I have found that traumas are different to different people.

I know that when I was going through the situation with the home care person who claimed to be an RN & caught her pulling ID theft with my Mothers ID & then when she had the police called to accuse me of abusing my Mother , & then she OD'ed my Mother on Morphine, I didn't know what I was going through at the time, & my pdoc nor psychologist didn't know what I was going through either.

The fears that it brought out in me, not knowing what she might do to me to keep me quiet wasn't something I defined as a trauma at the time either. I didn't really know what was happening at the time except for all the separate pieces that were going on around me.

A few weeks later when I was really sick, it still wasn't defined as a trauma either. Even months later when I realized that I had preceived it as a trauma, the psychologist that I was going to at the time told me that yea, things like that where care givers steal things from the person they are caring for happen all the time. The trauma wasn't validated until the psychologist understood the actual fear that I was dealing with.

Trauma is a hard thing to define. Mostly things seem like just something we live through & because we aren't effected exactly, but are just around the situation, we just have lived through it. What we don't see much of the time is how much effect the situation actually has on us internally...in our subconscious. Sometimes the trauma can be just the what if we had been........ Or like me.....what if she had enough influence on my mother to make her say that I was being controlling....I would have been arrested........what if she wanted to keep me quite because I had filed a report with APS already.....she could have messed with the car I was driving....or someone could have showed up at the house when I came home & beat me up.....or.......yea, alot of the what if's were based of situations I had seen on TV shows, but who knows WHAT IF??????

It seems to me that even if we haven't been actually effected by the situation, we are a part of it when we can see ourselves in a possible fearful situation during the trauma.

It is kind of the same as when my husband didn't think he was dealing with depression because he didn't seem to himself that he was as bad off as I was when I was dealing with my worst depression. Sometimes even though we don't see it, it still is there even though it does't seem that way to us.....& why should we feel that way anyway....it wasn't as bad for us as it was for the people who were actually effected.

We still are dealing with the trauma in our own way.....less or more, it is still trauma that we are dealing with. Once we understand the relation it has on us, & others can help us deal with it, that is when things can come into perspective.

I had to realize that what I was experiecing was dealing with a trauma even though I didn't even know what I was dealing with at the time, nor did others. It wasn't until I actually filled a report with the police that the situation I went through was validated.

I hope this helps you realize that sometimes even though we don't think something has effected us as bad as it has, it really has had more effect on us than we realize.

Take care of yourself......
Debbie