TRIGGER WARNING

Here's a listing of my traumas - that I can remember:

Childhood and adolescence:
1. Sexual abuse (multiple times, multiple perps - both from male family members and non-family-members, from age 3 to 18)
2. Physical abuse (from my father, which occurred regularly)
3. Emotional abuse (from both my parents, which occurred regularly since at least the age of 3)
4. Neglect (many different kinds, but primarily emotional neglect)
5. Domestic violence exposure (my father would beat my mother)
6. Vicarious/secondary trauma (when hearing about the traumatic experiences my father went through during WWII)
7. Microaggression and race-based traumatic stress injuries (when my White father would make negative comments about Japanese people; my mother is Japanese, and I am therefore half-White, half-Japanese)
8. Being bullied in school (called names, beat up, ostracized)
9. Experiencing neighborhood violence (gang activity, having my stuff stolen, being cat-called during my early and late teen years)
10. Medical trauma (getting sick frequently, getting my period at an early age and being interrogated by everyone about why, being made fun of at school and elsewhere when I'd bleed through my maxi pad at the age of 9, being made fun of and having to take so many different pills and ointments for acne since the age of 7)
11. Separation trauma from multiple ecological losses when my parents moved frequently and had us change schools, friends, etc. frequently.
12. Grief and loss trauma when my best friend was murdered by some man at the age of 14 (I was supposed to go out with her that night, but instead I had to work at my part-time job, which I had parental consent to work at the time; I felt guilty for not being there to protect my best friend, or fearing that if I went with her I would have been killed, too)
13. Earthquake trauma (natural disaster trauma)
14. Vicarious/secondary trauma when my neighbor killed himself after fumigating his home and not leaving (I've hated and feared bug spray ever since)
15. Moral injury traumas: Multiple times from multiple perpetrators or influenced from multiple perpetrators between the ages of 7 and 13 (I am too ashamed to outline the specifics)
16. Spiritual abuse: When my pedophilic uncle kept giving me spiritual gifts after sexually abusing me (those gifts entailed a coin with a triangle and eye in the center, a paper with that same symbol, which I got in trouble later for coloring all over it with crayons)
17. Threatened and coerced to maintain secrecy for multiple things, which cuts across so many different types of trauma, including moral injuries

Early adulthood:
1. Grief and loss trauma when my father passed away from a heart attack
2. Moral injury: My half-sister's fiance was a police officer shortly before he got fired, and he was trying to get me to do things for him that were not good (I reported him, and thankfully he is no longer with my half-sister)
3. Domestic and intimate partner violence victimizations from one man I was in a relationship with (after my military experiences)
4. Theft victimization: People stealing my things
5. Sexual harassment: This happened to me at one job, not including the military (which I separated below)

Military sexual trauma during early adulthood:
1. Sexual assaults during my time in service from those who ranked higher than me - all male.
2. Moral injury: Being made or influenced to not disclose my victimizations, which may have meant that more victims occurred because of my lack of reporting

Adulthood:
1. Identity theft: This happened to me multiple times, which is why I'm afraid of posting online at times
2. Rape (after the military): This happened to me two times
3. Discrimination: This happened to me a number of times across a number of jurisdictions and in many different institutions
4. Therapy abuse (when a therapist insisted that I see her four times a week in her home and sometimes in her bedroom, and when her roommate got jealous and threatened my life; thankfully, a trauma treatment facility helped me when I went in-patient after that trauma/retraumatization)
5. Spiritual abuse from various religious institutions that try to get demons out of me, that judged me, that ostracized me for my agnostic beliefs
6. Microaggressions: Continued throughout my life concerning my race, appearance, height, weight, skin color, dress, socioeconomic status, age, gender, disability, veteran status, specific diagnoses, etc.
7. Emotional abuse in educational settings
8. Victim of Title IX: I made a complaint against a peer who was harming not only me but also others on campus
9. For a short while, and for short periods throughout my adult life, I was homeless, so I had dealt with deprivation trauma (lack of food, shelter, safety, capable guardianship, social capital, health care, resources) and multiple losses of relationships, jobs, resources, and reputation
10. Natural disaster traumas (blizzard, heavy rains/flooding, hearing about sinkholes in the area)
11. Vicarious/secondary traumas (I won't get into them here, but I was planning to go to NYC for my birthday in September 2001, but then 9/11 happened, and some of my boss's colleagues who had interviews at the WTC on 9/11 were thankfully spared when they were late to their meetings due to subway delays; I heard about stories from them and some sad stories I read and watched in newspapers and on television, respectively)

Yes, I have experienced both POST-traumatic stress AND CONTINUOUS traumatic stress throughout my lifetime. Yes, I have been resilient throughout most of my childhood and early adulthood, which is why I was able to accomplish graduating from high school, working part-time as a teenager, passing many different exams to get into the police reserve academy and successfully completing that, scoring high enough on the ASVAB to get guaranteed enlistment for a career in aviation/support/traffic control (though never trained due to my military injuries that led to my honorable discharge prematurely), going through boot camp, and finding work shortly after my honorable discharge from the military.

No, that resilience did not sustain me long enough to continue to deal with my traumas during adulthood (30s to now, mid-40s); my conditions worsened and my dissociative symptoms seemingly increased or were made more aware to me. My PTSD worsened over time, despite my therapies for dissociation and trauma. Continued traumatic stress and revictimization during my years in college and post-bacc years in research led to the return of my trauma symptoms. Resilience and positive psychology helped me, but only to a point. I needed to acknowledge to myself and with the help of others in the community that I was still actually being victimized, that it wasn't my faulty thinking, and that I needed a safer atmosphere to heal from that on top of my past traumas. For other traumas that didn't involve victimization from another person, such as many loss issues and some minor vicarious traumas as well as minor natural disasters, I felt like the world and everyone in it weren't safe at times. It's one thing to have non-interpersonal traumas that exact fears of the world, but not necessarily of people, but another when you have experienced both interpersonal and non-interpersonal traumas that increase fears of both the world and the people in it.

I've learned to manage my symptoms over the years, and to enjoy some of the wonderful things and people in the world. I've learned in college to admire the science behind geology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, criminal justice, victomology, traumatology, technology, and many other fields. There are some people who do bad things, and the climate changes (whatever the etiologies) have gotten really out of hand and traumatic for others, but I'm learning to find the good in this world and in people, too. It's hard when news reinforces trauma without actually naming certain phenomena as traumatic.

I'd venture to bet that a lot of people have experienced more than one trauma in their lifetimes, even if they never perceived such experiences as traumatic. Perhaps some people are more resilient than others, but my resilience in childhood and early adulthood only carried me so far. I eventually broke down. I'm hoping to heal some more.