But I wanted to comment on PTSD. The way it works is you can only be traumatized once, no matter how many traumatic events you have in your life. That one time, that first time, causes you to create a room within yourself that is not public, that is beyond the reach of intruding emotions. It is a zone of relative safety.
But this room comes with rent. There is a psychic cost to maintaining it. And the more trauma you have, the harder and harder the beating on the door. If it ever breaks fully, then that is a psychotic breakdown. It is taking you beyond the breaking point.
Short of that, though, there is a lot of psychic energy that has to go into keeping it closed. All of this pulls energy out of your daily life. It makes you less energetic, less open emotionally, and often depressed. Fear leaks out under the door that cannot be fully ignored.
I may or may not have posted this story before: http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/what-the-war-did-to-andy-19691231
In my view, when he put that electrical cord in his mouth at age 4, he got PTSD. It gave him access to emotional dissociation, and practice in performing despite lacking some common emotions. It likely made him better as an operator, but also unable to process in any meaningful way what happened to him, which was the fatal chink in his armor.
In coming years, if we survive the efforts of the Left, the Globalists, and the Islamists to destroy everything decent in the world, we will, I think, come to realize that pre-verbal PTSD is much more common that we has supposed. In my dreams, we develop ways to identify it and treat it effectively.
The struggle I have been through could have been much shorter, but the categories I needed did not exist in any of the many dozens–likely hundreds–of books I read, or in the minds of any of the “professionals” I paid to help me.