Can attacks cause issues for over 7 years?

[Amandurz]

Hello everyone.

I'm feeling quite confused lately. I've suffered from depression and as a result, social anxiety and eating disorders since I was about 14.

However, when I was 13, I was attacked by a group of 3 strangers when walking home from the cinema with a friend in broad daylight. I was very innocent and sheltered for my age, and my mum has started bringing this up again lately now that my younger sister is 13. She keeps telling me that it's the reason I have all these problems.

The thing is, even when it happened, it didn't seem to bother me, I put it to the back of my mind and didn't think about it. I barely even cried, and I keep telling my mum that she's wrong. Now I'm starting to think she might be right, and that it might be causing me problems on an unconsious level.

What do you guys think?

[suzannacorfu]

Definitely Amandurz! Our unconscious does this all the time! We are the sum of our experiences and anything traumatic will affect us. It may appear that you were not upset at the time but...
I would say that this is an important factor in your depression and social anxiety!
Love Suz

[alias_kev]

Hi, From talking to a lot of people here there does seem to be a frequent situation that the "avalanche" of our anxiety and depression can be traced back to one or more past events that start the process. Sometimes they are big or dramatic events, other times its just an accumulation of small ones.

For some people its clear that its formal PTSD with the memories, flashbacks and nightmares that often accompany this. I think for a lot of people its less focused than that, the event(s) just being the start of the damage. One might compare it to the difference between a leg damaged in a major accident, and one injured by years of running in bad shoes.

If you experienced little emotion at the time then its a toss up whether it did not affect you much, or to use your words "you did not think about it". The former can still affect us now because we are looking at with an adult's perspective, rather than as the child we were. The latter can be worse because it is claimed we lock away the emotions and they fester like dry rot in the foundations.

The closeness between the year of the attack and start of your emotional problems does suggest a link quite easily, but its hard to prove this kind of thing. HUG. Traditional therapies used to say the past is all important and that you had to deal with it to move on. Modern therapies like CBT tend to say the opposite and focus on the reactions we have now, and the better ones we want to have tomorrow. My personal perspective is a bit of a hybrid: Often to understand ourselves and our reactions (now) we gain from looking at the past, but we should remember its the future we want to be different; the past is what it was (although we can understand it differently). Sorry if that's jumbled, I'm struggling to express it well today.

You could talk to your GP about counselling, or seek it privately, or talk with a close friend or relative. Or even talk to us here about both your present and your past.

I hope that helps.

[Nigel H]

I would suggest that it is not about the passage of time per-se - rather about what you do within the time that passes.

It could be 7 years or 7 days ..... PTSD can be dealt with swiftly.

If you keep re-living the events in your mind without doing something to break the pattern, then it can go on for as long as it takes, to realise that old pattern can be re-set, now.