*Trigger warning, I'm talking about the events that led to my current mental health issues, events namely isolation+'bullying'*
Hi, I didn't really know what subject line to give this, but I'm basically wanting to open a discussion around potentials for bullying to cause C-PTSD? I've been going down a dark internet hole lately to look up if anyone's had any similar experiences to mine. Looking back I was basically socially alienated throughout my childhood/elementary years--in second and maybe third grade I would just walk around by myself at lunch everyday, was constantly belittled by others, in sixth grade, on a group chat this guy I liked called me a * and told me to go jump off a cliff, and there's more than that but that's main stuff that happened early on. Anyway, so a few months ago I was been diagnosed with C-PTSD and had kind of been suspecting it for a while. When I saw people who were part of this 'cool group' from my elementary school I would feel like my body was tight and need to literally run away.
So, alright, this is too much contextual information, but as I've been kind of talking about it again recently, very much wrapped up in right now feeling like I'm still there, obsessing about the people who I grew up with. But down my internet rabbit hole because I somehow decided it would be a good idea to look up C-PTSD and bullying, there were a lot of threads where people talked about how experience with bullying is not a valid reason to suspect C-PTSD and how it's trendy to pretend to have PTSD now. Idk I personally got really angry about it because I consider most of my traumatic experiences to be based around 'bullying'--the isolation, the shunning, the belittling by friends as well.
Part of this is me wanting validation, maybe. But also I wanted to open up the conversation maybe to see what other people think of the opinions expressed on these threads, and whether other people have similar experiences of trauma to what I've expressed? The usual association that I think of when I think of trauma are life threatening events, and while that might be true for some people, I don't think it's true for me, if I do in fact have C-PTSD.