me_irl

I hate this line of thinking. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is bullshit. There is a decent amount of literature that shows trauma exposure and ptsd make you less resilient. There is literally an evidence base that shows it is incorrect and yet ignorant assholes will repost it because it’s a cool quote for their dumbass social media feed

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278584610002332 - trauma exposure in the absence of ptsd is associated with decreased hippocampus volume, which itself is associated with issues with memory processing and fear

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6315158/ - decreased volume of prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate in people with ptsd, associated with modulation of stress response

There are more too, amygdala differences and changes in connectivity between sections of the brain being notable ones

That said this is not a means to say that once you have trauma you are permanently broken. There is also evidence that interventions are effective if utilized

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355083645_Neural_contributors_to_trauma_resilience_a_review_of_longitudinal_neuroimaging_studies - adaptive changes are possible after trauma that can modulate and bolster resilience. The interesting thing here is that this focuses on naturalistic intervention, eg the brains ability to fix itself, rather than something like CBT or medication

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36228389/ - link between cortical patterns in the prefrontal cortex and improvements noted in TF-CBT. Note that there are many “CBT” therapists out there that don’t actually practice CBT, they just utilize some aspects of it because they were taught it in grad school. TF-CBT specifically (trauma focused) is evidenced based and highly structured so if you’re going in and just chatting every week your therapist isn’t doing it right

Similar papers for things like paroxetine reversing the hippocampus volume loss seen in ptsd and other things

No intervention works for everyone of course and all interventions come with drawbacks but intervention is worth trying if you have experienced trauma (I am biased obviously, so keep that in mind).