For us uniforms we have encountered many situations of trauma that could or would trigger this entire forum in one way or another. Our traumas are specific encounters or volume of encounters.
Mmmmm, I would say that the same thing applies regardless of type of trauma. I've dealt with
being taken hostage and held at gun point for 24 hours, several other assaults at gun point
(once w/machine gun) many other instances with knives, clubs, fists. Several serious car accidents
one so severe it held up a four lane highway into a major US city for hours. And yet each of
these incidents, which by themselves might be enough to qualify as a precipitating event
were a walk in the in the park, to me, compared to what I experienced in childhood. Remember
you can walk away from an abusive adult who is unarmed if you're an adult, but cannot as a child.
The key thing is whether there was a fairly real expectation of severe bodily harm and/or death.
And also, I would add, what the relationship of that person is to you.
And as for the combat vs civilian thing. It was decades before I could even consider myself
as having PTSD, because both I would tell myself (and was also told) "well, it wasn't combat."
I was able to keep my symptoms hidden, and when I did tell anyone they would either use
the info to harm me
(NPD/APD types revel in using sensitive info to gossip/harm), diagnose me improperly
or they would get angry at me!! I was the strong helper type, so they needed me to stay in
that role. And besides, there was no way I could have any issues because I was so stoic.
The fact that I regularly holed up for weekends drinking straight out of the bottle staring at
the wall was completely hidden.
The attitude that if it's not combat or serious natural disaster/accident, it's not
real, kept me from pursuing help for years. Kept me dealing with the wrong type of
help/meds that either didn't help or worse, caused real damage. Kept me on the outside
and feeling like a freak. Support groups with people who were having bad break ups
were totally unrelatable.
While I get that having support groups that are geared towards type of trauma makes sense,
I know that for myself that I would rather have a hundred memories of threatened harm by
strangers or mere acquaintances than one of harm by my parent who after harming me,
to the point of putting me in catatonic state (at very young age), would spent the next
while humming happily to herself. This happened multiple times. And yes, while
I do get that seeing people harmed/killed
would be terrible beyond belief, being threatened to be killed by your parent is another
terrible beyond belief kind of thing.
It's unfortunately a very real thing, although it
doesn't seem to make the cut of being threatened with death and/or severe bodily harm
compared to combat. I might add the childhood sexual abuse often doesn't seem to
make the cut at all, and yet, SA survivors seemed to be the only folks (besides other
survivors of severe abuse) that got where I was coming from as they shared the same
type of symptoms and often far worse. Severe childhood neglect is also another type
of thing that can trigger PTSD. What meets the criteria for expectation of serious
bodily and/or death for a child is totally different for an adult. An adult who is capable of
sexually abusing, severely neglecting or otherwise abusing a child is in reality capable
of just about anything. Once those boundaries are crossed, you just don't have any
idea what that person will do next. And the scary part is, I think often, neither do they.
You just cannot tell what will put a person at the threshold. For all of us it's different.
I think we should be careful about creating a hierarchy of traumas, consider in many
cases it might not be accurate. The incidents I experienced above that are in some ways
spectacularly traumatic are fairly trivial to me in terms of what my body has stored as
traumatic memory. I wasted a lot of time on these memories (therapists loved these)
but they were not what were driving my symptoms and I got nowhere. Childhood trauma
and abuse is still considered by some as somewhat shameful, better to forget about it kind
of thing. Maybe you're just, fill in the blank diagnosis, and looking for excuses kind of
thing. The bottom line is people are quick to ascribe their successes in life toward their
own talent and hard work, and not luck. Other's lack of success is often viewed as laziness
and lack of talent. It's just how we are. We also don't like to consider that the sweet
old neighbor down the street might be a malignant abuser. Or that the super successful
auto engineer that gave us that nice family and friends discount on our next car is sexually
abusing his daughter.
There's still a lot of push back regarding other types of abuse that can cause PTSD. Let's be
careful not to add to it further.
