I have had three memorable traumatic events in a fairly long life, each about ten years apart.
I was in an explosion where my girlfriend and I were the closest people to survive; I was in a physically abusive relationship; and I was in an abusive work situation.
I had no effects from the explosion. It took me over a year to recover from the abusive relationship and separately, from the abusive job.
A counselor explained to me the reason was that after the explosion, I was in control and immediately made the right decisions to survive basically unscratched, so I experienced no trauma. In the other two cases, I was trapped and felt powerless.
Thank you for sharing your own similar experience and understanding me.
It's difficult for me to explain abuse without being stifled, but I have a feeling while everyone online talks about telling you to stop victim blaming, the abused one is victim blaming themselves anyway. It's why it's so traumatic, I replayed the situation to make sense of it, and it hurt every time, until I got out of that mental rut.
It's funny, when bad things happen I dismiss other problems I had because I had a worst one before so it helped with stresses.
Your chances of getting PTSD from a traumatic experience is less if you feel as if you are in control.
I cannot find the paper I read at the time, I feel I'm missing the right phrase, but here's a more recent one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6161595/
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I have had three memorable traumatic events in a fairly long life, each about ten years apart.
I was in an explosion where my girlfriend and I were the closest people to survive; I was in a physically abusive relationship; and I was in an abusive work situation.
I had no effects from the explosion. It took me over a year to recover from the abusive relationship and separately, from the abusive job.
A counselor explained to me the reason was that after the explosion, I was in control and immediately made the right decisions to survive basically unscratched, so I experienced no trauma. In the other two cases, I was trapped and felt powerless.