If you look at all the symptoms of PTSD, what these symptoms really mean is that your internal sense of how you developed an auto pilot where your brain really functioned so much on it's own, example, you can move around your house/apartment knowing where everything is instead of having to look for where each light switch is, where the bathroom is, and which cabinet you keep your glasses in or which drawer you have your silverware in. That is why moving ranks so high on something most people find to be one of the most stressful, even some of the things one may find more desirable in picking out a new place to live unknowingly. Often, living in a new place can be stressful until our brain gets used to functioning in that new environment where so much of that environment becomes on an auto pilot.

Also, one of the things about being so uncomfortable in the environment where a trauma occured is that our brains register a lot more about that environment then we may consciously realize. That is simply another way we are designed that is meant to help us in our ability to survive, and a lot of mammels have this feature in their brains.

So ThatSpaceDude, what you posted as "sounding strange" isn't really all that strange if you understand how the human brain actually works and why that is so. By understanding how the brain works, you can actually learn how to help yourself instead of seeing these challenges as something to fear. The whole point of recognizing yourself as "a survivor" is that you did have the ability to survive a trauma, even many traumas that you may have experienced in your past. What you managed to do is continue to preserve your sense of "auto pilot" and sense of structure.

Now, that being said, the purpose of working with a therapist is not meant to "retraumatize" or have another person decide that whatever challenged you is to be criticized or judged, but instead to get an idea of what structure you developed that you functioned well in and help you "learn" that while you experienced a major trauma, that you can get back on track with regaining your personal sense of structure. While we can never go back and change a trauma that we experienced in our lives, we CAN learn to rebuild our lives and function in spite of a major traumatic setback and the symptoms that we experience that confuse us that can interfere with our getting our sense of structure back again. This ability has been recognized and is called brain plasticity. This has also been crucial to our human survival as early man learned how to move from one location to another and adapt to a new environment that provided more food and other things in an environment that provided a way to sustain early human beings.