Small Slights, Big Consequences: Living with PTSD

Small slights have big consequences for us traumatized folk.

Years of abuse sensitizes us to harshness and cruelty of all sorts. 

Hypervigilance pricks our ears to vocal tones, sharpens your eyes and our minds to expressions, postures, actions, and the lack thereof.

I was thinking about this today as a doctor’s office asked me to fill out forms using their new online system. They wanted intimate information, diseases past and present, drugs legal and illegal. 

Did I ever have cancer? Did I ever suffer from depression and anxiety?

And before I could even confide these details, I had to read statements of legal liability, disclaimers, and waivers. What my rights are if I consider myself mistreated. What would and would not be done with my private information.

I suppose this is standard stuff, but I could feel my pulse quickening, physically and emotionally.

During a previous appointment at this office, living with PTSD and fresh from cancer surgery and treatment, I was bullied by a nurse and a doctor who got angry and defensive when I asked a simple question.

At that time, I shut down immediately and walked out, leaving my questions unanswered and my problem unsolved.

Today, facing an empty patient portal, I am reminded that trauma does not evaporate into thin air. It lurks and resurfaces like an underwater monster that feeds on garbage.

I no longer trust anyone affiliated with this medical office. I no longer want to confide anything about myself to them. I don’t want to bare either my body or my soul.

I canceled my pending appointment.

Eventually I will have to brace myself, show up at a place I don’t want to be, have relationships and conversations with people I don’t want to have relationships and conversations with.

It stinks. It adds to a long history of trauma and an ever-deepening distrust of humanity.

But what am I, are we, to do? 

People, even professionals, persist in their small cruelties: the lies, the bullying, the indifference. Whether they hurt you doesn’t really matter to them, not when they are so sure of themselves, so eager to prove who is knowledgeable, powerful, and in control.

I can only recoil, I, who have spent my entire life considering the needs and the feelings of others, I, who devote so much energy and effort to being human.

I suppose it means something to me, to stand for decency and mercy. Even if in this sense I am an extreme minority.

Some discomfort cannot be measured