Do You Believe You Were Bound For Ptsd Before You Suffered A Trauma?

[Redip]

The idea of 'inherited' ptsd makes an awful lot of sense to me. Looking at my family, I can't even guess at how long it's been going on. My mom has admitted that several people have mentioned that she might have ptsd, and she knows she's got several symptoms but she's never been diagnosed or treated. My father abuses her the same way my grandfather abused gram, the same way my ex treated me. I don't know what made me end the cycle, it was the way I thought life was supposed to be from what I'd seen.

I know I set up on a crash course and given a snowball's chance in hell of making it. It's all they had, but each generation it degenerates a little bit more. I was the one giving it a go when things broke down, bottomed out and ran ashore. It's on me to rebuild something that might work better.

 

[Mehav]

You presumed your lack of normalcy was a negative thing.

This argument always kind of pisses me off.

No, I don't want to be "normal" in the sense of being a clone of Jane Doe. But did I want a "normal," as in healthy, family? Hell yes!

Did I want a "normal," as in trauma and abuse-free childhood? Again, YES.

Would I like to have a healthy, undamaged psyche now and not have to struggle with PTSD and be able to have a family and have friends and work without all this garbage I have to struggle through? Are you kidding me?

Of course we want to be normal. Nobody wants to be boring or derivative, but we all want to be healthy and sane and OK.

 

[Otov]

No. I had a few mental health issues but the PTSD was caused by a trauma that could have been prevented. My life could and would have taken a different road. My trauma happened suddenly and was a shock to the system. It was not something I was bound for, unless of course you believe in destiny..... but that is another topic!

 

[Pomu]

Being teased profusely as a child because I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome gave me first big dose of shame and not knowing how to handle the teasing. I began to laugh with the kids.

Later on, when my first trauma happened I felt the same shame all over again. I knew at 14 something was not right and I tried for years to cope only getting myself in bad situations and more traumatizing results.

It's like that song by Violent Femmes "Add It Up".

Yes, I feel that the childhood incidents do leave something in me which later caused me to react to the future traumas in a different way.

Shame, not telling anyone, abusing drugs as a teen, over trusting people who were clearly dangerous. Putting myself in dangerous situations, etc...Then shock as something worse would always happen.

 

[Cipuhu]

No, I wasn't always like this. The trauma derailed much of who I really was and could have been, and I am only just now starting to fully re-connect with that purer form of myself, after years of working to unsort it all.

 

[Merifa]

Hi All

Would love to know more about these studies with 9/11 mothers who were pregnant.

I am probably one of the babies you are talking about as a trauma happened to me before I was born - my father was killed in a freak accident the month before I was born.

Honestly I never linked this to my personality as how could it? I was just a baby? The fact that I have always been called 'highly sensitive', 'dramatic', 'neurotic' and 'controlling' was just personality surely.

As an adult I have had an incident of workplace bullying which sent me way over the edge compared with others in the same situation (at the same company). I then started to see that I did trigger faster than others and react a lot more strongly. I was diagnosed with complex PTSD but I never could work out why it was so extreme so fast and why I seemed to lack the capabilities to stem the issues off before they got worse. Now I find the panic attacks and symptoms returning and I ask myself, if nothing bad happened to me most of my life, why is my entire personality a classic PTSD sufferer even BEFORE I officially had it?

Ive just had a baby myself and, by reading about her development, Ive been coming across more and more about just how early a baby develops its limbic system and the way it responds to 'fight or flight'. It now seems certain that early trauma, when the baby themselves is totally unaware, can have an impact on the way the brain is built and functions and therefore the blue print for life. It would make sense to me that the reaction of others to trauma could have a huge effect on a baby/child's brain. If it's wrong to shout and scream and verbally abuse a baby because they pick up on this, so isnt this similar to being born into a house of extreme grief. I have also read that babies are extremely receptive to emotion. My daughter cries when I am telling a stressful story for example. Now I am seeing first hand the amount of sync between mother and child, I really can believe there is something to all this...

 

[Acim]

I've also heard about these studies I believe that one of the things that triggered the investigation was that some children born to concentration camp survivors were displaying PTSD or PTSD like symptoms despite not being exposed to a trauma. I think when women who were pregnant during the 9/11 attack they found that the mothers raised cortisol levels at a particular point during gestation can have lasting impact on the child (sorry I can't remember the exact times).

For myself – no I don’t believe that I wasn’t predestined to develop PTSD. As a child I dealt with abuse fairly well all things considered but now look back and I think I cold deal with it because I knew when it was coming and I knew who from. The trauma that left me with PTSD was a bolt from the blue, I didn’t see it coming and it was my own body that tried to kill me – that was one of the things I really struggled with.