guilloche, thank you for responding to everybody here and reading all the posts, I sometimes make threads and sort of forget about them or don't read all posts, and certainly it's not often I respond to every poster so that's nice of you.

I agree with you about the fact that some of us have families that are not particularly "helpful to connect with." As I had said in my post, though my family had been helpful in other circumstances, in the circumstance that caused that trauma, they contributed to my PTSD both indirectly and also directly. I would have been better off then seeking a support group. I had no therapist at the time. My stupid insistence at getting support through family cost me big time.

I also want to say something else about the original question. I think people really should not imagine how they would feel if X tragedy happened to them at present. They are not other people and they don't live at that time.

For instance my parents live through very difficult physical and emotional issues. It damaged them but did not break them. Same thing happening to many people right now in my neighborhood might break them. But it's strange to try to compare them directly.

Then on top of that you have the personal variation, how some people are way more resilient than others. But I have feeling that older generations lived the kind of life that you had to be resilient just to survive. My friend once said if her parents take away her sister's access to computer for a week, she would be literally traumatized. She was half-kidding but to me it was interesting how their mother raised them all by herself in a home that often did not have hot water and sometimes even electricity. The mother herself had been raised in a worse environment still.

So yeah, psychologists should not assume what should traumatize someone would, or to try to force the person to deal with a trauma that does not exist. This also works the other way. What traumatized me personally may not traumatize you or another person. There is no objective correlate to what definitely results in trauma and what doesn't. The most important part is subjective feelings, like of helplessness and so forth. That's why personal meaning-making (or religious) can make a lot of difference. Same with having social support.