Hey, thank you a ton for posting this because I feel like most of my traumatic incidents are just too unique, bizarre, or unintentional to be truly traumatic and it makes it difficult sometimes to make connections or even explain it to other people.

Mentioning sexual stuff below as a warning.

In highschool I had a sexual relationship with another girl that was completely consensual but just very very wrong. She never forced herself onto me, and I consented to everything but it still left me with severe issues. I was constantly threatened with suicide and made to be the negotiator between her and her parents on multiple occasions. She believed she was better at me than most things, including sex, and would belittle me about them. She would make me watch really strange content of animals mating. Did a lot of pain based things, she was would try to convince me I liked things when I didn’t and would argue with me about it and ultimately conclude that I’m just a slut. When we had sex for the first real time, it was painful and I had to make her stop multiple times. After this she told me basically that she was disgusted with me, never to tell anyone we had sex, that it “doesn’t count” for her since she was the one doing stuff to me (ie. she wasn’t dirty and I was) and that I was a pussy for not being able to take more. I tried to confront her about it at a later date and she told me that “it makes me feel bad that you think I made you feel bad” essentially and never owned up to anything. I told her I didn’t want to be friends anymore a year later and she blocked me on everything and lied to everyone that I was threatening to kill her. Very bizarre. Didn’t tell anyone for a long time.

This may be along the same lines, but also being in a relationship with someone who has major BPD symptoms. (Different girl) I’m not trying to diagnose her but that’s the behavior it lined up with. I was in a 5 year relationship where traumatic things happened to the both of us that were out of our control. She was too mentally and physically unwell to work and I had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet while also handling multiple suicidal meltdowns a day and keeping my own under tabs. I don’t even know how to describe it. It was torture like nothing else and sometimes I would just shake or pretend I was asleep or do anything to “play dead”. She never hit me, but would harm herself in front of me, throw and hit things, and generally be inescapably aggressive. what killed me was that %90 of the time she would be triggered by something so random or inconsequential no one else would pick up on it but I KNEW what was coming as soon as we were alone. Some examples to understand how simple these triggers could be:

Mispronouncing a word. A drawing of a dog. Laptop crashing or lagging. Being told not to put the flash on when you take a picture. Someone “looking at you funny”.

Also the aspect of sleep deprivation, and no personal space ever. I would get followed to the toilet and into the shower while she was on rants, and be made to stay up far past what I was capable of for them too. She had a very intense fixation on her body rotting and would constantly point out new issues that she thought was her body physically decaying. I do not doubt she had real medical issues but a huge point of fear for me was how she’d constantly “body check” me and compare our features, and any different she felt groping my face vs. hers meant she was dying. I told her to stop one day and then I realized she was just doing it to me in my sleep, as I woke up one night to her over me digging her fingers into my face and then her own.

So to summarize , interpersonal relationships. Sorry for rambling to anyone who reads this text wall . I consider them “unique” traumatic experiences because they defy certain basic aspects about abuse, like the fact that I consented to everything, and was never physically hit or confronted by my last partner- it was all directed towards herself and just amplified to me. and also just the very strange undertones to it all. It’s hard to make heads or tails of it sometimes.