Written by Sam Lasky
When I first heard the word trauma or PTSD, I thought it meant jumping at loud noises or having a panic attack in crowded places. The acronym PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, elicited the assumption that you had to have been through something objectively disastrous and life-ruining, like war or physical abuse, in order to qualify. For years, the gravity of the word left me wondering, did I?
I went through a lot in my late teens and early twenties. At 20, while in college, I suffered a roommate breakup that devastated me to my core. It involved being kicked out of my first ever apartment in Boston – the home away from home I’d always dreamed of- and moving in with my parents. While living in their new home in suburban Florida, I suffered the loneliness and isolation that is common of young people living outside the mainstream. I subsequently began to build upon the foundation of an already emerging eating disorder, something that only worsened when I returned to Boston and entered the beginnings of a relationship with a male friend of mine. What came of this experience was nothing but panic — waking up in the morning unable to breathe. I hated my body, not just for the size but for the aversion to sex. Why didn’t I want it? Why was I so impossibly different? The paranoia of it all drove me out of Boston to a farm in Maine, where long nights living on the edge of a potato field worsened my condition, and I woke up one night in the middle of a rainstorm to find myself vomiting into the bushes.
I was sent to residential treatment, a relatively traditional DBT and CBT center luxuriated by its surrounding New Hampshire farmland and mountains. In the presence of kind therapists and fellow residents, the panic mercifully began to slip away. I devoted myself to the wise words of Zach, an occupational therapist who worked at the center, and educated me on everything there was to know about calming the nervous system. I felt I’d found the answer to my problems, but was devastated when weeks after I graduated, Zach failed to keep his promise of staying in touch.
Sixth months later, as I navigated working and living with my brother in our childhood home in the suburbs of Chicago, the anxiety crept up worse than before. Old negative beliefs became my daily mantra. I began to spend hours counting calories, exercising, and crying on my bedroom floor, lamenting the size of my body and my inability to fully control it. I was a person possessed. It wasn’t long before I ended up in the hospital.
After that, another residential center. The goal was to “weight restore”— a term I believed to have been invented by sadists. Days of protesting food turned into moments of surrender. I emerged stronger than I left, largely because of the peers around me. I was no longer alone. I took this knowledge with me whenever I went, and it helped.
I moved to a very communal sober house in Chicago. I went to college in sunny California. But what I couldn’t handle through all of this was the incessancy of my racing thoughts—there was never any relief. At 22, exhausted and overwhelmed by the demands of my psyche, I sought help from a last resort: a hypnotist. At $300, the financial cost was tempting and cheap, but the mental cost turned out to be much greater.
All the while, I never imagined that these collected experiences and subsequent behaviors could be anything other than unfortunate. Many of them were, as described by therapists, “little t” traumas as opposed to the larger, more serious “big t” traumas. The whole concept of “little t” and “big t” made sense when I first heard it, because it solidified the commonly accepted idea that there are some life experiences that are objectively more serious and impactful than others.
However, as time went on, I began to question the notion that some things were “objectively” smaller than others in their impact. I watched friends and family members wave away significant life events, too afraid to associate themselves with the word “trauma,” regardless of the “big” or “little” assignment. I remembered my own aversion to the word. Trauma? Surely that was for other people…not for a girl whose privilege had given her the resources to go to college, work, and attend various treatment centers.
I was not a survivor of trauma. I was not a girl with PTSD or cPTSD. I believed these things… until the hypnotist.
After leaving her office one afternoon in August 2023, I noticed the onset of a mental fog rolling in. I had no idea where it was coming from or why, only assumed it was there as a momentary byproduct of the work we’d done. It turned out to be more than momentary. In the days that followed, the fog solidified into a fixture over my memories and cognitive functioning. I thought I was going insane. Days turned to months before I realized what I was experiencing was dissociation – a disconnect from my body and reality. Or, more specifically in my case, depersonalization and derealization disorder: DPDR, a lesser known byproduct of repeated traumatic experiences or a sudden panic attack that causes the nervous system to shut down its emotional processing and frontal lobe activity.
I learned I was paying the ultimate price for a life lived in denial of my own trauma, my resistance to processing or feeling what happened to me in all my years of moving around and having my heart broken. I was quite literally no longer able to live in reality. And not just for a few seconds or days, but for months that have now accumulated into a full year.
You can see I was given lots of help, having gone to several therapists and treatment centers, my pain was constantly evaluated and diagnosed, but the one thing I was never told and never let myself believe was that I had been through a “big t” trauma.
Now, I know it’s trauma that created my racing thoughts. My codependency. My eating disorder, my “borderline” diagnosis, my “ADHD” diagnosis. It was trauma fueling the way I moved through the world, the fact that I couldn’t stand being overstimulated or even a little bit neglected.
One day, prior to the hypnotist event, I was trying to convince my sister that she had gone through something traumatic, so I looked up the definition of trauma online. It’s described as “a deeply distressing or disturbing experience.” It comes from the late 17th century, a Greek word meaning “wound.”
In my life, I knew I had been wounded. By parents, friends, therapists, but the world wanted me to think it wasn’t bad enough, that none of it was a deep enough cut. It was only a “little t, not a big t.”
I let myself believe that for a long time, but I see now how dangerous and invalidating it was. I want everyone to know that no matter how small they think the wound is, or how small others have told them it is, it’s still a wound. It was distressing and disturbing to you. That’s trauma. It’s subjective. No one can tell you about your pain. Even I can’t tell my sister if she has been through something traumatic. All I can ask her is, are you still distressed by it? Did it disturb you? Are you okay?
And then I have to let her decide what her wounds mean. Just like I’ve decided about my own.
For more information on trauma and healing please visit our resources on the TILA website.