I agree with @Kardamom. It sounds like PTSD. But I think it’s the kind of thing that should be treated through therapy. PTSD causes people to avoid situations that are like the one that caused the trauma in the first place. For example, a soldier who was in an IED bombing on a street in Baghdad might have an impossible time walking down a street in Los Angeles, because they keep on triggering the fight or flight response whenever they see a vehicle that looks like the one that exploded in Iraq, and caused them to lose an arm.
Girls who have been sexually abused sometime respond by being unable to trust any men and that makes it really hard for them to have love relationships with men. Some might only have relationships with women, as a result. Others may continually sabotage any relationship they start with a man. Some may even get the fight or flight response around men who remind them of their abusers.
One technique being used to treat PTSD is desensitization. So, for example, with the soldier, you would slowly introduce them to walking down the street in little bits. One day they would open the door to look out. The next they might take a step out the door. The next a few more steps, and so on. They are using video games to help with this. The DOD has built virtual models of Baghdad streets that allow soldiers with PTSD to virtually walk down these streets and build up a tolerance for being in the dangerous situations.
In the case of therapy, the therapist would help you build a clear mental story or model of the situation(s) that caused you the trauma. Then, over time, they would help you re-imagine the situation, and to think it through, until you were able to think about it without exhibiting the fight or flight symptoms. Your goal would be to learn to assess threat differently. You want to be able to identify real threats, not just respond to a threat that reminds you of the old one, but actually is not a threat at all.
As long as your automatic response system is overwhelming you with the urge to fight (or flee), you won’t be able to assess the threat realistically. You’ll be raising your hackles all the time when it really won’t help you. This causes undue stress, and can lead to things like agoraphobia and anxiety and generally impede your ability to live the life you want to live.
I think it is possible to work yourself through this on your own, but I wouldn’t want to do that. A therapist who is knowledgeable in these kinds of problems would make it so much simpler. But if you did want to do it on your own, I would build a model of the threat. I would write down as much as I could stand to write. I would expect that the process of writing about it would bring up a lot of the fight or flight response and it would be very difficult and scary and might cause depression or even suicidal thoughts.
But that’s what I’ve been doing in trying to cope with the trauma of depression and having suicidal thoughts. For a long time, I couldn’t think about anything that led me into depression. I couldn’t really think about depression itself, because simply thinking about it felt like it would make it happen again. But slowly, over time, I wrote more and more about it, and it became more possible for me to think about it without feeling like the simple thought would make me want to kill myself. It took about three years.
I wrote my way through it, though. I’m still doing it. I’m sure people are bored and tired of hearing me talk about it, but they don’t have to read anything I write. I don’t really write for others. I write for myself. As therapy. If I wrote for others, I would surely not write because, while some people do appreciate what I write, most people seem to think it is shit. But I have found a way to be ok with letting other people’s opinions go, and sticking to my own purposes.
So I would write about the event (and not in public—just in a diary or something or some other private place) over and over. First without much detail. Later more. This is a desensitization practice.
At the same time, I am trying to create as detailed and accurate a picture of the trauma as I can. I do this so I can analyze it. I want to analyze it for threats, so I can learn to take alternate steps if the same thing happens. I also want to analyze it for threats that probably aren’t really there, so I can start talking to myself about those and retraining myself. I want to be able to tell myself when a threat arises that really isn’t a threat, so I can not respond to it.
WIth respect to alternate responses, I want to train myself to protect myself against those threats in a more effective way. For example, if you have been assaulted in the past, you might want to learn the art of self defense, so that you fight off an attacker. Often times, people respond by never going out at all because they don’t trust themselves to stay out of dangerous situations. The only way to stay out, is to never go out. But if you learn to fight, you may feel you can handle a dangerous situation. Another thing to do is to learn how to identify safe situations so you can allow yourself to go into them. I mean traumatized people in general, not you specifically.
But again, this is all easier done with professional help. I have no training in this. I only have my own experience and thinking about that experience. I tend to analyze things in great depth, which annoys most people, but I find it helpful. I have been able to retrain myself to some degree. I did indulge myself in one of my defense mechanisms in this, but I knew I was doing it and modified it so that I was not unrealistically dissing myself, as I used to do all the time.
It’s hard to deal with trauma, and I would imagine it is even harder to deal with trauma from decades ago that you have been avoiding for all this time, or unaware that it was the source of your problems. I’ve had to deal with trauma from my father, and I’ve found that while I got very angry with him for a while, I was also able to calm down. He still does this stupid shit, judging my children the way he judged me, and it’s hard to deal with. But at least I don’t have to visit the same thing on my kids. And in a way, when he does it, it reminds me that I’ve been falling into bad patterns, and I remember to stop it. So his faults are an object lesson for me. I kind of blessing in disguise.
I wish none of us (in my family) did this. But if someone has to do it, I’m glad it’s my father, who rarely sees my kids because he can be such an asshole. When he does see them, and he behaves in that assholish way, I can see it, and I can protect my kids by talking to them about it later on. Or by intervening. So in being an asshole, my father reminds me of coping skills I need to train my kids with. The silver lining in the cloud, I guess.
Your trauma, too, will have a silver lining some day, when you learn the coping skills you need to deal with it. Those skills we be useful in far more ways than just dealing with the trauma, as important as that is, now.
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