Can a life threatening disease be considered trauma?

[Friday]

might very well have affected how I reacted to it. One of the questions in the Workbook is: "How I reacted" and so that has to be considered too. I was DEVASTATED by the Lyme Disease. It wrecked my life. It took me a long time to recover physically, but mentally I have always since that time been badly and deeply affected by it also.

Yep. And when you trace that back, being & feeling helpless, body out of your control, authority figures not believing you, etc. whilst sick; something that "should" be safe/normal/trustworthy/etc. (Aka grass) all of a sudden not being so, everyone else having fun in their grass while your grass hurt you... List can go on and on and on from how we're reacting to fairly normal life stuff (grass, getting sick, etc.) way differently from how people without a trauma background react to the same thing.

That's one of the tells to LOOK for earlier trauma, when someone is having a huuuuuuuuge response to something that's really out of the norm. Illness, uncomplicated birth, breakup, cheating/affair, etc. Stressors that are kicking off a trauma response, rather than necessarilly being one, themselves. Doesn't always mean there is one. Sometimes it's a different disorder (also how people often end up misdiagnosed, with say GAD, or agoraphobia, or hysteria type, when earlier trauma that better explains where the reaction is coming from isn't looked for).

PTSD is one of those things that's pretty simple & straightforward. The effects of trauma, however? That shit gets reeeeally complicated.

Finding those patterns, what you react to in BIG ways, and how? So hugely useful.

Ditto, it doesn't really matter if something is qualifying, Cap T Trauma, or little t trauma, or just normal stuff... when you're looking at things that have affected you in your life. If it's affected you in a big way? It's affected you. And therefore rates sorting out.

 

[Changing4Best]

Thanks, again, @Friday, for clarifying that. It took years to find the real PTSD. It was heavily repressed with threats of death if I told, to the point that I did not speak intelligibly until I was nearly 4, though I was told that I drew pictures on the wall with the cold cream next to my crib when I was about 2 and a half. I was told not to "talk" about it to anyone, but no one told me not to communicate about it in other ways! Daddy said that it took 8 coats of paint to cover those communications. If only someone had been able to decifer them. They might have told the story. (It had been his father who had harmed me). Anyway, I am going to treat the illness as well as the more obvious Traumas as things to look into in my workbook. Hopefully, looking at all of it will be more healing for me than if I were to leave something out, just because it is not a typical Trauma with a "T" attached to it as opposed to a "t."