As someone who has PTSD, it's annoying when people say that they're "triggered" when they're pissed off. I think people don't realise that anger is a normal human emotion and it's unpleasant to experience and that there's nothing actually wrong with you if you get angry enough to have an unpleasant afternoon or evening, but that maybe it's not quite right to appropriate the language of PTSD to describe the fact that you read a piece of fanfiction in which someone cheated, and having been cheated on in the past, it brought up a lot of bad memories, but you were still able to function. I may have even told some person who seemed rather privileged to me at the time that it wasn't quite right for her to use that language for that particular situation.
The thing about triggers is that you don't actually always get conscious memories when they're tripped. There was an exchange on a TV show that was so exactly like an exchange my mother had several times, and after I watched it I became hyperactive and anxious and wound up and unable to think clearly, but the exchange actually seemed really normal to me and I remember being surprised that other people thought it was abusive, which it certainly was, and later when I realised that I felt weirdly gratefully vindicated. But in the moment I was angry that people didn't think relationships happened like that all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was so very upset, and why I wanted to hide and to snap at people and was afraid to go to bed. My best friend had to tell me that I was exhibiting all the signs of having been triggered, and she was right. I was freaking out because just observing two other people have that same exchange on a TV screen in a program I knew had been filmed months earlier and hundreds of miles away had sent all the right signals to my subconscious mind that I was in danger and flooded my entire body with adrenaline, so that when my mother (whom I haven't seen since 1991) turned on me I'd be ready for whatever she did. I wasn't angry; I wasn't even conscious of how scared I was. I was just...ready for combat.
BUT.
BUT BUT BUT.
PTSD doesn't always or even usually come from a single definable incident. It can--people can develop it after being raped, or mugged, or having a single intensely traumatic experience--and I'm certainly not denying that their PTSD is real PTSD. But often people have PTSD because they were in a combat situation that went on for a while, a really long while, like a war, or a sexually abusive relationship, or in my case, an emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive family of origin coupled with horrific bullying in school.
For people who are multiply oppressed under the kyriarchy, I think that ordinary life must be kind of like a combat situation. The constant microaggressions, the knowledge that you can't just directly ask for what you need and expect to get it, that you can't trust people, that even people who seem likable and trustworthy and friendly may turn on you when they discover "it" (whatever your "it" is) or stop acting like "a credit" to the group they think you're an exception to, that you are more likely to get mugged or raped or murdered...how different is that from being in a war zone, really?
So. I think that low-level PTSD is probably really common in people who have to live in a world that tries to erase their existence and destroy them. And if any trans person ever told me that they thought they might have PTSD simply as a result of having to live in a world where trans people are treated like shit all the time as a matter of course, I would absolutely believe that person.
I don't know if you were triggered or not. But what I do know is that while a lot of people misuse the word to mean "something really pissed me off" or "something brought up bad memories that I was consciously able to process but it upset me for a long time and that's got to be the same, right?" there are also a fucktonne of people who have PTSD and don't know that they have it. I still remember the first time a psychiatrist sat me down and explained to me that even though I hadn't had some of the experiences I thought at that time that you had to have had to "really" be an abused child, he still thought that all of the stress and trauma I had experienced growing up had affected my brain chemistry and neurology possibly permanently, and that there was nothing wrong with it if I needed to take medication for that because processing it all was just making me a very insightful and well educated anxious person who was not able to work or take proper care of herself.
Before this we had talked a lot about paranoid ideation but the thing is that my childhood was an environment in which believing that most people did not have my best interest at heart was a good strategic and survival adaptation. Or in other words, "you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you", and one of the things that makes PTSD hard is trying to learn how to live in a world that is NOT out to get you (if you leave an abusive situation or come back from the war or whatever).
But I think it's even harder if you never get to leave, because the whole world is your war.
IDK.
Sorry, a depressing comment is hardly an introduction. I came over here to see who you were because I'm a friend of vaurora and I read that you weren't meeting interesting people in SF so I decided to come take a look at what you had going on. :)
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Date: 2012-05-18 07:53 pm (UTC)The thing about triggers is that you don't actually always get conscious memories when they're tripped. There was an exchange on a TV show that was so exactly like an exchange my mother had several times, and after I watched it I became hyperactive and anxious and wound up and unable to think clearly, but the exchange actually seemed really normal to me and I remember being surprised that other people thought it was abusive, which it certainly was, and later when I realised that I felt weirdly gratefully vindicated. But in the moment I was angry that people didn't think relationships happened like that all the time, and I couldn't figure out why I was so very upset, and why I wanted to hide and to snap at people and was afraid to go to bed. My best friend had to tell me that I was exhibiting all the signs of having been triggered, and she was right. I was freaking out because just observing two other people have that same exchange on a TV screen in a program I knew had been filmed months earlier and hundreds of miles away had sent all the right signals to my subconscious mind that I was in danger and flooded my entire body with adrenaline, so that when my mother (whom I haven't seen since 1991) turned on me I'd be ready for whatever she did. I wasn't angry; I wasn't even conscious of how scared I was. I was just...ready for combat.
BUT.
BUT BUT BUT.
PTSD doesn't always or even usually come from a single definable incident. It can--people can develop it after being raped, or mugged, or having a single intensely traumatic experience--and I'm certainly not denying that their PTSD is real PTSD. But often people have PTSD because they were in a combat situation that went on for a while, a really long while, like a war, or a sexually abusive relationship, or in my case, an emotionally abusive and sometimes physically abusive family of origin coupled with horrific bullying in school.
For people who are multiply oppressed under the kyriarchy, I think that ordinary life must be kind of like a combat situation. The constant microaggressions, the knowledge that you can't just directly ask for what you need and expect to get it, that you can't trust people, that even people who seem likable and trustworthy and friendly may turn on you when they discover "it" (whatever your "it" is) or stop acting like "a credit" to the group they think you're an exception to, that you are more likely to get mugged or raped or murdered...how different is that from being in a war zone, really?
So. I think that low-level PTSD is probably really common in people who have to live in a world that tries to erase their existence and destroy them. And if any trans person ever told me that they thought they might have PTSD simply as a result of having to live in a world where trans people are treated like shit all the time as a matter of course, I would absolutely believe that person.
I don't know if you were triggered or not. But what I do know is that while a lot of people misuse the word to mean "something really pissed me off" or "something brought up bad memories that I was consciously able to process but it upset me for a long time and that's got to be the same, right?" there are also a fucktonne of people who have PTSD and don't know that they have it. I still remember the first time a psychiatrist sat me down and explained to me that even though I hadn't had some of the experiences I thought at that time that you had to have had to "really" be an abused child, he still thought that all of the stress and trauma I had experienced growing up had affected my brain chemistry and neurology possibly permanently, and that there was nothing wrong with it if I needed to take medication for that because processing it all was just making me a very insightful and well educated anxious person who was not able to work or take proper care of herself.
Before this we had talked a lot about paranoid ideation but the thing is that my childhood was an environment in which believing that most people did not have my best interest at heart was a good strategic and survival adaptation. Or in other words, "you're not paranoid if they're really out to get you", and one of the things that makes PTSD hard is trying to learn how to live in a world that is NOT out to get you (if you leave an abusive situation or come back from the war or whatever).
But I think it's even harder if you never get to leave, because the whole world is your war.
IDK.
Sorry, a depressing comment is hardly an introduction. I came over here to see who you were because I'm a friend of