[floatingurboat]

Ok so basically I've been diagnosed with PTSD. It seemed to come out of the blue, I really wasn't expecting it. My husbands first reaction was one of "now it all makes sense" and upon further reading I seem to fit the description quite nicely. HOWEVER I'm not sure what it's from? I know I've had plenty of traumatic events happen in my life, but as far as one being the cause I'm not sure what that would be? Could it be a combination of just all the crappy things that have happened to me? I was under the impression that it would be one thing that would stand out in my mind. I'm rather confused as I was given something of a cocktail of diagnoses and all of them seem to fit to some extent. I feel like if I could pinpoint THE thing that has triggered this disorder I'd be able to conquer it and have one less thing on my plate.

[Alishia88]

floatingurboat, do you get flashbacks or nightmares? If you do, those could give you a sense of what led to your PTSD.

If you don´t, I think it can come from one single thing, but also from many crappy things that pile up over a longer period of time.
In this case, I don´t think you can say it´s just "one" of those things, it´s all of those together, which alone might not have led to your illness. I guess you´ll have to look at all of those things that happened to you and that traumatized you, in therapy. I´m not a therapist though, I don´t know, your therapist can help, I´m sure

[floatingurboat]

I do have nightmares, basically every night. More often than not though they don't really pertain to anything that has happened to me.. They're just very gruesome and awful. Or there are the awesome 'someone I love treating me terribly' dreams. I've just been having a hard time pinpointing it. I suppose it could be the accumulation of things over time, I was just always under the impression that it was one major thing. I'm new to this, so I'm still learning about it.

[Teacake]

Remember that trauma is not the event that happened to you but the way your body responded. If you go into freeze mode and stay stuck there, you've got a traumatised body. Children may experience trauma from surgery, of they are confined, restrained, and unconscious. Obviously an appendectomy under anaesthesia in a safe and clean hospital is not three tours of Afghanistan, and the trauma responses are not identical, but trauma is trauma. What rises to the level of a PTSD dx will vary and IMO the dx is so overused as to make it useless. Anyone whose mental illness may have been made worse by a traumaticevent now has ptsd. The fact remains most people are in some kind of shock and holistic therapies for that can only help us. Everyone benefits from good and sane ptsd treatment.