Has anyone experienced an onset of PTSD long after the actual traumatic experience? I'm afraid that this might have happened to me and concerned it could represent an over-all weakness in my mental health which is not something I particularly WANT to have to deal with.

What happened for me is that I had a very difficult experience last September followed by a couple difficult "aftershocks", and was pushed into therapy. In January separate from therapy completely, but having started to do a lot of looking into myself, I came to I guess the word is "acknowledge" certain events that had happened around the ages of 4-7 years old which I had in the past chosen to ignore.

Since then I have had a lot of problems with sleep, nightmares, re-experiencing things in my sleep. No day-time flashbacks or anything like that. But I am having difficulty dealing with this whole thing and I am simply unable to acknowledge it to anyone else at this point. There are times when I am preoccupied with the whole thing and with details I don't know, etc, and it's almost like these things could have happened yesterday, I feel so effected. It took me 20 years to even think about it myself, let alone have to bring it up with anyone else. I just can't do that, and I have found counseling to be unhelpful and uncomfortable, any time I decide I might mention it.

Anyway- since January I feel that the issues about all of that have caused everything to be a big blur to me except that I feel as though my ADHD symptoms that I have always had have been magnified to the point where I am having difficulty day-to-day. I believe in the past when I was in 6-7 years old i had similar problems and was probably dealing at that time with the actual after-effects of what had happened, so I recognize this. I know it will get better but I am so impatient. And I don't want to think this means I'm crazy or weak or unable to deal with life.

Thanks for listening & I appreciate any responses.

Sounds like a good sign that you can address it now. I don't hardly remember anything at that age except I know it was unpleasant. Not totally blocked but pretty darn fuzzy.

Now that I go over the criteria for PTSD I don't believe I have it but I do think that the nightmares and sleeping issues have exacerbated (sp) my ADD symptoms, or maybe it's just all the changes in my life. I haven't ever really had to focus too much on me but what's sad is the more I focus on me the worse I seem to feel and actually do. That is starting to change in the last couple of weeks but I have a real issue with sustaining progress or sustaining much of ANYTHING. So we'll see. I'm going to think positively anyway :)

A little over a year ago when I was first prescribed Ritalin, that night for the first time in 23 years I remembered why a past brief relationship was haunting me. When I went to tell him that I wanted out of the relationship hoping for a "nice" breakup, he drugged and raped me. I had repressed these memories for 23 years. At the time, I told one person what he had done to me (this was not the only abuse, just the worst) and apparently the next morning I no longer retained any conscious memory of the actual abuse. Realizing that I had never married and never had children as a result of this one incident was hard. For even though I couldn't remember the actual abuse, I have always retained the Mantra he chanted to me repeatedly, that I was a *****. No good man would ever want a *****. I have never had a truly intimate relationship and dated very infrequently before stopping it all together 14 years ago. There is no doubt that PTSD overtook me for a time after that. It was as if it happened last week instead of two decades ago. But the thing that helped me with this more than anything else was talking about it. I told my Mom, my sister, my best friend and even my brother! I talked to my doctor and even to a trusted co-worker. I know that the time frame helped me to talk, but Please find someone to talk to soon, it truly helps. This site is very anonymous why not open up here? Please let it out before it eats you up from the inside.

Moving on, I am so sorry this happened to you, but I really think a talk with a good Doc would be very good for you with this problem

I can't say you have PTSD, but I'd be rather surprised if you had no affter effects from such abuse.:(

Hugs,