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Old Aug 22, 2014, 09:08 PM
cece431 cece431 is offline
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Is it harder to fight PTSD when it happened to you at a young age, 3 years old?
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Old Aug 22, 2014, 10:10 PM
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I think so yes.
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Old Aug 23, 2014, 10:24 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by cece431 View Post
Is it harder to fight PTSD when it happened to you at a young age, 3 years old?
Theoretically yes, since I think it might be less likely the 3 year old would get the help/support they need to recover from the trauma especially in an abuse situation they could be stuck in a tramatizing environment with no way to leave it... Also just having a lack of support/help after a traumatic event can increase chances of developing PTSD from it so even if the child has a good family if they aren't able to provide the right support/help which based on 3 year olds maybe having less ability to verbalize their symptoms and what not...or if the family doesn't know about the traumatic event.

So I think it sort of depends on the situation, but not so sure it's being a young age specifically that would make PTSD more difficult to fight...or if its more not really having any support or help to get through it.
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Old Aug 23, 2014, 11:40 AM
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I wouldn't put it that way...

the longer one takes to enter therapy for PTSD then the more time to develop bad habits of coping that have to be replaced which takes more therapy...

PTSD being an anxiety disorder causes us to quit thinking rationally. If it develops at an early age then rationality hasn't been developed yet and a distorted view of the whole world begins. Bad habits of thinking, being unworthy, not trusting, hypervigilance all impact your way of life. Unraveling all the bad habits and replacing them with rational, positive ones takes time.

There is no cure for PTSD but therapy makes life livable with it.
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Old Aug 23, 2014, 11:48 AM
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I wouldn't put it that way...

the longer one takes to enter therapy for PTSD then the more time to develop bad habits of coping that have to be replaced which takes more therapy...

PTSD being an anxiety disorder causes us to quit thinking rationally. If it develops at an early age then rationality hasn't been developed yet and a distorted view of the whole world begins. Bad habits of thinking, being unworthy, not trusting, hypervigilance all impact your way of life. Unraveling all the bad habits and replacing them with rational, positive ones takes time.

There is no cure for PTSD but therapy makes life livable with it.
I usually see bad habits as things the person initially had control over but just didn't bother with. like for instance as a child I had a bad habit of picking my nose its not like I 'had' to I chose to but it was a habit....A person with PTSD does not choose to take on an irrational view, feeling unworthy, not trust and be hypervigilance so not sure I agree with it coming down to bad habits.

Therefore I do not think correcting bad habits really addresses the complexity of PTSD and thus would not be an effective treatment.
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Old Aug 27, 2014, 10:33 PM
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Ive started going through trauma at the age of 2. Everything I know was told to me by my mother I Dont remember anything but feel I suffered the effects throughout my life. Today I have a few diagnoses. Bpd bipolar ptsd anxiety depression codependency and prob more. Even though I dont have flashbacks I continue to suffer.
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Old Sep 01, 2014, 02:35 PM
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vonmoxie vonmoxie is offline
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Originally Posted by Hellion View Post
I usually see bad habits as things the person initially had control over but just didn't bother with. like for instance as a child I had a bad habit of picking my nose its not like I 'had' to I chose to but it was a habit....A person with PTSD does not choose to take on an irrational view, feeling unworthy, not trust and be hypervigilance so not sure I agree with it coming down to bad habits.

Therefore I do not think correcting bad habits really addresses the complexity of PTSD and thus would not be an effective treatment.
They're also not "irrational" reactions that we end up with--in our worldview and life experience they're entirely and genuinely rational, and in fact can be the very things that once saved our lives, saved our sanity; if I hadn't become just the hypervigilant little adult-child that I was, who knows what further terror I might not have otherwise managed to avoid, and what alternate set of afflictions I might be dealing with. It continued to serve me, for many years, the wisdom of having had to contain and carry that shrapnel; only recently did it become a problem when it was dislodged and hit an artery. Metaphorically speaking; or maybe not so metaphorically. It feels like that anyway. Perhaps if my father had considered that inflicting abuse on me at the age of 4 was tantamount to shooting me with heavy artillery, I would never have become such a creative thinker; would never have had to. But ignorant bliss is a luxury that was not afforded me.

It does seem to me that it is much more complicated to resolve effects of trauma relative to how early in our development they may have happened, because we weren't processing then with the same language we use today; we have no records written, even in our heads, in what would become our native tongue. What were our thoughts like, before we had vocabulary on which they could travel? Who can recall? I certainly can't. For the few very early memories I do have, I only remember being there and receiving the information of my experience. And while I was speaking at the age of 4, I had few words to describe aspects of the trauma I experienced.. and no one to talk to about it, with only perpetrators, deniers, and the terrorized in my midst. So although the memories are vivid and intense, they do not carry the kind of linguistic narrative that is a major component of how I process everything else in life, and I do think that makes processing them more difficult, even with the recall.

I've had therapists complain that it's almost like I'm talking about someone else, when I discuss those events at all. Well, I am, sort of. I was dissociated in the sense that no part of who I knew how to be was there when those things happened (also no part of me that could be integrated with the self I was allowed to be, in order to be part of a more integrative character development over time). I'd not been given skills for operating in those kind of conditions; in contrast, I was constantly told how good I had it, how easy, how ungrateful I was. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
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Old Sep 01, 2014, 04:18 PM
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I remember things I did not have language back then to describe. However, I remember, fear, confusion and feeling "unsafe" and also being "overpowered/powerless" as well.

I think that most likely you held on to these feelings and worked around them growing up too. I would assume you most likely have these same emotions come up whenever you feel powerless with something taking place in your life or environment too.

I can now see how different things about me really do go way back. When I remember how I raised my own child, I always stayed close to her, never let her cry for hunger, I would not follow the advice about just putting her down for a nap and allowing her to cry with lonliness feeling she "had to" just go to sleep. I prefered to have her be with friends at my home so I could keep an eye on her to make sure the other child was "safe" for her to play with. I did not allow hitting and spanking in my home, I feel it only scares children because I saw too much of it in my home growing up and I know it scared me.

I was the littlest in my family growing up, I felt the most vulnerable, I never wanted my own child to feel that way.

I always wondered why I had problems with "space" perceptions tbh. Well, I finally figured out that I never really got over my childhood perceptions of space and size.
I never really wanted to have a "big house" because I felt safter in a smaller home, but I didn't really realize that about myself.

So, while you may not have a lot of language, you actually have more than you realize where your sense of "safety" and emotional support is concerned.

OE
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Old Sep 02, 2014, 05:24 PM
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vonmoxie vonmoxie is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Open Eyes View Post
So, while you may not have a lot of language, you actually have more than you realize where your sense of "safety" and emotional support is concerned.
Well.. me personally I actually might not, at least not as a result of anything I experienced during that period of my life. Perhaps my sense of an absence of safety, and of an absence of support.. but that is quite a bit different to a young mind than the existence of a thing not experienced. From as early as I can remember I only sensed my parents' need to get things from me; to get their own variety of emotional support. Completely narcissistic parenting; I felt myself not to exist except as a vehicle for satisfying their own basest psychological needs. A sense of safety for me came many years later, and emotional support even later after that as I had to create it and provide it to myself, without anything healthy to model it on.

The only way that my own earliest traumatic memories (starting with CSA, age 4, my own father, siblings present) relates to the sense of safety and emotional support I would one day have was in this absence of it, in which I only knew that something was very wrong. And had I not had the opportunity at the age of 12 to live entirely separately from my parents, in another country, I honestly do not know who I would have become. I was trapped before that. Mute, completely isolated, ostracized, and unapproached by any caring or concerned entities (despite rampant red flags). Didn't reach out for what I didn't know to exist. Only when well out of reach of my bloodline perpetrators and their self-fulfilling support system did I come to understand that safety could even exist, and without that opportunity I imagine I would have been en route for a very different set of maladies. Even worse than the junk I deal with now.

Change of scenery can do a girl a world of good though. When I came home after that year abroad, I was a different person. I did whatever I had to do to never let them abuse me again, which involved quite a bit of effort and some very difficult decisions for such a young teenager to have had to make. Previous to that though, with horrors happening inside what was then my only frame of reference, my ability to resolve what had happened simply did not exist. I cannot intimately connect with what emotions existed for me at the time, and can't recall a time that I could. I can visit the map, but not the territory.

That said, I don't know that I haven't achieved exactly as much resolve, about those early incidents, as are humanly possible and even appropriate. I certainly don't intend to entrust anyone with hypnotizing me, or otherwise endeavoring to wander about freely in my most ancient minefields. I'm quite lucky (omg I can't believe I'm saying that right now) to be as sane as I am (if you knew the irony of my making such a statement), considering the source (yup).

It's a crazy riddle, this human existence of ours. Anyone who claims to know otherwise is full of mashuguna.
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Antonio R. Damasio, “The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness” (p.28)
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