school. It was between classes and the kids were running around. I happened to see her and I told her we had to go. She, of course, asked why. It was dumb of me (I wasn’t in my right mind) but I told her that Papa died. I remember her collapsing on the stairs. We got home (my 8 yo son was home from school sick with my youngest sister babysitting him) and he was standing at the picture window with his hands against the glass, sobbing. What a day. That was in 1993 and I can still remember every minute. I remember after a week or so, I’d be driving somewhere and it would all of a sudden hit me hard. I miss him and think about all that he has missed and all that we have missed (especially the grandkids) not having him with us. I still think of him at least once a day. I don’t cry anymore. It’s mostly fun/funny things that he did that my sisters and I still talk about.
The second trauma I experienced, or I should say traumas, began when my 27 yo son was diagnosed with a rare cancer. From that point until he died 2-1/2 years later it was nothing but traumas. The diagnosis, the chemo treatments, the treatments and surgeries done at the U of MN hospital and Mayo, watching him cry when he told me that he worried that his kids wouldn’t have a dad, watching him cry every time we were given bad news, watching him having to go through test after test, having him tell me that he didn’t want to die in a hospital, that he didn’t want people to look at him when he was dead (nothing like asking your son if he wanted to be cremated), calling my daughter to tell her that it wouldn’t be long and that she should come, calling the clinic to set up home hospice, realizing it was time to call the priest and making that call, waking up and finding him dead, calling the hospice nurse to tell her he had died, calling his fiancee` to tell her he was gone, watching the funeral home people pull into the driveway with a van (I couldn’t watch them take him. My husband stayed with him for that), going to the funeral home the next day to make arrangements, the funeral, and every day since. It’s been 8 years and I still cry at certain times. It’s hard watching his son and daughter grow up without him. They were only 4 and 3 when he died. They’re 12 and 11 now and I doubt that they really remember him anymore - that’s very hard on me. Every milestone they have made or will make is bittersweet. Losing a child at no matter what age is a lifelong trauma for a parent. I still cry sometimes, I still get angry about it but I don’t hide under the blankets, I still enjoy life but it’s like having to learn to live a different life.
Yes, that was not my intent to imply that.
My meaning was that after witnessing how my brother’s death impacted my parents, and as a parent myself, I can’t imagine anything more traumatic than having to make that decision for and about your own child.
I really can’t fathom what you went through, or my grandmother who lost her son at thirty. But it strikes me that for her, she has always been this person who needs to take care of people, and she was always taking care of her grandchildren. So when my uncle died she and my grandfather became legal guardians of his eldest child, then ten, and she poured all of her effort and energy into that and her other grandkids, and then, another shocking tragedy, that same grandchild died at age 19. So she lost not only her son, but her son’s son, and she just keeps going tending to all the needs of her other grandkids. I’m self-sufficient in comparison to the others, and she still drives two hours over here to watch my kid sometimes so my husband and I can go on a date. But this woman never quits. I don’t know what it’s like for her in her private moments of grief but she has somehow just kept showing up for her remaining child and grandkids and now her great-grandson. What concerns me is what happens when she can no longer take care of people, when it’s her turn to be taken care of, how will she handle that? And will all that pushing through the grief and being strong for everyone else eventually catch up to her?
I remembered you had had a miscarriage and I wondered what you would say about it <3
I had a lot of intense grief about my miscarriage, but I wouldn’t call it traumatic as it was reasonably short-lived – I would say it messed me up pretty badly for a few months, and like you I was definitely terrified of losing the pregnancy I had after that one, but that pregnancy going to term helped a lot – I wouldn’t say that I was grieving about it for a year or more. I think if I hadn’t been able to have a child after that, or if I’d had multiple miscarriages (which some people I’ve known have had), I could see that tipping it over into traumatic territory. (As it was, I remember being crushed every month after that that I wasn’t pregnant.)
I think my husband had grief that lasted a year or more for his mother when she died. Though I don’t think he would call that trauma either – it was sort of a natural consequence of her being just a totally wonderful person that everyone loved a lot, if that makes any sense. (I still miss her too.)
My sister and I had a childhood that didn’t feature any physical abuse, but was pretty tough emotionally speaking. She has what I consider clear trauma stemming from that childhood, though I don’t. (There are several reasons why I got off substantially more lightly than she did, some of which have to do with personality differences and some of which have to do with my sister not ever getting a break – I was the older by four years, and I suspect our mom could handle one kid but not two, so I got four years of a somewhat-reasonable upbringing and my sister didn’t.)
Yeah, that’s kind of a simplified version of it. The aftermath nearly wrecked my marriage because I went into a depression and for some reason refused to help myself. I refused therapy and medication for some reason, for the first time ever. But it was more like the miscarriage was a catalyst for a lot of things that had been building up. There are just some events that can strike the little fissures in a relationship in exactly the right spot to shatter everything, and that’s what happened.
But once I became medicated, I was fine. What was more painful was waiting three years to adopt a child and then finding that child and then realizing I wasn’t equipped to parent that particular child and having to pull back and then realizing adoption was not for me. What a way to learn. I’ve talked to my husband about it in the aftermath and I know we made the right decision for the well being of that child. We had kind of gotten misled by the adoption agency because they encouraged us to be as open to as many situations as possible with the reassurance that we can always take it on a case by case basis. At first I was overjoyed, we had a due date in six weeks, we were making plans, but the more research I did, the more I began to question whether we were the right fit. But then when we expressed doubt about our ability to meet that child’s needs, we got some pushback rather than an honest assessment of our capabilities. Which made me feel like, okay, I’m not really comfortable working with this agency. And we were three years into waiting and I couldn’t wait any more or go through all of this with a new agency.
But what I remember the most about that experience is that I was in a state of hysteria and shame for three days straight after saying no to this child. It was like having a child and then losing it and it was all my fault. I could not stop crying. It was the most distraught I have ever been in my life. I never got to meet the child or the mother but I felt like I had failed them both.
And then I had my son. And while those were both difficult experiences, they just kind of pale in comparison to the joy of my son. I imagine I’d still be pretty upset if I never got to have a child at all. I do think about the adoption sometimes because I named my son the name we had chosen for that kid. It’s because the name was after a favorite protagonist of a book series, but maybe a part of me didn’t want to leave that experience or that child behind. I’ve made peace with my choice, and I do think I made the right choice, but I haven’t forgotten that kid.
My wife and I divorced after our daughter’s death. There were issues we could have worked on but it was like I have only enough in me to get through day to day, sometimes hour to hour, sometimes minute to minute. I had nothing to give to try and save my marriage.