You know you live among a diverse group of people. You posted on the internet, to an international audience. You are experiencing that it doesn't work out well when someone says hey, one culture here should dominate over all the others as a "solution." English may be your second language, and maybe that is why you do not know why even the use of the word "solution" is offensive in this context to some people.
Insulting you is different than threatening you and putting your life in danger. Disagreeing with you is different than insulting you. Your statements do not make it right for anyone to threaten or be cruel. Two wrongs do not make a right.
But, if we return to your original question, do
you have PTSD? No one here can diagnose, but based on both the event you have described and your symptoms, it is
unlikely you have PTSD.
In order to have the very specific major mental health condition of PTSD you must meet the conditions under Criterion A in the DSM 5.
Criterion A: Traumatic event
Trauma survivors must have been exposed to actual or threatened:
- death
- serious injury
- sexual violence
The exposure can be:
- direct
- witnessed
- indirect, by hearing of a relative or close friend who has experienced the event—indirectly experienced death must be accidental or violent
- repeated or extreme indirect exposure to qualifying events, usually by professionals—non-professional exposure by media does not count
You do not describe anything that fits that criteria.
I can see how a threat sent online that includes a picture of someone standing outside your front door with a knife - that could very well meet criterion A. You don't describe anything like that but the more typical nonsense and internet nastiness that happens online a lot.
Meeting Criterion A alone doesn't mean you have PTSD. The symptoms have to match as well.
Your description of your symptoms doesn't match for typical experiences and symptoms of PTSD.
Being insulted or disagreed with online is not usually trauma.You keep calling it trauma but I am not sure it is helping to call it trauma.
Things people say and do online to other people can feel really very bad, and some people have even taken their lives because of insults made online, and I want to be sensitive to that. However, not everything that happens online that feels bad is trauma, especially not Criterion A trauma.
You could have the mental health conditions of depression, generalized or social anxiety, an OCD type disorder or OCPD. Some of your actions fit for BPD. There could be any number of mental health conditions playing a role in how bad you feel right now.
But I would be very careful from thinking that insults people said online gave you PTSD.
You are in real pain. Even if you did have PTSD, erasing memories doesn't help. Simply remembering what happened is not the cause of your suffering now.
Meeting with a therapist and looking into CBT and DBT self help workbooks may help you find more relief. It also will likely help you make wiser choices in the future, and that will give you more positive experiences in life.
It is unrealistic to ever expect to look back on this incident and feel good about it. It was a painful hard thing that happened. You can recover from this and work with whatever else may be going on for you as well.
It is good you took responsibility for your actions and even had the courage to apologize. Words may not have been enough to undo the damage of what you said, but I do applaud your efforts to make some sort of apology and to recognize that people did feel hurt by your words.
You held a belief that is hurtful and you expressed it in a place for taboo topics. You got some backlash, and you taking some good steps to address your pain now.
Instead of focusing so much on how you feel like a victim, maybe it will help your depression and anxiety to spend time not debating or apologizing for what you said, but taking real action to understand the other side, and why they responded the way they did. Read about others who once held one stance, and then later changed their minds. Don't erase the memory, find stories of others who made mistakes in life, and used the mistake to learn deeper empathy and compassion for others and to turn their lives in a different direction.
If you keep trying to ignore the pain you feel, it will just keep trying to get your attention. Instead, look up information on how to mindfully observe the distressing thoughts and feelings, and you may find they pass more quickly.
Keep reaching out for wise counsel and work to understand others. Create good new positive experiences with people of different viewpoints.
If you feel the urge to get into a debate again, get offline, in a hurry, and go join a debate club.You can tell yourself you learned from a bad experience. Many people never learn from bad experiences, at least not healthy lessons. You are learning healthy things and that is a good thing.
If you feel like talking about taboo subjects on public world wide forums, be ready to accept that some people will have strong reactions. I do not condone insulting or bullying people, not even real or perceived racists, as doing so never changes anyone's minds or helps anything. But I absolutely support the right of people to say hey, that is really hurtful, racist, and wrong and your understandable bad feelings now.
And to bring this all back to the original question, no their disagreement and even insults doesn't likely mean you now have PTSD.
If you still feel you could have PTSD, please seek out professional counseling in your area who can properly evaluate and treat the symptoms you have now.
