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Ever doubt that “it was significant enough to count as t-word”? 

Well, the key word is significance. 

Let’s break this down simply and talk about what really creates PTSD; our brains’ subjective experience of fear and the meaning we give events (and ourselves) in the aftermath. 

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Transcript / Blog Version:

It’s a point we’re revisiting because it stubbornly fades, and re-emerges on repeat.

If you’ve ever found yourself sitting in a bottomless cluster of shame, similar to the hangover you get from shitty, similarly dosed mimosas – you’re not alone. Shame for everything you have done, for what you haven’t done, and for your interpretations of both – as others have informed you your perspective was awack, and you just “should” see things another way… you’re not the only one. Far from it.

But if one of the things you shame yourself about is the possibility that maybe you have NOTHING to be complexly bothered by – that ACTUALLY, your life was just fine and you need to readjust your interpretation of your entire life autobiography… you’re in extra good company.

I don’t think a single Motherfucker in the community has ever NOT said the words “I used to doubt that it was really so bad” or “I still do.” “WAS this trauma? SHOULD I have PTSD from it?”

It’s a common experience, doubting your past. Or trying to see it through a thousand different frames, last of which is your own. Even when your therapist informs you “this is called trauma or PTSD,” you might doubt that they’re seeing things correctly. Maybe you painted things in a more dire light than necessary, right? Maybe you said some things that they’re just reading into too much. That’s what you’ve probably heard before, anyways. Seems to fit the bill.

Everyone has to tango with the realizations of trauma – especially when it involves people who we have complicated, sometimes caring, sometimes mortifying, relationships with, that foster a sense of ambivalence you’ve never been able to quite pinpoint. Loyal to the people involved, somehow, but also aware that things didn’t seem… quite right.

So what do you do now? Finally believe your brain? Or continue finding ways and reasons to frame history in more compassionate light. More compassionate for others, that is. At the sacrifice of acknowledging your own past and your Self.

But that’s one of our major trauma obstacles. Believing that the past happened the way it happened, and that it mattered in structuring our lives ever since.

Problem being, there are so many ways to see the past. And so many opportunities to judge yourself for the apparently “off-base” reactions and interpretations you drew from it. Landing us in a perpetual cycle of abandoning ourselves, off-writing our memories and emotions, while disrupting our own autobiographies with doubts of self-accuracy or trustworthiness.

So “was it trauma?”

Well. Here’s what we can definitively say after this past year of research and life experience, collected from the community, which shines a lot of light on this perspective doubting…

Yo, it’s not about the actual event – how that event looks from the outside to others. It’s about the aftermath of the event – how that event impacted you and, maybe more importantly, how your brain sewed that interpretation into the rest of your life story.

That’s it.

We don’t have life-destructive events happen, and our tiny brains frame them through “well, this doesn’t matter, because so and so hasn’t been affected by it.” We experience the events. And our own heads have to figure out what that means. For us. For survival.

IS there consideration of the ways others are impacted? Absolutely, we’re a fawning and fixing bunch. But is that all a biological brain will focus on, when safely living is now in question?

No. And it will make up stories to understand the ramifications of your most gas-station toilet-esque events in life.

So, early in the year we talked about long-lasting PTSD being a perspective-based disorder, in a sense that we’ll talk about a lot later. But, fact is, you don’t have to go through the WORST event in human history for your brain to make up stories about it that impact your subsequent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors… indefinitely.

Hell, YOU don’t even have to be the one who immediately experiences the event to acquire PTSD from it.

We found out that subjective fear moderates post-traumatic stress. The experience of fear, itself, is enough to send a head spinning for a long time afterwards. It has to protect and serve, better than the nation’s blue do around here.

Also keep in mind, humans have a lot of extra factors to fear in the world. Including things like finances, social standing, and the ability for human connection. Even belief in your own personal capacity can be a t-word thorn in your side – we’ll return to that. So there are a lot of ways that we can experience fear – and they might not boil down to immediate physical harm.

See how the “is it trauma” conversation gets hard to pinpoint, compare, or define, between inherently varying perspectives?

Now also consider that we’re deeply socially connected animals who try to learn from others’ examples to spare ourselves the same pain… and that means, we can scoop up PTSD from observing other folks have seemingly life-destructive events.

From others, we can gain the realization at a very young age that terrible fates can befall us, and life can change in an instant. Or abuse is normal and expected, following us everywhere we go. Or humans are dangerous. The whole world is.

We love our fancy primate brains, but we don’t really consider how powerful they are. That they’re observing and recording… but then they’ll start analyzing and extrapolating with or without us. What they ultimately come up with, how that’s turned into automatic programs, and how those stories impact us forever, seems to be a blind point.

At the end of the day, the downside of having a complex, integrative, future-preminating human brain is… that we don’t just live through these events once and let them go. They stay with us. And we develop regular thoughts, expectations for the future, and behavioral patterns to cope with them. To protect ourselves against them happening in the future.

In this way, it’s the aftermath of trauma – when we’re processing the event and making meaning from it – that fucks us. More specifically, it’s being left alone with our own thoughts, or surrounded by unhealthy and dismissive brains of others, in the aftermath that fucks us.

Our brains turn against us, it turns out. Especially with the imparting of shame and blame that amounts to “somehow this event is your fault,” “you deserved it,” or “it wasn’t even that bad, you shouldn’t feel anything about it.” And people echo those sentiments for their own protection.

Brains look for explanations for events that have happened – it’s their job to understand so we can better navigate the world. And unfortunately, our own experience or accountability in the matter is the easiest one for most of us to pick at. “Well, I don’t know EVERYTHING that happened surrounding this event, but I know what my role was… so how was this a result of my actions?” Or, “How am I blowing it out of proportion, like everyone says?”

Our perspective on the situation has the ability to flip 180 degrees from what we THOUGHT happened, and we instead turn the event in on ourselves.

“WAS it a trauma and how was it due to my actions or inactions?”

It’s smart and it makes sense to keep us alive – we’re not very wise apes if we don’t learn from our experiences to better walk the earth without falling in the same sulfur pits. Unfortunately, all of our efforts to keep ourselves safe become destructive and degradative to our actual life experiences.

And no assorted layperson may be able to gauge the connections from that original event to the outcomes you experience from the outside. That’s something only your brain, maybe with the help of some trauma-informed professionals, can do.

So. If or when you find yourself in a “was this trauma” doubt sesh, remember. There’s proof, and it can be traced backwards in your past.

Our post-traumatic lessons and key takeaways result in behavioral changes. Especially when so many things inside and outside our front doors feel dangerous to us, triggering those cognitive and behavioral patterns and putting us in trauma-reactive places on the regular. This is where we get long-lasting, chronic, PTSD. Things like falling into pits of agoraphobia, insomnia, paranoia, isolation, stagnation, self-doubt, and demoralization. These are common outcomes of a brain that’s running on programs derived from traumatic events.

Ever hypervigilant, obsessive, attention-deficit or hyper-active, fearful, ashamed, anxious, weirdly-attached to others, and beyond… with increasing fervor, as more and more events are categorized with the original ones, and we continually reassess the world as being an endless source of struggle, in so many ways.

So to answer your question, if you’ve experienced anything that sounds like what’s been described above. Going through an event that was fearful for you, yourself. Witnessing a life- or self-altering event that happened to someone around you. Failing to have social support after the event to healthily explain or reframe the happening. And regularly experiencing re-emergences of shame, blame, fear, life and self-disruption ever since…

Yeah, motherfucker, you got the PTSDs. You experienced a trauma. No one else needs to see it the same way for your brain to have interpreted it to be significant and developed adaptively – maladaptively, in the long-run – in the aftermath.

No one else gets to judge your experiences. No one can understand the impact they had on you. No one can actually put themselves in your shoes – even if they were ever to fully try. Especially when we’re talking about young children experiencing these events, looking back at them as adults.

No one needs to quality-control your past, for it to have affected you significantly. And in ways that are still a mystery to you, let alone to others.

The good news is, we don’t NEED to have other people “get it” to believe in and honor those experiences, ourselves. We build up our sense of self and self-esteem to trust in ourselves, our perceptions, and our capacities, as we recover over time. That’s the real meat of rewiring our brains long-term. So we never again have to look at our pasts and wonder “is this my fault, or should I care at all?”

But at times when you DO need someone to validate what you’ve seen, there are support options. Foster a healthy social system with boundaries and brains that understand and support your own, however you can get started. Find folks who “get it” and don’t need to challenge your history. There’s a Fort full of them here, if you’re ever interested.

But no matter what… don’t you dare doubt your own past.

Your experience is what counts when it comes to PTSD.

No one else can be inside your brain – hell, you probably try to avoid it as much as possible, yerself.

And remember, it’s the aftermath that seals in our perspectives. Those perspectives turn into lifetimes of either acceptance and growth or doubt and further fear. So listen to, respect, and support your brain after every event, no matter what shit-goblin life might throw at you next. And, of course, we’ll talk about ways to do that in every upcoming episode.

Til we meet again.

Hail your Self.

Hail your subjective experience and what every event meant to YOU.

Hail Archie.

And cheers y’all. I’ll talk to you real soon.