Seemingly trivial things that have traumatized you

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Could you give any examples?

Dentist trips. Someone being so close to my face, the drill feeling like it's in my head...
I avoided it almost to the point of ruin, I had infections, broken teeth and cavities in nearly all of them.
I had to get refered to the hospital and be under sedation for all of the work, I lost half of them and what's left will have to get pulled out within the next 15 years. Part of me wishes I'd just gone, the other knows I just can't handle sitting in that chair without freaking out.
I have a filling discolouring badly at the moment but can't bring myself to go - every dentist has misunderstood how terrifying it is for me.
It's a typical NZ mindset, 'she'll be right, mate!'
No, it jolly well won't be.

I used to severely freak out when the toilet overflowed.

When it comes to the dentist, I need to be looped up on anxiety meds before even going and then knocked out for any work to be done.

When I was a kid it was dentists for me as well, though I have overcome my fear of dentist's drills as an adult. Same with injections.

Nowadays it's when a need to get blood work done. What I really don't like isn't the needle piercing my skin but because my veins are so deep and "slippery" (according to the phlebotomist) what usually happens is they keep "searching" for a vein with the needle, which is painful. When they've tried both my arms, with no success, they try my wrists, where my veins are really superficial. Drawing blood from the wrist is much more painful than from the arm.

When I was little, I saw a cartoon where someone's face got sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Now I try to avoid those things.

Also, my parents constantly yelling at me to fix things that are beyond my control.

I have an irrational fear of large ditches... they type you find in rural areas that are so big a car could fit in them.

My paternal grandparents lived in the country and you had to drive by those big ditches to get to their house and the road was slanted and crappy. My dad once asked me if I knew about the trolls that lived in those ditches. He said they would creep up and snatch you up and eat you if you got too close to the ditches. He then asked me if I knew people could drown in a foot of water. I immediately freaked out and scrambled to the other side of the car to try to weigh it down enough to keep us from getting pulled into the ditch, having the car flip so we would either drown upside down in a foot of water or be eaten alive by trolls. To this day I get really unnerved when I am on a road with those big ditches.

I'm not sure why that particular thing bothered me so deeply. My dad said a lot of bizarre things when I was a child and no other thing bothered me like that one did. Go figure.

I had a terror of toilets overflowing too! Still there some although I know how to work the mechanisms in the tank better now.

Some things I avoid, less than "traumatic" but still very problematic, I'm slowly connecting to sensory sensitivities. I'll do almost anything to use a broom instead of the vacuum cleaner. (Or I just avoid cleaning...) The vacuum hurts my ears, turns out. Dentist drills do some too.

Just recently diagnosed, and had no idea of these connections -- maybe as a kid I did, but acting "normal" was such a goal then, I find I ignore many of these inner reactions automatically. Oddly enough I feel terrible emotionally when doing so, but it's hard to differentiate lots of this, it doesn't feel directly connected.

I have some of these, because when I was in my early teens, I used to have this tendency to act like someone died when it was really something like a change to a routine that I was crying about.

I have no idea if I would say this was traumatizing or not because I don't want to minimize the word. When I was 8, my mom told my brothers and I a story about people eating at Jack in the Box and people got sick and had to go to the hospital because of the burgers there they had. She even mentioned there was a boy laying on the table with his head down because he was sick. After that my brothers and I never wanted to go there and sometimes my mom would say when we would be in Spokane heading to Montana to see my grandparents, "let's all go to Jack in the Box to get sick" and my brothers and I would start shouting "no no" and one time she pulled into the parking lot saying we are all going to get sick now because we are eating here and we were all crying no no and we were so scared and then she pulled out of the parking lot. I was 21 when I finally ate there for the first time and guess what, I didn't get sick. Be careful what stories you tell your children parents. Our parents could never get us kids to eat there so they could never stop there for lunch or else we would all be screaming in fear. I was in my teens when I realized my mother fabricated the story because no way was she there when it happened and this happened in Seattle and she wasn't in Seattle and the way she told it was all exaggerated and I think she did it to make it a fun story for us but instead it backfired. But I still wasn't able to eat there because of the story she told us.

League_Girl, I used to be afraid of eating at Taco Bell for years as a child because when I was in first grade, a fifth grader told me about a person who ate there once and wound up getting horrific growths growing on his tongue.

I'm still disturbed by Tim Burton's claymation films, especially Nightmare Before Christmas. I've never seen the whole movie, just snippets of it, but that was enough to scare me. My friend used to have a stuffed doll of the creepy mayor that can spin his head around and change his expression, and whenever I stayed the night, I always threw it down the stairs into her basement because it freaked me out so much. I really hate the music too, it makes me feel very anxious and unsafe deep inside, like a familiar environment has suddenly turned into something distorted and evil. Burton's other movies make me feel the same way to a lesser extent, like The Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie. I think it's a combination of his disturbing animations and dark, twisted plots. Just thinking about them makes me very uncomfortable and kind of sick.

sometimes when i am feeling very "seedy" after just having woken up, and am having breathing difficulties (due to bronchitis which is almost chronic), when things simply get moved out of place when i grab for them and it makes me have to stretch further to reach them, i think "f****n blast the s**t out of it!! !!"

examples of that today:

1. woke up and put pants on and then went to put my shoes on (all while sitting on the bed as the pants and the shoes are right beside the bed). have to bend over to put shoes on and that increases the squeeze on my lungs and i accidentally knocked one of my shoes under the bed (polished wooden floor so it slid quite far under the bed).

i had to either get on my hands and knees and reach as far under the bed as i can to grab the shoe (more breathing stress) or move the bed. i chose to move the bed, but i was extremely annoyed about the whole situation.


2. found that the cord leading to the phone base station (cradle) on my desk that is close to a wall had been knocked out due to activities the night before (just pushing stuff around the desk to make space for what i was doing). it is just a simple clip in plug and it was laying just behind the base station and i went to grab it and plug it back in, but i fumbled picking it up and it fell back and down beside the desk on the floor between the desk and the wall.
i just sighed and shook my head because i was shell shocked.
i had to drag the desk over the floor and it is a huge desk to get to the bloody plug, and in the process, 2 monitors fell over and another plug was pulled out and the whole thing was mounting into a major exercise of cued up obligations to fix a cascading set of faults occurring, and i had to sit down to get my breath back. (i presently have bronchitis)
i got it all sorted out, but it was traumatic....or maybe not traumatic but.....there is a better word....
errr...disconcerting or something.

3. it was rather hot today, and i bought some chocolate milk down at hazelbrook which is 4 kilometers away from my home. i had to get home rapidly and get the milk in the fridge because i do not trust milk if it warms even slightly above 4 degrees c, and lo and behold, on my way home i struck the first red light which was red for ages. it is usually green because i live in a lowly populated area. then i got every red light from there on all the way home, and my frustration mounted at each red light encounter. when i got home i ran inside and got the milk in the fridge as fast as i could, but my blood pressure was through the roof when i measured it 1 minute later. it was 175/100

Getting stuck on my building elevator made me afraid of them forever.

Also taking an X-Ray is scary as hell.

i don't fear the dentist but i did have an anxiety attack part way through them injecting the anaesthetic (novocaine most likely) and said it looked like an allergic reaction and my gag reflex was insane, kept trying to swallow everytime they inject or use the vacuum.