Some of you who've seen my posts in the past know that he's never referred to it as "trauma" and I've been scared to. He's danced around the word, at one point saying the experiences exceeded my ability to cope. But he didn't use the word and so I didn't either. In my head it's been "the T word" ("transference" being the other "T word").
I worry I'm overreacting. I worry I'm being melodramatic. I worry it wasn't that bad. I worry that I was just weak and bad. He validates that these things are not true. But there was no physical or sexual violence. One time he asked me if I had flashbacks (no) or nightmares (also no). So I kind of assumed that meant he'd decided it wasn't PTSD. I also asked him about the diagnoses he had for me and they didn't include PTSD.
I was scared that if I called it trauma he'd tell me it wasn't.

We'd kind of moved away from the topic for a few months. Some med changes had triggered suicidal ideation so we'd kind of been focused on that and other things going on in the present. But it came up again yesterday. I think because he brought up anger? He wants me to allow myself to be angry at my parents and I said I just don't feel angry and hadn't been experiencing the sudden overwhelming urge to hit something or throw things because we hadn't been talking about my childhood. It had been really weird for me to experience at the time.

He asked more about it and I ended up explaining/describing the emotional flashbacks (though I didn't use that word). We'd talked about them before but this was exploring it a bit more. I told him I hated how the emotions came out of nowhere and weren't about anything at the time, it was like reexperiencing the emotions from that time all at once.

We talked about the specific frustrated powerless anger of being unable to do anything and how it felt like I was fighting for my dignity and personhood every day for years. No one else stood up to my father. No one protected me.

I told him that I didn't understand my reactions. I told him that I hated that I hadn't even started to remember this stuff until less than a year ago when it came up in therapy and all of a sudden I was remembering these major aspects of my childhood and adolescence that I somehow hadn't remembered until now. It makes me feel crazy. Being overcome with sudden emotions out of nowhere makes me feel crazy. Realizing that I'd just forgotten such huge parts of my life is unsettling. I don't think there's anything else I'm not remembering, but the idea scares me.

I asked him if this was normal. He said it was, and made some comparison to people with PTSD reacting to triggers. I said that that is something most people are aware of though, it's a common reaction.

He asked if I could see that my experience was a form of PTSD.

I asked if I should quote the DSM at him. I think I was testing to see whether he seriously believed it and I was looking for reassurance. Up until this point I didn't know whether he was a DSM purist when it came to the definition and I was too afraid to ask.

He said "what, because you didn't think you were going to die? You were just saying it was what you had to do to survive." I said I didn't have flashbacks and he pointed out that I'd also just been describing being overcome with sudden waves of emotion out of nowhere that were from those times and not a response to the situation in the present and that it made me feel unstable and crazy.

I then curled up tighter (I sit on his office floor hugging my knees to my chest in the fetal position. It's something I started doing when we first started talking about my childhood lmao) and went silent and after a minute he asked me where I went, said that I'd been there in the room with him and now it seemed like I wasn't there anymore. I told him the words he used scared me. That I wanted to deny it and say it couldn't be true. At some point I used minimizing language and he was like "'somewhat bad'? To use your words, it was some ****ed up ****."

Then we talked about how I'd feel if it was someone else. I joked that the fact that I talked about it all in such a detached way instead of being emotional about it the way I would if it was someone else meant that I was "over it" and "completely fine." He made the very good point that the number of scars even just visible at the time would suggest otherwise.

I think I need to do some writing. I should probably tell him how much of a big deal it's been to me that he didn't use that word. He's probably going to tell me he wishes I'd brought it up, but if he'd told me he didn't think it was that I would have been devastated and it would have been super invalidating and even harder for me to talk about.

Idk. I have a lot of feelings right now.