Does anyone else feel like their trauma isn't valid or real

Disclaimer: I don't have PTSD, but I come on this section a lot because I have trauma concerns .
1. I don't feel like any of it happened. I feel like when I tell someone about the abuse I'm lying. Sometimes I just feel like I read it in a book.
2. If my trauma was real, then it's not valid. Sometimes I feel like my trauma isn't valid because I was never in a war

I question myself about my trauma as well. I kept thinking that I had made up these memories, but the PTSD is very real and it interferes with my quality of life.

Hi Ad Intra,

I don't have PTSD either, but I do struggle with trauma and have also had EMDR sessions, although they worked only partially.

I do feel my trauma is real, but I don't feel it is valid. Absolutely not valid. My trauma is related to sexual abuse in my teens, but I feel it isn't valid because I didn't struggle, I just froze. Plus, I question if I do actually remember things well. Maybe I was in for it, too. Maybe I asked for it.

I am sorry for all people who have felt abused in their lives. There is no need to prove it, just that you feel it is so means you were not nurtured and loved as all people want in their hearts.

Victims of abuse often feel responsible or guilty of inviting abuse. It is easier to take the blame than face that someone we love would fall to abusing us. It is a shame that happens, but it is all too common with victims of abuse.

There are no easy answers but having a therapist specializing in surviving abuse or PTSD can really make a difference.

I have had nightmares about the Holocaust for 30 years.
I was born 29 years after WW2 ended.
The majority of the people tell me that because I was not
there...or alive during the war...that it is all just
in my head.

by the Third Reich over and over
again for 30 years. Some times I will read at a much later date
that what I witnessed was accurately true... I will
be given dates, places, calendars to look.at in my nightmares.
How can I be the author of these emotions?

I feel like I am living in a war zone.
I was r**** and molested for 7 years by a male physician.
3 years later the Holocaust nightmares began.

I was diagnosed by my therapist with PTSD.
I will have flashbacks when I am giving a lecture
when I am teaching class.
Then I will go to sleep and have 4-5 nightmares in a night.

If people witnessed all that I have, would they believe
it's just all in my head?

Maybe you are a "sensitive."
You can sense energy that most people cannot?

You are not alone. I froze too, and so have a lot of other girls and women. it doesn't mean it was consensual, it means we were too shocked or scared or confused to struggle and yell. Your pain is valid and you didn't deserve what happened to you.

I was abused by my dad between the ages of when I was born (more than likely) and 18 years old. I always feel guilty that it was my fault that he abused me, because I wasn't on Psych meds back then and I know for a fact I was more than likely Bipolar. So, really maybe I deserved the abuse is how I think. Though I know he abused me and it was the most horrible thing I went through and eventually at age 25 I filed a police report for him inflicting child abuse on me.

I'm not sure if my trauma was valid - when i lived at home (ages 14-16)- my father hit me a couple of times and my parents were always shouting. But some of my childhood was good. But then my mum committed suicide when i was 20.

I'm guessing you feel that a diagnoses will validate your trauma? Are you diagnosed with anything? My apologies if the assumption is wrong. Trauma is trauma, I would look at it this way at least I'm not a person that has to deal with the diagnoses and also process and feel the feeling the abuse should make you feel.. For instance anger, sadness, guilt. I don't feel those things as I should for parts of my trauma as a child. I definitely understand.

Just because something isn't constantly negative in your life
does mean it is not valid: nor does it mean it did not happen.

I was r**** and molested by a male physician from ages 3-10.
My mother knew. She took me to him each and every time.
She did not want me.
However, once I returned from his office--the sexual abuse stopped.
It never happened in my home.
Just because it never happened in my home--does this mean that my
trauma was not valid or real?

Say prayers and blessings for your mother.
She clearly saw no other alternative or way out of her situation.

My mother ruined my sex life.
My first, real memory is of the doctor r***** me.
I have no recovery point of normalcy to refer back to.
Every time I am with someone in an intimate relationship--
my PTSD flairs up. I start having flashbacks of the doctor r***** me.
When this happens? The relationship is over.
I stopped dating over a decade
ago because of my PTSD.

I am not convinced that I was put on this earth to have intimate
relationships.

If you haven't found a therapist that is making progress with you--
don't give up. I went to many & none of them helped me at all.
All they wanted to do is tell me how a man thinks and acts.
All of them were female.

About a year and a half ago I started going to a therapist who has the same
spiritual belief/ religious faith as I do. I highly suggest if you are spiritual, or religious--that perhaps you try finding a therapist within your faith to help you.
I have been able to open up to him--unlike all of my other therapists I had before in the past.

Also, I am learning how to trust someone from the opposite sex again.

Hang in there. Don't brainwash yourself into thinking that what happened to you was not real. Also, just because it wasn't a constant trauma 24 hours out of the day/ 7 days a week---does not mean it doesn't have merit.

.

Oh jeez, no, you weren't "in for it", if you just froze. That happened to me also when I was 19, and I did manage to say no, but then didn't manage to defend myself at all, not even shout for help, nothing. That "freezing" was definitely not healthy. I couldn't control it, or understand it. But that was clearly r***. Believe it or not, I only understood it years later. Sick.

I know and have always known that my abuse was real but at times I question if me having to deal with it all these years later is 'valid' and get hard on myself for simply not being able to get past the aftermath of the abuse. Therapy is helping me with that as well as with my flashbacks.

Take care and try to go easy on yourself. *hugs*

I can remember some of the abuse, but it's the neglect that really F's me up. I do remember pieces when I was older, but that's about all. I question every day if I 'deserve' therapy based on my past. The flashbacks I have are brutal, too, because they have almost no context and become totally grounded in maternal transference (e.g., my therapist is leaving me, no longer cares, etc...)

When I was a child, my parents let me have a kitten. Then they made me kill it. Just because it was nice while I had the kitten, doesn't mean it wasn't traumatic as **** when my father took me into the woods and made me shove it down a pipe to its death, nor does it mean that I wasn't conditioned to be so terrified of him that I didn't argue and just did as I was ordered. The nice part about having a kitten for a little while doesn't negate the rest of the story. Just because some parts of your childhood were good, doesn't negate the rest.

I agree. I've never been abused or anything, but I saw someone get struck by lightening, and now I am to afraid to tell my parents about possibility of ptsd because I feel like it isn't valid or that they'll think I'm over exaggerating.

I've had feelings like this about traumatic experiences because they weren't 'traumatic enough compared to other people' and that has kept me from talking about them for so long. Or acknowledging even to myself that they were a struggle. Sometimes memories have come up for me at odd moments or in dreams and I've just pushed them away. Coming to realise they are real, important and have deeply effected me has been challenging.

If I channel my T for a moment, she says "If it made you shut down in some way, it was enough, thats all that matters'. So if you are impacted, or effected by it, then thats the only qualification - no other comparison or measure really matters.

Its been very hard to push back against all those expectations of "deal with it, others have it worse, just move on, forget about it, focus on other things, think on the bright side, help others, don't feel sorry for yourself" etc all that common sense stuff that in this context actually doesn't make sense.

And i wholeheartedly agree that freezing is a sign it was not consensual, you don't have to blame yourself or expect yourself to have dealt with it differently.

I remember asking my mother years ago whether the doctor she took me to to fix my height (when I was 8-13 years) was legit. He basically molested me at every visit, in the next room, while she waited outside. I became completely self-loathing and, but blamed myself for this, I was obviously a freak physically, and this treatment to fix 'my height' was going to pay off. But them when puberty hit, I couldn't look at myself in the mirror, and I spiralled into a depression and disgust about myself. I don't remember much of my visits to him, other than his 'feeling up' or me and digital rape, that had no basis in his weirdo science anyway. My mother has only now admitted that she didn't pay enough attention as to what was going on in his private office.

It is only now in my early 40s that I'm really suffering mentally about all of this.It sucks - I really would like to say 'it didn't really matter'. But that's not working.

LB

I felt very similar. That's why I lived in denial for most of my life. I wasn't in war, I was a child abuse victim. I kept telling myself "that's not what that was." But the thing is, all that matters is how you feel. You are the number one authority on your personal experience. Nobody else. No one can invalidate your feelings because they can't be invalidated. Honor your feelings, you'll get there.

The primary reason for me, that I've ever questioned my own memories, is as a result of therapists so often doing so. For them it's in part because they worry they may be encountering an example of so-called false memory syndrome (even though I never forgot what happened in order to only remember it later in a questionable way), but the end result for me is that in having to repeatedly re-quantify these deeply definitive experiences in these settings, it can wear down on my own orientation with them.

The other thing to consider with regard to this question is that the way traumatic memories are stored is different from other memories; because we become sort of frozen in those moments, experiencing shock in real time, the memories have sort of a movie-like, or slow-motion quality, and as a result we don't talk about them in the same way. When we re-tell them it can sound like a third person experience, which can also confuse people about their validity. Therapists are always telling me it's surprising to them that I don't express the types of emotion they would expect when I share about my traumatic experiences, but that is what shock is like, and at least in the way it has felt to me: deeply embedded traumatic experience is shock made permanent.

In that traumatic memories tend to feel very different even to us than our regular memories, it's only natural that there can be a feeling of "unrealness" to them; in some cases we've been able to dissociate at the time, so that we really were there but not there; or there in a uniquely different way.

Denial is a coping mechanism. It fails to work as we grow more mature and can't reason out the evidences. Also, for those who were told, such as in child abuse, by the abuser that it was their fault, not the abuser's, then that also props up the idea that it really wasn't ---whatever you're telling yourself--- and you "deserved it anyway"...

Don't beat yourself up over the coping mechanisms you use to survive... working with at therapist will allow you to safely dismantled them in the future. (((safe hugs)))

I feel like a fraud and a lier - I really struggle to believe the flashbacks actually happened, they just don't feel real. So many memories are recovered- I feel that invalidates them. But the effects are very real, and theres building evidence externally that it did happen. Im beginning to think it did all happen- but dissociation is what makes it feel unreal. I struggle to believe any and all of it. And yet I do. Its very confusing.

I am sorry you feel that. I often disassociate from some of my events, they just become facts most of the time. I also struggle with the fact that while there were some physical events, there was much more emotional, verbal, and psychological abuse which makes me often feel less valid than others. I suppose this is an example that we should not compare our pain and trauma to others.
If you experienced trauma it is your pain, your past, and you have every right to feel violated and seek help. Take care!