My traumas consist of 10 years of relentless bizarre or unusual incidents adding up into one giant ball of stressful memories. Most were out of my control, but some I feel were my own fault, and those are the hardest to deal with.
When I was 15 I got in an argument with my mom and took off running to my Grandma's house, less than two miles away. There's a freeway entrance to a very rural middle-of-nowhere area on the way there, and right outside of it, and a van full of men (I believe) attempted to abduct me. They were headed the opposite direction, but when they saw me they flipped a dramatic illegal u-turn to pull up beside me; one jumped out and reached for me while I could see another man inside was seemingly bracing himself with his arms out. I immediately bolted off running to the houses around the corning (hoping people might be out in their yards), and the guy sort of jaunted after me but gave up pretty quick when he realized I was in full gtfo mode. Once I got to my grandma's house, I called my boyfriend to ask him if it was bad enough to need to report to the police. He told me not to worry about it, and I just kept telling myself they were asking for directions or that I was being paranoid. I never felt particularly traumatized by it, but I always wondered if I should have reported it.
Fast forward a few years, and a 15 year old girl gets kidnapped right outside our neighborhood. No one knows what happened to her, but reports from other young girls start coming out describing the exact same situation that happened to me years before. Then another girl goes missing. Extreme guilt hits me like a ton of bricks - I thought if I had reported this incident when it happened to me, it wouldn't still be happening to other girls. Every day I had to drive passed the news vans, and every store had a picture of the girls in their window - it was all anyone was talking about that year. I felt that they deserved to still be here, I didn't - in my irrational state, I had convinced myself that it was somehow my fault. I fell back into drinking/drugs - I stopped eating. I started engaging in really destructive behavior - picking fights with total strangers, going home with people I just met - all of this completely out of character, and causing a few more traumatizing incidents for myself.
I snapped back into reality when they found that the disappearance of the two girls had nothing to do with the similar reports - sadly, they were gone, but it was under completely different circumstances.
But the damage was already done, and now I was dealing with some of the trauma caused by my inability to cope.
It's now been years since all of this took place, and I no longer feel guilty for not reporting the initial incident, but I'm still trying to cope with my poor choices resulting from the guilt.
I can't look back and say that I would have reported the initial incident, because there's no way - I was too shy, I was always second-guessing myself, and I didn't feel like anything that happened to me was ever bad enough to take seriously or tell anyone about.
I can't look back and say that I would have handled the guilt any better than I did, because I was not a mentally healthy person at the time - I wasn't yet diagnosed with PTSD, nor did I even know what it was. I had conditioned myself to believe all the bad things that happened to me were completely normal. When I saw the similar incidents being spread across the news, it was too much for me to comprehend that some of the stuff that's happened to me may not be that normal - it made me start questioning everything else that's happened over the years. A lot of it was apparently too eye-opening, and I had a meltdown as a result.
I have since been diagnosed with PTSD, and therapy has made me realize that I can't feel bad about not having handled something years ago the way I would handle it today. We try our best to deal with situations in the present with the tools we have at the moment - sometimes our tools are not that great at the time, and so it's unfair to judge past decisions based on present knowledge.