Have you ever gone through psychological trauma? How do you deal with it?

I laugh at everything and everyone usually unbeknownst to them, for most of the very same reasons they are laughing at me.

Everything to me is funny, everything to me is a potential reason to laugh.

It truly is my sanity, and it truly does heal most things.

“One half of the world laughs at the other half; neither side realizing how the lot are fools.”

I sleep

I don’t cope very well, per se. I have a lot of nightmares and sometimes I can’t shut off my brain. There are days when I feel like I will never move past it. However, I have seen therapists and psychiatrists, and it’s very helpful. Sometimes it’s just good to have a new perspective, and that makes it easier to see healing as a real possibility.

I was lucky to have found a compatible therapist and spent almost six years seeing him once a week.

My divorce was a mind bender. I exercised like a fiend and that kept me from totally shutting down from that insanity. Exrecise is an awesome antidote to all things mentally messy.

Therapy helped me greatly but there are still remnants that trip me up at times.

I have had what can best be described as a mental breakdown three times in my life. I’m bipolar, so it’s not unheard of. I’m happy to report that I’m stable and have been for some time for those who might be worried about me.

I coped with it by
1. ignoring it, which didn’t work,
2. exercising, which helped a bit,
3. quitting my job, which was probably not the best way to go about it,
4. taking time off another job, which was a better idea than quitting,
5. getting medication, which has really helped me tremendously,
6. seeking therapy, which I highly recommend, and
7. meditating, which calms me at times.

I got therapy that was specifically designed to help with trauma, namely EMDR for getting beyond the flashbacks, the hypervigilence, and the need to dissociate, and DBT for learning how to deal with everyday life and not be my worst enemy.

I had the shit abused out of me both mentally and physically (though thankfully not sexually) by various people and groups of people from the time I was very young up until I was about 20 or so.

I used to be extremely depressed and I had some pretty serious anxiety issues, but I got over it all through sheer force of will. I convinced myself that I am in complete control over my brain and feelings, and I started standing up for myself and demolishing the negative feelings that were keeping me down. It worked very well.

Depends on the trauma, and my reaction to it.

Therapy helps me get rid of nightmares.

Sometimes I just ride the sadness and depression, cry, write down how I feel, call my girlfriends to vent.

If I am accutely anxiety ridden, I would use Xanax again, until I could function a little better.

I denno if I’ve been through anything that constitutes as psychological trauma, but when bad stuff went down, I had my dad to go to. He’s gone now, but he’s left me with enough wisdom that helped me back then, and that might come in handy in the future.

I developed a big heart with a titanium shell and a peppering of joviality.

Yes. One day at a time.

In a crisis, even a tramstic one, something clicks in me and I am at my best. I take care of business and my head gets extremely clear. 2 weeks, 2 months or 2 years later, I am a complete basket case.

Not exactly sure what counts as psychological trauma, but it seems to me that the only way to deal with it is to deal with it. I.e., the old cliche—you keep on keeping on. You generally know the bottom line. How much can you collapse before you have to pull it together or you die?

I think that we all have a sense of that line. Most people, if the trauma is recent, will pull it together and fight back. However, if you’ve been beaten over and over throughout life, there will come a time when you decide you can’t deal with it any more, and you just let yourself go. You might end up on the streets. You might die. You might get rescued. Who knows?

I went down as far as one can without dying. I had the support of my husband and family and a great psychiatrist who helped me learn to trust again. It was a long and hard battle but I am finally at the point where I can live with the things that have happened to me in my past without burying them or having them bury me.

Buried it.
Denied it.
Talked about it.
Wrote about it.
Got help (from a therapist) to move on from it.
Learned from it.

Not sure what ‘psychological trauma’ means but I have had some pretty significant and traumatic events in my life and I have done all and some of the above at times.

I’ve talked about it a few times, just embraced the feeling of circling the drain for a few fleeting moments before swallowing what I was feeling down, became enraged, took action, punched a wall (and hit a stud) and just became an emotional cripple.

A lot of time, quite a bit of therapy, medication, and changing my life situation (cutting those who harmed me most out of my life).

I realized I didn’t mention that what helps me not feel so horrible during very stressful times that make me feel a little out of control of my emotions is to try understand the other person’s position, put myself in his shoes, if that applies to the particular situation. Or, to reframe the situation in my mind, try to get a different way to look at it. People who handle stress and bad times fairly well, have a different way of thinking about things (some people, others are just emotionally cut off, that is a different thing). People who tend to get stuck, overly freaked out from situations that others can handle, I think sometimes they need to take a leap of faith that their thought process might be harming them. People usually seek support from those that understand them, who handle stress similarly. That doesn’t help you feel differentky. I think it is good to have some support that understands and empathasizes, but also good to have a different point of view.

My father, thoughout my life, loved to tell this story. When I was a newborn, he had a dream. He was in a room with a bassinet. There was a sign on the bassinet and he moved close to read it. It said, “Genius.”

Whenever he told that story, he always would look at me as if to say, “And he was supposed to be my genius???” It was very hurtful. Perhaps more so than I imagined earlier in my life because other things happened.

Like the time at a dinner party, my wife was there, although I was somewhere else. He told the guests that he was proud of my sister because she traveled the world as a reporter, going to all kinds of strange and dangerous places. He was proud of my brother because he dedicated his life to being an artist, even though he didn’t make any money.

My wife told me was thinking, ‘And…..’ And nothing.

I don’t recall them ever telling me they were proud of me.

For much of my life that didn’t matter, but when I got sick, it took on a whole new significance. That, together with a bunch of other things, nearly killed me. Funny how the brain can make seemingly insignificant things into a huge deal.

My therapist dragged this all out of me. I didn’t really want to admit it meant anything, but she said it did. It still makes me angry, and I’ve stopped feeling very close to my father. We won’t talk about it because my family doesn’t talk about jack shit. They don’t know what happened to me, anyway. It was always made clear, quite explicitly, that we don’t do emotions. I just make nice when I’m around him.

He doesn’t seem to notice a thing. I stopped calling him once a week. Now they call or we don’t talk. They once mentioned something about not hearing from me for a while. But that’s it.

I don’t know if that kind of disappointment ever really goes away. Then again, why should I expect my parents to behave in any particular way? All I knew was that I wanted to be very different parents. I wanted that since I was a kid. I’m sure I am visiting a whole new set of traumas on my kids. Isn’t that how it always is?

Being the daughter of a man who married the wicked witch and then divorced her (which caused a lot more problems), I’d say I’ve been through a lot of psychological trauma. It’s not very easy to forget things like it. Nightmares appear, memories flash up, depression sets in. It can be hard to deal with. Fortunately I had the support of my family and friends who were willing to just listen while I vented. They didn’t try to give me a way to fix things. They just…listened which is sometimes the best therapy. It helps to get things off of your chest when something is bothering you or you are still being affected by the psychological warfare from the trauma.
What I did was try to stay strong. I’m not one who likes to show my feelings which means I don’t cry or talk about what emotions are going through me. I wouldn’t suggest this to anyone else. My mind is so made up that it’s hard to adjust after a trauma.
My advice is to find someone who will just listen to you when you need to talk. Someone who will hang out with you and get your mind off of the memories or flashbacks.
Stay strong my friend! In these trying times, it can be hard to be happy after something bad has happened but it isn’t an impossible feat!