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Have you tried to seeing a CBT or DBT therapist or joining a DBT group? These are coping skill focused therapies and you're not obligated to even tell your story if you don't want to (in fact, we don't ever talk about traumas or problems in my DBT group, except when we were identifying our...

Thanks, Debbie. It's good to know people won't be comparing and judging here, because I definitely felt like they were doing that in some other online groups I've been in (though my in-person support group is great). It's also nice to hear that CBT and DBT helped you. I've only been in the DBT...

Hi and welcome to the forum. I'm sorry you've had to deal with so many horrible situations. I've had some terrible experiences with hospitals as well and understand your violent anger over it. It's a special kind of wrong when people who are supposed to help instead hurt and further traumatize...

It does make sense. Thank you very much for your post. I found it really insightful and supportive. :) I found your posts on this thread supportive and helpful. One way of phrasing things may make sense and be helpful to one person and not another. That's just sort of the way communication goes.

I guess I liked what she said because it made sense to me and helped me accept that what I experienced might be "bad enough" to qualify. The DSM V criteria seem to be kind of vague. I mean, I guess my ex's suicide threats and attempts qualify as "threatened death or severe injury" and what they...

I pretty much never cry. Not when my ex tried to kill himself in front of me, not when my mom almost died, not when I witnessed my fiance being abused by the medical staff who were supposed to help him. My mom cried all night after seeing that and I later found out my usually-stoic best friend...

I had to select "no, didn't report", but believe me, I would've reported if I could. But the most recent abuse I was witness to was at the hands of medical professionals, who falsified the records to make it look like they'd done nothing wrong. It would be my word against theirs AND against all...

It's certainly entirely possible to have repressed a traumatic memory to the point you have no idea it even exists, especially if you were very young at the time. That's not the case for me, but I've seen it happen with others. Of course, that doesn't mean something *did* happen to you, but it...

I was a supporter for a very long time before I was a sufferer, and remain in that role on and off even now. I've never needed to hear details to understand. I can gather the general idea of what happened from the person's symptoms and triggers. Of course, sometimes people feel the need to share...

No, what you say is correct. None of my traumas were my family's fault, though it's hard not to blame my mom a little, both for the role she played in what happened to my fiance and for how she over-shared her own problems and abuse history with me as a child. Rationally I know she just did the...

Thanks, Solara. I think the DBT is helping, at least a little. The mindfulness lesson seemed to actually sink in and help me focus on the present, though all the talk about acceptance makes me mumble that I'll accept the things I've seen right after a certain hot place freezes over. A trained...

For me it's paranoia. I leap from one imaginary threat to the next, and most of them are completely irrational. The intrusive thoughts suck pretty bad too, though, as does the persistent feeling of doom, like something terrible might happen at any moment. I'm not sure if this is a type of...

I have co-morbid diagnoses (bipolar disorder and ADD), so it's a little complicated, but when I went off the anti-psychotic medication prescribed for my bipolar in order to switch meds, the sudden, intense flashbacks were unbearable. They mostly went away on the new anti-psychotic. So apparently...

I chose "death or suicide" since that was the incident that I was originally diagnosed with PTSD over. In the period of a few months my best friend attempted suicide (doing permanent damage to her hands in the process), another friend committed suicide just hours after we'd been together, and my...

I'm not very comfortable posting here because I don't feel like anything bad enough has happened in my life to justify PTSD. But denial hasn't done me a lot of favors so far, so I figure I'll take the chance. I was actually diagnosed with PTSD in 2011 after a long series of people I was very...