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Is This What Trauma Feels Like?
How you process extreme stress now can pay off in the long run
My diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder came after a string of difficult personal events: a traumatic birth, an eviction, two close family members diagnosed with cancer, marital problems, even a cockroach infestation. Taken on their own, I might have managed each, but as they piled up over the course of three years, I found my anxiety climbing. I had nightmares and horrible daydreams; I was unable to focus on my son; I had panic attacks that put me in the hospital. A chat with my family doctor got me a referral to a social worker who specializes in PTSD. In my first session, I cried, not knowing if what I had gone through “counted” as traumatic; she reassured me that it did, and that she could help.
It was in PTSD therapy that I learned a way of thinking about trauma that can be very reassuring to people who, like me, might be compelled to second-guess the severity of their experience: ‘big-T’ trauma and ‘little-t’ trauma. Big-T covers the kinds of huge, cataclysmic experiences that we tend to associate with PTSD — things like combat, sexual assault, and life-threatening illness. Little-t traumas, on the other hand, might not be directly life- or body-threatening, but can be hugely destabilizing in a person’s life: job loss; housing uncertainty; food…
