It's really hard to phrase my question, so here's some background.

In the last couple of years, I've experienced two events where something extremely terrifying was happening, only to learn what seemed to be happening wasn't the true reality of the situation. The first one was seemingly a very aggressive home break in. I won't get too into the details, but basically my former roommate woke me and my partner up in the middle of the night because someone was trying to come into their window, and had started pounding on it when they weren't able to gain entry. We all huddled up in my room in the pitch black and called the cops. Thirty minutes passed with no cops while we were in the phone with the operator as the banging on the windows got closer and closer, eventually reaching my bedroom window. To our knowledge, our other roommate was out with friends and we had texted them not to come home because someone was trying to break in.

Long story short, it was our third roommate, who had taken drugs from a stranger, come home, then "heard a noise outside" that they went to investigate in the snow with no shoes, no coat, no phone, and no key. They claimed the door locked behind them (it didn't) and they were trying to wake us up to let them in, not thinking to say it was them until thirty minutes into scaring the living shit out of us. What was so scary was that we thought if someone was trying to break in to steal shit, they'd try to be subtle, so this violent banging and brazen attempt to break in felt incredibly threatening because it seemed like it was some sort of aggression directed at the people inside. To help you understand how violent the banging was, in the morning we realized our windows were covered in blood from the amount of force our roommate put into banging on them.

Anyway, I haven't really been the same since. I developed some problematic behaviors surrounding safety at nighttime; repeatedly and obsessively checking locks, constantly "making sure" the oven and stove were off, general trouble sleeping, intense nightmares, all the works. It's been a couple of years and the behaviors have died down a bit, but they're still there.

Now, a couple days ago, I thought my boyfriend died. I was sitting in my bedroom with the door open, and I could see him in the kitchen down the hall. I heard a groan, saw him clutch the counter top, and then fall to the ground unconscious. I ran into the kitchen to find him on the ground, laying on his back with his eyes wide open and vacant, completely unmoving. I don't know how long he was out, but I spent at least ten seconds shaking him by the shoulders and screaming his name. He was looking straight at me but clearly not seeing me, completely unresponsive. Right as I was reaching for my phone to call 911, he came to, delirious but alive, crawled to the bathroom, and vomited. We had him checked out and he was fine, he seemingly just fainted because he hadn't drank enough water and/or eaten enough that day. I cried all night though, and I still can't sleep well because I keep waking up to check that he's still alive. I know it was only a short moment, but I really thought I lost the love of my life with no warning. I'd never seen anything like it before and I feel so frozen now.

How do you cope with these "near misses" or whatever you want to call them? I feel kind of silly knowing that I wasn't ever in danger during the break in, and that my boyfriend wasn't even having a NEAR death experience, just a poor reaction to not adequately taking care of himself that day. That said, the experiences linger in the same ways that other trauma has affected me; trauma from experiences that were reality, not just perception.