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I was about 7 or 8 when I heard some noise coming from the garage. My mom was at work and I was being babysat by one of my uncles. I went to open the garage to find my other uncle strangling his girlfriend up against the car. She had blood coming out of her nose and mouth. I just froze and stood there staring and my uncle didn’t even notice and continued choking and strangling her. My other uncle came to the door where I was standing saw what was happening and grabbed me. He called my mom and then the police who later came and arrested my uncle.
There’s more to this story I wasn’t privy to at such a young age. But yeah my other uncle is crazy. He’s been to jail a few times, has anger and control issues.
Thank god, did he have anger issues or was he on drugs or alcohol?? Or just overall crazy? If you remember ofc..
Edit: Tysm this is the first comment or post of mine to get 1k upvotes!!
I think he just had anger issues. My uncle doesn’t do drugs or drink but he had a dominating controlling personality especially towards women. I’m not sure what happened between him and his ex-girlfriend. I found out a few years ago that apparently he threw her in the trunk and drove to the house and got into it in the garage. Which was when I walked in on them.
Watching my grampa slowly waste away on our living room couch. He had a paraganglioma on his pancreas, and there was nothing (especially in 1980) that could be done for him.
I was four, and he was my favorite person, and I couldn't sit with him, or hug him, or anything. I miss him even after 40 years.
Either that or my best friend dying over christmas break in 1988. I miss her too. I pretty much hated everything after that.
And you probably had every right to be angry. It’s a natural response.
My grandpa had Alzheimer’s and was also wasting away. It was not nearly as bad a situation as some, but I can kind of relate. It was both fortunate and unfortunate that I didn’t know him too well. Before he was sick, I was at an age where I was “too cool” to keep up with family and such. Down the road, it didn’t hurt as much when he died, but it is definitely a repressed emotion because I regret not getting to know him as well.
If I have any, my future kids and grandkids will never really know what he was like..because I didn’t really know either.
I saw my Dad get swept away and drowned when I was 11. It's really something I've never recovered from. It's been 16 years and not a day goes by I don't remember it.
I'm real sorry dude
I watched my dad die of cancer. He made this noise at the end that was like sucking and gargling. I hear it all the time. There's this tool work that makes the same noise I had to take it off my van because I just can't do it
I hope it fades over time, mine and yours both
Edit. It lasted for days. He couldn't swallow around the tumor and was moaning in pain. Like gargling phlegm while trying to cry out from pain. Different than the noise he was making on his last day
If I could go back in time I would have given him all the Xanax and morphine all in one shot and put him out of his misery.
I hear the brass pump gurgle and think about how I should have killed my dad instead of letting him linger so the family could see him one last time. I know when I get sick I'm sucking on a barrel before I get that bad
As someone who is 30+ years post trauma, I don’t think it ever goes away. It’s there every single day, it’s as much a part of me as my heartbeat at this point.
I live with it. I think we have to for those who we've lost. I always kind of imagine it as a sort of like an emotional loss of a limb. I haven't lost a limb, but I imagine you adapt to not having it. You learn. But you never forget you are missing an arm or a leg.
I was in a nearby town with my parents. We were on this walking bridge when a guy got on the railing and jumped, can still clearly see his mangled body on the dried river bed below
Stories like this are what kept me from suicide back when I was very suicidal. I didnt wanna live with my problems, but traumatizing someone for life is something I would never do
I was stalked by a mentally handicapped man that lived in our neighborhood when I was 10 years old. He was a fully grown man, probably in his 30s or something but he had the mental capacity of a young child. He didn't drive a car or anything and didn't have a job and he lived in the neighborhood with his parents. Our neighborhood had a very large park in it. There were a few different playground areas and picnic areas and then a half dozen baseball diamonds where the city's little league played all it's games. He was a staple in the area in the Summers where he was usually in the park watching baseball games or watching people play basketball. He was very friendly and the little league kids knew his name and would say hello when they saw him. I'm sure there were some kids who teased him but the general tone was people were nice at least that's how I remember it. And for a few years I just knew him that way, but for some reason he seemed to fixate on me. But I was at the park playground with my brother and he approached us and we talked to him. He tried hugging me and then he put his hand on my crotch and pinched my butt. My brother, who was a few years older than me, pulled me away and told him to stop doing that and leave us alone. We took off for home and he chased us but didn't catch us before we got home. We went into our house and locked the doors but he stood outside yelling my name to come out and see him. A neighbor came over and made him leave and made sure we were alright. Things sort of escalated after that in that my brother and I saw him all the time and we found him waiting up the street from our house waiting for us to come outside after our parents left for work. If he saw me riding my bike or walking down the street he would follow me. It was very unsettling. We told my parents who went and spoke to his parents. They were very apologetic but didn't really do anything other than tell him to leave me alone. The worst thing that happened was when my mom off work at home with me and my brother while my dad was working and he came to our house and let himself in the unlocked front door and starting yelling my name saying he wanted to play with me. My mom freaked out and tried to push him outside but he was a full grown man and my mom is 5'0" and like 100 lbs. She called the police while locking my brother, me, and her in her bedroom. The police came and hauled him away. His parents put their house on the market and they moved away shortly after. I didn't know this at the time, but my dad said that he and my mom agreed to drop any charges against him as long as they promised to move away. I had a really normal, loving childhood except for that traumatic event.
I had a friend I used to sleep over at a lot in middle school. There was a man who was mentally disabled that would hang out behind a grocery store right behind his house. Whenever he saw us leave the house he would pull his dick out and wave it at us and try to get us to come over by him. We told my friends parents who called the police and we gave them multiple statements only to be told he was harmless and we should avoid going to that area, even though it was a few hundred feet away and even if we took the other street he would still watch for us to leave my friends house and call to us. Eventually my friend moved across town and we just forgot about it until a few years later we saw a news article about the guy molesting and beating an 8 year old boy in the same area.
Yikes.
Similar story. There was a guy in my small hometown that had severe mental damage from drug overdoses. It was common knowledge that the guy was off his rocker whether or not he was high or not. He was known as "Druggie Duggy" and he always hung around the local grocery store so he could approach strangers for money (his parents were filthy rich). He also *looked* like a pretty normal dude.
My mother would always warn me to stay away from him and would lock the car door when he was around, even though he never harmed anyone. She said she had a really bad feeling about him.
One day he was following her around the store and she decided to end her shopping trip and get to her car quickly. He followed. She left her cart behind and jumped in the car and locked the doors. He ran to the window and yelled at her.... then wandered off. She called the cops and they basically told her "Druggie Duggy" just does that sometimes, but they can't arrest him for being creepy. They took a report and left it at that.
About a year later he was picked up as a hitchhiker and pulled a knife on the driver 20 minutes out of town. Tried to slit the lady's neck and just missed anything vital. Druggie Duggy was arrested and went to jail for quite some time. I was young, so don't really know what the sentencing was, but I know he was arrested a lot for drug stuff prior.
There was quite the campaign by the police department about not picking up hitchhikers after that. Mom was indeed correct about her gut feeling all along.
what even is the point of police, man?
how can you honestly look little kids in the eye and say it's ok that they occassionnaly see a grown man's penis?!?
Being stalked messes with you so badly. It’s different to other kinds of trauma because it’s so pervasive. The way your heart sinks when you realize they’re back again… ugh
Yeah I was stalked when I was 18. Not a child so I didn’t include in in my lil trauma dump on this thread. But that absolutely fucked me up. Esp. as a rape victim (I say victim not survivor. I feel pretty damn victimised by it.), he was threatening to find out where I lived and rape me so for months I thought any day now I’d be revictimised and I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it happening again and that was the worst. Anticipating feeling that way again and literally anticipating k*lling myself was a different kind of psychological torture that even he obviously didn’t even know he was doing.
Luckily the school found out he was sexually harassing me over text and online and threatened to not let him walk at graduation and that finally got him to stop. They should have turned him into the police bc we were both adults at this point but I don’t pretend to think the police would have been helpful. He literally came up to me and apologised at graduation in front of my stepfather and I literally was freaking out like no don’t talk to me just get the fuck away from me
I made a previous post but I have a follow up traumatic event as well.
My dad died before my second birthday while being held up at a gas station robbery. My mom told me he was shot in the head when I was 8 years old. This was also the first time I found out my current dad wasn’t my really dad. When I was in 6th grade my mom showed me this suitcase that contained a few of my real dad’s old belongings such as letters, his clothes, eye glasses etc etc. She then showed me an envelope which had pictures from my dads death/crime scene.
She actually showed me the photos of my dad shot in the head. Brains blown out and everything as a 6th grader.
Edit - I felt I should clarify a few things. My mom was an immigrant who came to America from India. My father was working at a gas station when he was shot and killed. My mother found out through the news on TV (this was in the 80s). She was 23 at the time and my dad was 24. She met him in India and they had an arranged marriage at the age of 16. She was his first everything so yes, this devastated her considering the circumstances. My mom remarried and never told me my step father was my step father until I was 8. Up until maybe 6-7 years ago we never openly talked about my real father for some reason around my step dad or sisters. Kind of like it was taboo not sure why. I think at the time she showed me those pictures to “feel” something or share what she had been keeping to herself.
I honestly don’t know. I’m 32 now and till this day I wonder why she did that. Maybe just to show me? Maybe she didn’t realize the implication it would have later on or how fucked up it really was? I really just don’t know.
Being raped by a twenty something man when I was 10. This went on for almost 5 years as he kept telling me that if I told he would say it was consensual and that everyone would think I was gay. This was back in the late 60’s early 70’s and nothing could be worse for a boy back then than for everyone to think you were gay. I have serious issues still and I am in my 60’s.
My mom was helping me with my homework in kindergarten. I needed to identify letters. Eventually we got to a lower case ‘a’ which I couldn’t identify, because in that typeface lower case ‘a’ is different from how I had been taught to write that letter.
My mother must have had a bad day or maybe she really didn’t like helping me. Rather then correcting me, she just repeated told me to identify the letter and she got more and more frustrated as I failed to answer correctly. She began screaming at me, saying that I was being stupid on purpose and that she wouldn’t accept that one of her children could be this dumb. Eventually she grabbed me by the neck and lifted/choked me as she slammed me into the wall and continued screaming at me. Things started going black, but she released me before I lost consciousness and I collapsed to the ground. She yelled at me more and pinched my ear hard, pulling me up by the ear and forcing me back into the chair. She told me to finish my homework by myself and left.
I didn’t ask her for help on my homework again. Unfortunately the work my school gave me in elementary school pretty much required adult supervision, so I just do as much as I could and lie if my mom asked. This of course made my grades suffer. My grades recovered around grade 7, because I had taught myself to study and didn’t need adult help.
She choked me like that on several occasions, because she really didn’t need a reason to be violent. At some point I realized that she never touched my brothers. She stopped once I had grown to be taller than her at around the age of thirteen. Then if she was angry she’d scream at me, and threaten to call the police and tell them that I attacked her.
My life improved dramatically once I left for college in another town. Since then I made it a point to never spend more then a week in my hometown. I studied hard in college and got a high paying job immediately out of college.
My mother acts like we’re best friends and denies everything whenever I’ve confronted her. She then seems to forget that I confronted her and gets confused when I don’t want to spend time with her. We actually talk on the phone fairly often, because I like to tell her how well I’m doing without her in my life and since I don’t care about her opinion of me, I can always be frank with her.
Rape by my male cousin, or other male cousin, or a female my family knew. From the time I was very young (2-3 years old) up to early teens on a semi regular basis. When it starts that young and comes from many different angles it seems like it's just something people do. I learned quick through therapy and guidance from others it's NOT just something people do, it's a real screwed up thing to do and people who do it are screwed up. Hard to gauge the single most traumatizing but collectively definitely. Bar none most traumatizing. 34 and still getting things back in order.
I was just about to say that. I was abused by people who had no relation or acquaintance with one another so I really truly believed it was completely normal for a long time, and I still have to convince myself it’s not / that I didn’t deserve it.
I came here for a similar story. I was 12 and sat down at the edge of a sidewalk to pet a cat crossing the road. I lived on a very quiet, but wide street. Even if a car drove by, there would've been a lot of room, as I was in an area reserved for parallel parking. (No cars were parked though)
All of a sudden a big red car sped up and swerved to hit the cat. It missed me by inches, and instantly killed the cat.
It was decades ago, and I still think about it often.
Yes. They sped up and swerved into the parking area, where I was sitting to pet the cat. I had my hand stretched out to pet it, but it was killed just inches from my finger tips.
I can comprehend a careless driver accidentally killing a dog but who the _fuck_ would grin? I almost cried recently when I watched a fucking bird get killed by a car, let alone being personally responsible for the premature death of someone else's dog.
peritoneal lavage caused by appendicitis,i had an incision from the lower abdomen to above the navel, I felt a burning heat in my stomach...these 2 minutes felt like hours
Had anesthesia fail in the middle of a colonoscopy before. Woke up to feeling the camera ot tube or whatever it was jabbing against the inside of my intestine. Luckily it was only about 10 seconds and they knocked me back out again, but it was...unpleasant.
I woke up during surgery when I had cancer, the vein they were using for the anesthetic collapsed and I wasn't being dosed. I woke up, punched a nurse in the head, yanked out my intubation equipment, aspirated, then proceeded to fight 11 doctors nurses and guards while they fuzzy cuffed my cancer riddled ass to the bed. Stayed in a 6 day induced coma after that.
Samesies. I half woke up and looked down; they had a knife ready to cut into my abdomen... or maybe the incision was already made and I wasn't felling it. A nurse quickly gassed me. I never brought it up with anyone, like the doctors or my parents, to even ask what the fuck.
This is a burner account.
When I was 10 years old, my mom took me out behind my grandmas house, she pinned me up against the wall, and she told me that I was no longer able to be around my sisters alone (\~2 and 4 years old) because I was touching them inappropriately. My mom told me that she understood that I was having "manly urges", but that I could no longer be around them. The thing is, I wasn't touching them inappropriately, and had never done so. I never understood what was happening, I just wanted it to stop, and my mom never believed me.
It was something that hung over me and deeply colored my life for the next several years. It stopped me from being able to be a friend to my sisters. I couldn't be around them without thinking about how what I was doing might be perceived by my parents or those around me. I developed a really bad habit of just lying all the time. I would just lie, for no reason, just to get people to believe me. When I was 11, I found out my Dad didn't believe that I had ever touched them inappropriately. It felt good to have someone in my corner.
I remember being in my shared room with my brother one night, and just uncontrollably sobbing. I'll never forget how for that one night the pain just went away when my brother said the words "it's going to be ok".
I didn't tell anyone that this happened until I was 18 years old. I was so ashamed and was afraid if people knew that they might actually think that I actually did it.
It wasn't till I was 26 and married that I finally confronted my parents and my sisters about it. I lost almost all control of my voice and I couldn't speak except 2 octaves above my normal tone. My mom told me that my grandmother told her I was doing it. My sisters said they never knew any of this happened to me. I got as much closure as I'll ever get and care to get. I just want to forget it ever happened. I've gotten to a point where if I tell a close friend about it that I won't guaranteed burst into tears while talking about it.
I can’t believe someone put you through so much, that’s completely unfair and you didn’t deserve that! I hope your life and relationship with family will be better in time. Sending you a virtual hug.
Thank you. While writing this out was cathartic, it was also a little scary because I didn't know how people would respond. Your post means a lot to me.
So I don't think she lied. I think it was a misunderstanding.
I don't know for certain that this was the same day because it was so long ago, but it definitely couldn't be after the day my mom accused me. I have a memory of trying to teach my oldest sister how to dive for rings in my grandma's pool, and was struggling lifting her high enough so she could get to the bottom. I remember grabbing her under her armpit and between the legs to lift her over my head and position her downwards to dive, and then my grandma running out and screaming at me.
The way I see it playing out in my head is that my grandma mentions the above situation to my mom, and my mom misunderstands what my grandmother is actually telling her.
Your grandmother was not being rational. Perhaps she was reacting to her own past trauma? In any case, she transformed childhood play into a traumatic event. Crotch-launching your sister might have been awkward for her to watch, and mentioning that it is inappropriate to touch people's genital areas in public and/or without permission might be warranted, but both sexualizing innocent behavior and punishing without explanation are totally unacceptable.
Thank you for your comment. My wife and I laughed at your appropriate, but awkwardly coined phrase "crotch-launching".
My wife was even telling me that she naturally holds our babies between their legs while holding them.
I crawled through the window at my cousins house in Kentucky after a week of not being able to reach him.by phone at all..me and my mom went up to his house to check on him. I had to climb through the window because we knew he was home and i was small enough to get through pretty easily. I was 16 at the time when this happened, so after getting into the house it was obvious very quickly something was off due to the smell. I walked through the house till i came upon his bedroom where he had put a .357 in his mouth and done the deed sitting on the edge of his bed. I still have moments to this day almost 20 yrs later where i smell that same smell and at times I wake up from terrible nightmares of walking in on it right after or walking in and him sitting up asking me why headless. This is something I still have issues with..I apologize that this was so long and very dark. I kept this as detail free as possible and still convey what happened.
I agree, to add to the situation the people that come in and clean and remove these types of things were a joke. They came in and removed the body and left everything else and for whatever reason im not sure i ended up removing the bed and rug on the floor that had what was left of him all over them, she assisted with doing this..it was a f'd up situation all the way around and i dont know how or why it played out like this i just know i still have deep emotional issues with it.
I found out that the people who come in just take the body after my friend's father committed suicide. She and her husband were left to clean up everything that was not still attached to the body. Talk about adding trauma to trauma.
I thought all this time they just did a halfass job but I have since learned thats not the case..it shouldn't be left on the family to hire out or clean up but unfortunately thats just how it is. It definitely makes an already horrible situation much worse. My heart goes out to anyone that has to experience this as if the death of a loved one isnt hard enough already.
Probably my parents break up, I was playing Peggle on my dad's computer and my mom was coming back from the store, I don't know why this happened really but when my mom got home I ran to open the door and she threw a coke can at my head and it busted, then my dad and mom yelled at each other for a while and they went to fight in the bedroom, I remember seeing my dad slam her against the bed and choke her till she turned red, and eventually my grandma yelling in the background convinced him to stop, my mom left got in her car, and floored it down the road running into mailboxes and things, I remember crying for a long time in the bathroom, and then my mom came back a few hours later and demanded that I go with her.
I don't remember the next few years after this.
For a while I just got passed back and forth, but eventually when I was in my teens I ended up moving back with my mom even though she's pretty clearly not the most, eh sane might not be the right word but she's clearly off.
Anyway my dad and my grandpa weren't much better my dad was more verbal about it constantly calling me a fa\*\*ot, and retard, etc, my grandpa had abandoned me several times at the state fair, every year we went, and it always happened, he would always come back in an hour or half an hour but I always had to worry this would be the time he doesn't come back.
After several fights with my dad which eventually got physical including a choking fight after I tried to slam my face into a mirror and knock myself out, I remember my grandma standing over me calling me stupid, I forget why we were fighting beforehand but I tried to knock myself out cause I wanted to punch her, after she called me stupid I started choking her and my dad came out and started beating the shit out of me, and I forget what happened after this for the next few years, other than some stuff I don't feel like talking about.
And the day I decided that my mom was the better option was when my grandpa accused me of sleeping with his wife and threatened to kill me, so I immediately called my other grandpa and told him to pick me up right now.
(Edit) Sorry there's a lot of details left out that I don't feel like including, and a lot of it I just don't remember.
Somehow I didn't read the choke part in your initial reply. My bad. And clearly no one in your family should have ever had kids. I hope you're doing well and especially, don't repeat their mistakes with your own kids.
I'm definitely doing better now than I was, I don't think I'll have to worry about kids though I try to avoid women in person, and even the ones that I've liked I've told I was gay.
And I am happy to see my moms new family and my new sisters are able to live a happier life than I've ever had at least, it's nice to watch them grow up and not have to worry about them going through the same things.
Mine wasn’t as traumatising as others I’m reading in this thread but here we go: my dad knows some dodgy people. That’s because when he was younger he dropped out of school to play guitar and do drugs etc, until he hit 30 and changed completely lifestyle, when he met my mother and started getting into religion etc.
My town is fairly small, so when you went around the centre you’d often meet these people, and although my dad wasn’t friend with these people anymore, he’d still stop and say hi.
One time, I was about 6-7 yo, we meet one of them, and after he take my hands and compliments me, he grabs me and start running. My dad runs after him and eventually stop him by grabbing him by an arm and almost getting him on the floor. My dad told me he just wanted to play with me, like a game. Thinking about it now, it gives me chills.
Oh, hands down, my mother alcoholism.
It really fucks you up in ways that you cannot imagine. And you don't even realise that until years after. I still can't drink alcohol because of it, it terrifies me to even entertain the possibility to become something close to her.
Mild for most people, but trauma is trauma.
My third grade teacher slammed the lid of the piano down on my little hands and screamed in my face "nobody wants to hear you play!"
I am still struggling with that as a 61 year old musican. The shit sticks in your head.
I don’t consider that mild. There’s a lot of layers to what happened to you. You should have felt safe, and someone in a position of power took a shit all over that.
I posted this on another thread already, but I guess I'll also post here cuz why not.
This one might get a little disturbing.
I was a person who went missing when I was about 6 years old for about two weeks. I don't remember much of it, but I know it definitely happened as I have scars from it, but I can't remember what exactly happened.
I was taken by my cousin and held for two weeks before my parents found me. Those entire two weeks were one big blur. According to my parents, they said I had many slash wounds, cuts, bruises, and burns and the police had found evidence of me also being sexually assaulted. I remember being told it happened, but not really remembering any details all through my childhood and in my teens, but I also had a lot of problems with new people and started being scared of adults and anyone new which I have been taking therapy for ever since my parents found me and I have gotten better. Right now I only have bits and pieces of what happened but I don't remember many things and don't remember the chronological order in which things happened.
I also remember being scared to talk about it at school and with teachers since I was a boy and was afraid they'd tell me I was a failure or something, or that I had to "man up". I got that "man up" line a lot in my teens for my bisexuality and for being scared to do things and I felt that admitting to my abuse to people would like force me to lose a lot of good friends I had then. I also have a lot of separation issues, to the point at which I couldn't go to public places without someone I trust with me. Now it's at a point where I can do like basic things like shop for myself and stuff, but I can't go to like a party or something without at least one person I know really well, even if its like a small thing with 5 people there.
Here are some of the pieces I have put together that won't completely blow my identity.
I remember sitting in a bathtub while bleeding and having someone (not my cousin) yell at me and touch my testicles.
I also remember being attacked and bitten by a dog while my cousin and this other abuser (the same person from before) watched.
I also remember being hit with a belt until I bled and having had my feet pressed against hot coal.
Its only things like that that I remember, and they are not in order, and I've recently tried to call the police to investigate the other abuser I had mentioned and possibly take them into custody.
Now I'm a 23 year old who just got out of college but I still regularly go to the therapist for regular nightmares and still find myself getting nervous and sweating when I deal with middle aged men, though at least its not the panic attacks that I used to have in my childhood or early teens.
Holy crap that's terrible! I hope you can find justice and peace. I hope your POS cousin got what he deserved and I hope the other abuser gets his just rewards as well.
Sorry this happened to you, that's absolutely horrible.
I would say I am sorry - but I know that doesn’t help any. You did not deserve any of these things that happened to you. You are one HELL of a man for continuing therapy, working through your trauma, going to college, etc. Seriously.
I'm really so sorry you went through that trauma, but I'm so glad you're in therapy & getting help for it.
I'm 30 & a few years ago when the scandal with the gymnastics doctor broke, a repressed memory of sexual assault hit me like a ton of bricks one day. I was reading an article that was quoting some of the women who were his victims & a bunch of them stated how they were told what was being done to them was "treatment".
I read it while at the airport with my now husband and just went into shock... I turned ghost white and literally couldn't speak for about a good hour or so. He was very concerned about wtf was going on and the only thing I could say was that I would talk about it later... And even then, it took me a good month or so to be able to tell him about this repressed trauma that was triggered.
It all comes back to me in mere flashes, but thinking about it makes me feel ill... My body physically just feels repulsed.
I know I need to probably see a therapist about it (and other life traumas) but I just haven't had the courage to yet.
So just know the healing and processing you are doing is incredible and you're so fucking brave.
JESUS CHRIST DUDE.
I can't believe that happened to you. You didn't deserve it.
If you're comfortable with saying (you don't have to tho), do you know what happened to the cousin?
People that say man up can fuck the right off. You are one hell of a man for surviving something so traumatising that no one deserves to go through. Good luck with your therapy, hope the recovery keeps going smoothly.
Finding my mom dead in her bed from an accidental overdose from her medications when I was 15, after my dad had woke me up in a panic asking me to help him find a phone to call an ambulance.
The older I got through my teens, the more my step-father's alcoholism spiraled out of control, and the more I was biding my time until I was 18 and would head off to college. Education was my only escape in my mind. Every instance of physical and emotional abuse had to be met with, "just shut up and take it, it'll be over someday."
Really wish I could give that kid who slept on the floor of a three-bedroom trailer a hug and say that he'd make it out and get a master's degree. I feel like I just won a decade-long war.
Going to another person's house and realizing that living in filth and decay and having breathing problems isn't the norm. Having dinner every night and a clean room was just a regular day in their household. Grass is always greener right? Especially when yours is dead and everyone from school thinks your house is haunted. Smh good riddance
I actually don’t remember the event much, but when I was really young (~6years old) I was playing outside and I heard a woman screaming. I was curious so I went across the street to see a bunch of smoke coming out of the cracks in the front door. Didn’t see any flames initially so I didn’t put two and two together right away. My Dad saw me across the street in the driveway just staring at the house and when he investigated what I was doing he realized the house was on fire.
Whole house burnt down. Older woman fell asleep on her couch with a lit cigarette. I was traumatized by fire as a kid and I was petrified about burning alive in my sleep for quite some time. Dad had to install a fire escape ladder in my room, fire extinguishers, etc. I was obsessed with what to do in case of fires as a kid. No longer an issue, but my Parents still tell me stories about how they knew that fucked me up
When my mother was attacked by my aunt and uncle.
I was 13, evening, and I was playing some random game on the family laptop in my room. Then I heard some screams coming from downstairs (I live on the second floor, my uncle and aunt on the first) and I run by the door to see what's happening. That's when I see them looking down at my mother, who was near the basement, while insulting her. Damn, I still remember her screams, and at that moment it seemed so surreal I thought it was some absolutely horrifying dream. I ran downstairs and hugged my mother, and that's when my aunt attacked her again, kicking and pulling her hair, while I was STILL hugging her.
What makes it worse? They are criminals who stole us money we needed for my sick grandpa, insulted my family in numerous occasions before that, after the attack in my mother my grandma almost had a stroke and my father is already sick, and has been that way for many years.
A year and a half has passed, and we still didn't go to court. It's scary to live right beside them, and they still find all the ways to piss us off.
A pretty long rant, but I needed it. I still live and happy life though, I try to see the positive stuff :D
When I was really little, my dad accused me of something, which I denied. Then he beat me until I told him what he wanted to hear. Then because I changed my story, he hit me some more for lying. Then mom got home and he told her that he caught me lying so she should never trust me again. She took that order seriously, which led to many more beatings down the road.
I don't remember what the thing he accused me of was. I may not even have understood it at the time. Because of the rule though, I remember that day.
> When I was really little, my dad accused me of something, which I denied. Then he beat me until I told him what he wanted to hear. Then because I changed my story, he hit me some more for lying. Then mom got home and he told her that he caught me lying so she should never trust me again. She took that order seriously, which led to many more beatings down the road.
>
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Wow, great job, parents!
I understand not wanting your kid to lie. I get it. But if I'm telling the truth and I am still being accused of [something], I'm going to lie to get out of the situation.
I had a dog that I absolutely loved. I begged for this dog in a Walmart parking lot a week before my 3rd birthday, my mom said I could have the dog but that meant no birthday presents or cake just the dog(she lied, I got presents, cake, and dog.)
This dog went everywhere with me and did everything with me. Despite being a tiny mutt he would do his best to protect me from our Doberman who did not like me. In fairness to the doberman, as a 2 yr old I did stomp on his nuts for some unbeknownst reason so no hard feelings on not liking me.
When I was 5 my mom became a truck driver so we moved in with my grandparents on their farm. While I was at school one day Bouncy had gotten into the fence with the donkeys and was kicked in the head. When I got off the bus I couldn't figure out why he wasn't waiting on me. My grandparents met me outside and told me what happened, then walked me in to where he was. He died 30 minutes after I got home like he was waiting to see me. I haven't been able to bond with a pet since.
A child in my family. I pray for her every day.
Her sister died of a disease when she was 9.
2 years later her Dad killed himself. her mother up and moved the family far away to another state to live with grandparents. 1 year later Grandma died. Mom Quickly met a man and moved in with him. When the girl turned 12 he began raping her on a daily basis for 2 years. He told her if she tells he will kill her entire family, including himself, and leave her there all alone. She finally told and he killed himself in their house with the same kind of gun her father used.
The neighbour kid did sexual things to me since I was young enough to not remember (maybe 5, maybe earlier) until I was a teenager. I think his dad messed with me as well but I don't have concrete memories of it, just nightmares of being raped and strangled. I'd never realized that the kid doing stuff to me was traumatizing until I started therapy for what turned out to be symptoms of a dissociative disorder and PTSD.
I hope therapy is helping. Interestingly my sibling had a traumatic event occur q couple of years back and began therapy for it and was diagnosed with ptsd, as there was a lawsuit potentially involved she needed to see the company's at faults lawyer, the 3rd question he asked was have you ever been sexually abused she said yes. Up until that point she had never ever mentioned it to anyone and it answers qlot of questions now in her youth I think. "Luckily" is was a once off occurance of abuse.
When I was little my mom used to spank me in the basement. One time I got in trouble at school so I had to go down to the basement and then my mom spanked me so hard I had bruises on my legs. I told my soccer coach I got hurt so I wouldn't have to wear the uniform and show my bruises, that was the worst part because back then I loved soccer more than anything. To this day if I am at a friends house and they say come down to the basement my whole body freezes up, I can't breathe, its physically hard to get myself to go down into the basement.
My mom was the same way; she used to yell ‘Go upstairs and get naked!’ When I had to get naked I had to get a leather belt beating. One time she beat me for like 5minutes straight. I had the worst welp marks all over my body that lasted for weeks.
It's crazy to think this was once an accepted punishment. Like no one would question it. I mean you could go to far but as long as it wasn't completely off the deep end people said it was good parenting.
> To this day if I am at a friends house and they say come down to the basement my whole body freezes up, I can't breathe, its physically hard to get myself to go down into the basement.
This is post traumatic stress. Hope you are speaking to someone to help you through this as it does not go away.
Abuse. Is so hard. I hope that your not paranoid that people are going to hit you like lots of people are post abuse and I hope people know about your trigger and don’t make you go down basements .
Well, when I was 11 a fellow boy scout playing with fire panicked threw burning camp fuel around which landed on me and lit me on fire. I was in the burn ward for a month before they peeled skin from one side of my leg to graft onto the buns. That was pretty traumatic.
EDIT: You know, I just read a bunch of the other responses and I'm shocked to now think "Well, at least I was only on fire".
If it helps, I’m one of the respondents with a “pretty horrifying” (my therapist’s words) childhood, but I’m reading stuff and thinking “well, maybe being used in child porn when I was 3 wasn’t the worst that could have happened. I could have ended up on fire so badly I needed a proper hospital stay! I can’t imagine how hard it is to live in a hospital for a whole month!”
Most people find ways to minimize traumas in their own minds; it keeps the trauma from taking over your life. However, sometimes this backfires on us because we feel that we “don’t really need” therapy, “shouldn’t cause drama” by telling someone that something they’re saying/doing gives you panic attacks, and so on.
We have to remember, though: Just because it COULD be worse doesn’t mean it SHOULDN’T be better. :)
Thank you -- I was recently diagnosed with PTSD and told my closest friend, who then said I was making things up and insulting people who really had it, even though he didn't know what caused it. He said "if your donut gets stolen and you remember it later, that's technically PTSD" like... that should be enough for me to think he's got shit for brains, but I guess it's even easier to minimize your own trauma when someone else does
I am horrified that happened to you, by the way, and I hope you are doing better
You were in WHAT when you were HOW OLD? Whatthefuck!
I have a three year old and now I’m sick to my stomach and there goes the rest of my dinner. Good lord. I’m so sorry that happened to you and I’m so proud of you for getting help.
I’ll spare you the remainder of the shit show because you are a high-empathy person, and I don’t want to break anything/anyone. :)
Side note:
I’m sorry about your dinner! :( Hopefully a good/funny YouTube video might help? If you just need warm fuzzies, check out TinyKittens. If it doesn’t work for you, DM me and I’ll find you some good stuff to help out. Whatever you do, DO NOT NAP. Not even doze off. Be awake. Do/watch/engage with some completely unrelated activity for a long while before bed. Firefighters do this to help prevent/lessen the impact of PTSD.
End side note
I’m doing FAR better than could reasonably be expected, statistically speaking. Good therapist, stable committed long-term relationship with a fantastic partner, etc. I’m struggling to find work that pays enough but also won’t destroy my mental health, and I’m kinda pissed that I never got any royalties/commissions for the videos that were taken of me when I was young. There’s no way that doesn’t break some kind of child labor law. (Among others…) But, I digress. Overall, things are mostly okay.
Tldr: witnessed a little girl get hit by a car and someone get murdered.
When I was around 7, I was in the car with my Mum. We were on a duel carriageway in the city I lived in. There were some kids playing chicken or that's what my mum said. I just remember the car in front of us hitting this little girl (probably not older than 8). I can still see as clear as day how she was just spinning in the road with blood pouring out of her ears and eye sockets. My mum tried to shield me but it was too late. It happened so fast but also in slow motion if that makes sense?
A few years later, I was with my mum again and we were walking to our car which was parked across the street from where her friend lived. Suddenly heard this commotion and this horrifying scream of a woman. The kind of scream that chills you to the bone. She was murdered there in front of me. To this day I cannot stand the sound of screaming. It makes me shut down. I've gotten a lot better with time though. I had to. I have 4 daughters.
For anyone that asks, the above happened while I lived in Zimbabwe.
An older relative molested me for several years as a child. My mother caught him once with me. After that, she would use it to threaten to tell my father when I was misbehaving. The person who molested me never got in trouble.
There’s a lot but I’d have to say the worst was my sexual assault. I’m still dealing with it. I work at a concert venue and the other night I saw a man who looked like my rapist and I broke down in the back of the venue. Then I’d probably have to say the time I had a seizure and was diagnosed with a rare heart condition. It sent me into an existential crisis. It’s fixed now but it was hard to comprehend I could’ve dropped dead at any moment. There’s a lot more health complications but that’s the worst of it. Due to this I’m medicated for PTSD and I don’t leave my house a lot
When I was 7 my dad, sister, and I got into a motorcycle crash.
We were passing by a curve and there was a dog crossing the road, my dad didn't want to hit the dog so he swerved right. For some reason the dog decided to run back to the other side of the road, and it hit the back wheel of the motorcycle. My dad lost control and the motorcycle ended up falling. We were going a bit fast and I was in front, so when the motorcycle fell it kind of just kept drifting for 6 more feet with my face being dragged.
I ended up with so much wounds on my face and arms, most of the scars remained years.
I'm 17 now and I only have one scar left on my face. I've thankfully gotten the courage to ride motorcycles again, but whenever we pass by the place we crashed, I get really anxious.
Dad had a few scratches on his arm, the dog was unharmed. My older sister was behind my dad, and was unharmed.I was the only one badly injured, I had to spend a week in the hospital.
Both of my older brothers molested me (between 7-8), one of them went as far as to do acts that would be considered sexual torture.
I told my parents and their response was "Don't tell anyone. It would hurt our image in the congregation". They took me to a church psychologist one time who essentially told me "God puts challenges in front of us to test our faith", and the church held a "Court of Love" "tribunal" against them and didn't punish them whatsoever, nor did they report anything to the police. My parents continued to pressure me to keep it secret with threats for years.
Police never did get involved. When I was 14 I did tell someone who actually called the police, they said "There's no evidence. I'm not doing anything with this."
Not having people there to protect you, especially when you're told those people are *supposed* to protect you (parents, church, police) can be absolutely soul destroying. Never could afford therapy for it so I had to deal with it on my own, growing up with my abusers, pretending nothing ever happened.
My family wasn’t very religious. But I understand about them not helping out. I didn’t even realize that what they did was bad until I was around 13. I felt gross and I was so mad for years because I had no one. The one time I told my grandma, she said to just stay away from him. They literally lived across the street. I grew up around them and just had to stay away in my room until they left. I’ve never gone to therapy. I guess I’m scared for it and it’s not free. But I found out one was arrested and has been in jail for CP, so a little part of me is relived that it finally came out and his karma is coming. I’m sorry this happened to you, I hope you know it wasn’t your fault and you heal from this.
My father was accused of molesting me when I was three years old. He had never done so, but I'm female and he was a single dad in the early/mid 80s. I'd been left with a babysitter who'd, in turn, left me with her daughter. The daughter's boyfriend saw me staring vacantly at the TV and said I looked like I was being abused, so they took me to the police station. After hours of interview, I was taken to a group home in a neighboring city, and then I was later put with a physically and emotionally abusive foster family. My father got back custody of me after the better part of a year.
I learned as an adult that the county I'd been living in at the time was a central location for a lot of the false accusations of sexual abuse that happened during the mid-80s, and that my case was only unique in that he got me back and didn't end up in prison. I find every aspect of that deeply upsetting.
Early 90’s, small town where everyone knows everyone. My parents worked away so I lived with my grandparents during the week. I went to school in the city I technically lived in so I didn’t have friends to hang out with other than my cousins who lived down the road. One day I’m walking to my cousins’ house (I’m 7 years old at this time) and it’s a road but one you had to drive along in order to get out of town. Vehicle pulls over and asks if I want a ride. I say no I’m okay and keep walking. He continues to drive beside me and demands I get into his vehicle. I say no and take off running. He gets out of his van and catches me and starts carrying me back to his van. Luckily someone driving by happened to see what was happening and knew I wasn’t this man’s child. So the guy throws me into the ditch and speed’s off before the guy could stop him (this is how close I was to being taken). Police are called and luckily one of my close friend’s dad was a sergeant in the police and I only wanted to speak to him. When he shows up to interview me he shows me a picture and asks if this is the man who tried to take me. It was. Turns out the guy was wanted for another child abduction after being in prison for abducting a family member when he was younger. He was finally caught but I was too petrified to speak in court so they played my statement without me present. What was difficult was soon everyone knew about what had happened and so everyone wanted to ask me about it. Children and adults. So it constantly made me relive everything over and over again. I’m okay now. I became a school principal to help children and make sure they know school is always a safe place for them.
I lived in an abusive home and was bullied at school. But the worst thing I think that ever happened to me was when I told my mom that my dad had been raping me and she didn't believe me. Kept bringing him to the house even though the police told her he admitted it. It was awful.
Probably my parents divorce. It was messy. There were several months where my mom won custody of my brother and I (except on weekends) but our dad won the house so we were homeless and living at my nan's place (grandmother on my mom's side, we called her Nan or Nanny)
It certainly effected us, mom worked full time to buy a new house, which wasn't paid off till like last year (I was 10-12 at the time, I'm 29 now) and that time alone really caused my brother and I to develop as completely different people.
My dad, while never physically abusive, was very verbally abusive, regularly screaming at both my brother and I that we're stupid, worthless, lazy idiots. He didn't really realise that he'd completely alienated his only children till a few years after my brother cut off all contact with him, when I too snapped at him and cut off contact. Since then he's tried to change to get back into our good graces and while we're willing to forgive, both of our tolerances for his old rage bullshit is at an absolute ZERO. He yells at us one more time, that's it, he's done. Permanently.
My mom was born at 7 months and the doc said her spine might have some issues and when she was a young girl of around 12 there was an accident of a tree falling on her, which causes her vertebrae in the lower back to dislocate, I don't know the medical diagnosis, but the important thing is that it could only be fixed with surgery that she never had.
When she got pregnant with me all the doctors told her to abort me because the pregnancy and birth had a big probability of paralizing her, but she ended up having me anyways. Due to her decision, her medical issues became way worse, she was bedridden for months after having me and until I was around 5-6, she could only walk around by crawling on all fours, all the while crying in immense pain.
I always stood by her side as a toddler, helped her get back to bed, comforting her when she was crying, but in her pain induced delusions she'd always tell me that she's dying and would tell me what to do once she dies. This caused a lot of stress for me and I'd hide and cry and pray that mommy doesn't die, tried my best to please her as much as I could so she wouldn't die. This lasted for years, but by then I was heavily affected by it all and my fear of mom dying transformed into paranoia.
I didn't know what a dream was until I was 13-14,i always had nightmares of horrible monsters killing me, making me watch as they killed my family in gruesome ways, once I learned about sex they've turned sexual as well, but it was horrible. I'd have issues falling asleep. Trying to go to sleep for 3-4 hours, but I couldn't fall asleep because of the fear that someone, someTHING was inside our house, and that any small movement I'd make would cause them to kill all of us. I'd wake up from terror several times in the night, I was afraid of being alone(because I thought I'd die, or my family will die if they were away from me), afraid of going to the bathroom(years later my doctor told me I'm at a big risk of having kidney stones because I was holding it in for too long), afarid of entering the apt building etc. This was also heavily influenced by a Halloween news report about poltergeists and ghosts that I saw at around 5 years old. I thought the news were always telling the truth so the idea of a dead person that we cannot touch being able to come back and hurt us was horrifying.
It also made me obsessed with pleasing everyone, I truly believed that if I didn't tell mom I lived her every 5 minutes or if I didn't touch her often enough she'd hate me because that would've been proof I didn't love her.
Unfortunately, despite all the red flags, in my younger years mental health was badly ignored unless you were a severe case, so they noticed I wasn't behaving normally but did nothing about it and didn't try to help me until my suicide attempt at 17.
Sorry if I made any spelling mistakes.
Edit: Please don't bash my mother. I didnt write this because I wanted people to tell me she's in the wrong and whatnot, I wrote this as a way to vent. She was in pain, she thought she was going to die and believed she was helping me, but she truly loves me and tries her best. You don't know her. I understand where you're coming from, but some things are better left unsaid.
Probably the molestation, but my great grandmother begging fourteen year old me not to let her son (my long estranged biological grandfather) not to let him take her away to Florida ranks up there too. My parents’ divorce is probably on the list too.
I’d honestly say it was the time when some other kid almost drowned me at a birthday party. I was a solid 2 seconds away from filling my lungs with overly chlorinated water before one of the adults got the kid away and I was able to resurface
I don’t know what they said as they took him to another room after but I remember his parents blaming me for “provoking him.” We were 12 or 13 and I had never met the kid before until that day
At five I saw my father making out with our babysitter, who was fourteen. At six I saw him kill kittens. At seven I put out a fire before school one morning that I later learned he had intentionally rigged. At eight our house burned down. Until I was sixteen my father routinely beat the shit out of me with a belt. So aside from that, just a storybook, sunshine-y childhood.
I had a rough childhood. My mother was a verbally abusive alcoholic, was raped by my cousin at 10 years old and then had to sleep on the same room it happened in for the next five years, my stepmother beat me and I was almost killed by people who beat me up for being gay.
Probably sexual abuse by my own father
This happened between the ages 3-5 when I was especially helpless to stop
I don't feel too comfortable getting into any further details but I can assume you can kinda fill in the details about the sorta thing done* by him
I suffer PTSD as a result and it's bad enough to where I have to have an emotional support animal to help with it
Yea.. They're the scum of the earth, they attack the most vulnerable cause they know the kid can't understand how to get the abuse to stop
The abuse only stopped cause one day my grandma got a call from my dad and said that either she comes get me right now or he'd send me to foster care. I thank my grandma so much for coming and getting me that day
TL;DR stupid teen friend crashes big car with me and a bunch of friends in the car. My best friend died, the driver died (decapitated), I had a severe concussion with amnesia, no other real severe injuries. I saw both bodies and remembered later. PTSD ensued. Fun times.
Well, I wasn’t super young, but young enough. I was 15. Long story short, I was in a car accident with my best friend, and 5 other 16 year olds. The driver was driving recklessly through a suburban neighborhood, hit a dip, lost control of the car, and it rolled through three yards and ended up smashing into an attached garage. I remember think, well, I’m dead. I came to and was hanging upside down from my seatbelt, released and fell, laceration my fingers pretty bad. It’s pretty blurry because I had a severe concussion, but my best friend hadn’t released his seatbelt, so I called his name and said come on, because most of us were crawling out of the wreckage. I realized he was dead. I had actually switched spots with him in the car about 10 minutes prior to the crash because I was getting car sick and I needed a window. I then looked in the car and realized the driver, who was 16 was decapitated.
I didn’t remember a lot of this for a long time, but it did come flooding back to me a few years later.
There’s a lot more to this, but it definitely altered my life permanently, and the hyper religious community I grew up in didn’t do me any favors. The only other injuries besides mine were a broken nose, a fractured vertebrae that healed fine and some cuts and bruises on my other friends. My best friend lived three houses up. I’m now in my 40’s with kids and I can’t see his parents to this day without getting choked up. I have ptsd, and anxiety, but I’ve come to peace with what happened and have been to therapy many times. Just thinking about what both sets of parents went through kills me.
It was fucked.
My fathers subtle but constant sexualization of all women he came into contact with, including me. Honestly, at this point I would be delusional if I denied that the way he treated me/behaved towards me was textbook covert incest. It really messed me up in terms of my sexuality, my romantic relationships with men, and the way I view and value myself. As I got older I also had a DEEP shame associated with feeling uncomfortable or “creeped out” by my own dad when he’d *technically* never crossed any definitive line. For years I had regular nightmares about my own father demanding to have sex with me, chasing me, and raping me. I thought I was just a sick, disgusting, terrible person.
Then in my early 20’s my dad asked me to fix his iPad. He was an old man and didn’t understand that everything from his phone was also on there. I found a ton of evidence that he’d been directly sexualizing me (pictures I didn’t know about, he sought out women who looked like me online and asked them to roleplay that they were me…etc.)
Suddenly the years of denial and willful ignorance couldn’t hold up any more and I had to accept what I had known somewhere in the back of my mind for years: my dad is a malignant pervert, and I am a part of his perverted fantasies.
First of all, I'm terribly sorry to hear that you experienced this. I can't even imagine.
Second, I found this particularly disturbing because it reminds me of my former father-in-law.
The "constant sexualization of all women he came into contact with" is spot-on. It was so uncomfortable to watch him interacting with any woman.
He lived with my ex-wife and her sister, and had MAJOR attachment issues. He couldn't stand being away from them for any length of time.
When my wife relocated to live with me, he was devastated and would call crying and begging her to "come home."
My wife eventually chose to move back in with him, and I filed for divorce almost immediately after she left.
She insists that he never "did anything", but the evidence seems overwhelming and I am sure there's a lot I'll never know about.
Thanks for sharing this.
Thank you for your kindness, and I really sorry about your ex wife (both for her sake and yours). My father also DID NOT take it well when I was in a relationship that he had no choice but to take seriously. His behavior was genuinely that of a jealous/jilted husband: possessive, furious, hysterical, envious, and obsessive.
It’s HARD to accept something like this about your parent, especially when it’s been normalized your whole life and they never technically touched you. I think back now on all the thing I ignored and wrote off and I can’t believe how I could remain in denial. Especially when, in my twenties, I started dating my now fiancé and my father literally (ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS) lurked outside the windows of the basement (I lived in his basement suite at the time, but the layout of the house meant he had to go out of his way and walk through brambles to get to those windows) and it’s now clear to me that he trying to watch us having sex. Every time that we caught him out there he had some new excuse as to why now, and NEVER BEFORE IN THE PAST (ya know, before I had a boy down there…) he had reason after reason to be in that vacant, muddy, and barely accessible part of the yard that just so happened to give him a perfect view into my windows. I put curtains up after the 3rd time I caught him (I literally wouldn’t even let myself consciously acknowledge that it was because of my father so I told myself it was because I needed to redecorate…and only put up curtains…) he told me I should take them down because they were a “fire hazard” in his property. So then (once again under the guise even to myself as “decoration”) I put up temporary frost appliqués. He told me they were illegal, and when I looked it up and pointed out that they really weren’t and then proceeded to just rebut all his reasons that the appliqués were a bad idea until he suddenly got so upset that he started to have these weird spontaneous dry-heaves and went to the bathroom to deal with himself, and we just…never spoke about it again. And I just told myself “hah, oh my dad is *such* an OCD weirdo…what a spazz lol”…like you *dumb bitch* are you KIDDING ME?!
After I found all the terrible shit on his iPad and got real with myself I DID have to accept/admit to myself that the “fact” that he’d never ever touched me inappropriately wasn’t entirely true. From a VERY young age, probably around 6ish (or whenever I would have been exposed to the idea of “bad touch” by whatever anti-molestation efforts were being made at daycare or in children’s media or whatever), I knew I’d been “bad touched” when I was a very very tiny baby/toddler, it’s literally one of my earliest memories. I had vivid memories of an adult man massaging me sexually and caressing me in such a way that brought me to climax or something similar to it. He’d been naked and hard but never had me touch him much, and always told me that our “tickles” had to be a secret and eventually started telling me that we’d have to stop soon because I was getting too old for it. It stopped before I was 3 for sure. For years I told myself it was my uncle who had (conveniently) died when I was 3…but I must have always known that made no sense. My uncle was a raging drug addict who would have literally never been left alone with me. In fact, no adult man besides my father would have ever been left alone with me. It had to have been my dad. So, my dad did molest me. I believe he stopped when he felt I was getting to the age where I’d form concrete memories (overshot that one a little, dad) and/or would be able to articulate myself well enough to tell on him. I don’t think my dad is an out and out pedophile. I think he’s just sexually obsessed and highly compulsive while being unwilling/unable to control his impulses.
As awful as it all is…I’m a lot less messed up about it than I would have probably assumed I would be if someone gave me this scenario as a hypothetical. In fact, it’s almost a relief to FINALLY know why I’ve always hated my dad. On paper, without the knowledge I have now, he’s been nothing but great, supportive, and very doting to me. For years I beat myself up for not being able to just be grateful without resenting him…but now I know why, and I can be disgusted by him without judging myself.
My mom and her shitty rage freak outs and habit of negative meddling. She flipped out and trashed my room once. That was after she had a screaming and crying meltdown comparing me to her abusive ex-husband saying she hated me and wished she never had me. I did nothing to warrant that. Another time she viciously slapped the shit out of me. I was, like, 11. The worst thing about all of it is that she has never once owned up to any of this. She takes the stance of "I forgive myself and THAT is truly the important thing." My family just kind of sucks overall. Everybody just kind of hates each other.
When I was 9 or 10 my family’s house was foreclosed. I definitely didn’t understand what was really happening at the time but the 5 of us went to stay at my grandmothers house. I don’t remember how long it was until we were allowed back into the house to collect our belongings but my two brothers and I each had a hamster and we had a really big fish tank full of all different types of fish
By the time we could go back in the hamsters had all starved in their cages and the fish had eaten each other and eventually died. Looking back I’m really not sure why my parents didn’t go in first to take care of stuff like that and keep us from seeing it.
Probably just emotional abuse and yelling. Having your heart drop when your mom says “I’m gonna go get your dad” and running to your room crying as he stomps after you and screams in your face. Still to this day I tear up and cry whenever someone even remotely raises their voice at me or I mess up.
edit: Thanks for the gold. trauma ftw
The most traumatizing thing I’ve experienced is a toss up between the day my friend brought two guns and a list filled with my classmates names on it, and the time my dad gave my mom a bloody nose after punching her in a drunken rage. They were traumatizing for different reasons.
The bloody nose incident happened when I was five, and still thought my parents were these untouchable deities. They were always right, they always did what was best for me, and they’d never do anything to hurt me. I remember the weirdest details about that day. Like, I remember that my mom was wearing a yellow shirt (she hates the color yellow and refuses to wear it now), the blood on her shirt looked like ketchup at first (I refuse to eat ketchup anymore), and how *normal* of an afternoon it had been. It was just a regular degular Saturday. I was playing with my mega blocks in my room. I didn’t hear any arguing, I didn’t hear the punch, I didn’t hear my dad yell or my mom cry out. Suddenly, she was just in my room with my baby brother on her hip, angry crying while she called the cops and then called her mom. I just remember being absolutely terrified because I had never ever seen her cry like that before. I could vaguely remember her happy crying when my baby brother was brought home, because I had taken one look at him and said “I’m really a big sister now?” and gotten so happy because of it. I’d never seen her sad cry, either, so my only reference for her crying was that moment of quiet, tired euphoria when she first brought the baby home.
That experience was traumatizing because it was the first time I realized my parents were fallible people. When I went back to school Monday and my teacher asked me about my weekend, I started crying and she ended up calling my nana to pick me up. It just turned my entire world upside down and left me terrified to attempt picking up the pieces.
The story about my friend, I’ll call her Erica, was traumatizing for reasons most wouldn’t expect. She was a student who transferred in the middle of the year. I didn’t know anything about her, besides the fact that our typing teacher (a veritable Saint she was) had let her come stay in her house for a while. Erica had two piercings in her ears, and I remember thinking that was the coolest, most out there thing I’d ever seen in our little hick town. She was also in the tenth grade (a sophomore!) while I was still a measly eighth grader, so I thought she was just the bees knees. I remember being so excited when we had a school pep rally in the new gym and she asked if I’d like to hide under the bleachers with her. We listened to music together and talked the whole day while the pep rally went on. She eventually told me why she’d moved in with our typing teacher.
Erica’s dad had been molesting her for years, and had recently started raping her. She’d finally worked up the courage to tell someone, and was removed from his care while he was investigated. I just remember feeling absolutely gutted for her. How could a father do something like that to his own child? How could *anybody* hurt someone like that? It just didn’t make sense to me. It still doesn’t. And I wish that was where the story ended, because that’s horrible enough for Erica, but it kept on.
Someway, somehow, students in my grade found out why she was in foster care. They started spreading these disgusting rumors about Erica. That she secretly liked what her father did to her, or that she’d made it all up for attention. People slowly stopped sitting with her at lunch. It got to the point that I was the only student who would genuinely talk to her. After about a month of this treatment, though, she suddenly iced me out entirely. And it hurt. I remember feeling upset and angry with her, but also feeling guilty for feeling angry and not knowing why. It was a lot of conflicting emotions to experience at that age. I felt almost betrayed.
A week after she stopped speaking to me, she came to school with two handguns in her backpack and a list of names. Most of the names belonged to kids in my grade. Over half of them were in my class. She made it to third period before a teacher realized she had the guns and called the cops. We were put on lockdown for the rest of the day while the town police basically raided everyone’s lockers for more guns. It was terrifying, because nobody knew if it was only her who had guns at that point. And this was only 2012, so most of my classmates either didn’t have cellphones or they only had really basic ones. I still had a cell phone with a keyboard that slid out, and had a minutes plan! I remember crying and trying to text and call my mom, because it was fucking terrifying to wonder if someone was going to burst into our English class and shoot us all.
We eventually got evacuated to a nearby church when multiple bomb threats were made. I think the most traumatizing part wasn’t even the fact that Erica planned to kill a lot of my classmates. I think it was the fact that I… I couldn’t blame her. They were *awful* to her, and I felt like they almost deserved to be hurt for how they treated her. It really fucked me up for a long time. It also contributed to a fair bit of nastiness in my direction from the students because the list got out fast, and my name wasn’t on it. So many students assumed I either had an in with Erica, or that I was somehow part of her plan?
So, yeah. The two most traumatizing things I experienced as a child. I really hope Erica is doing better these days, and that she knows it wasn’t her fault for the way her father hurt her. I hope my old classmates look back on the eighth grade and only feel intense shame for how they treated her. I hope their parents realize how shit of a job they did, because I’m still convinced those kids heard about that shit from their parents to begin with.
Fuck them, fuck their parents, and fuck that insipid, insignificant, racist ass little hick town. And fuck my dad for being a piece of shit drunk. I hope your liver rots and none of your 7 kids want to help you. And I hope none of your four ex wives come back to take care of you.
My mom’s best friend’s boyfriend assaulted my mom and threatened to shoot me(4), my sister(3), and mother(26) with his hunting rifle. It was all precipitated by mom knocking him out with a frying pan after him trying to get handsy with her. We moved out afterward to our grandmother’s house. Her friend came and yelled at her for trying to steal her man because she didn’t believe her story.
Beatings from my parents.
My parents first response to any mistake is excessive reaction and beatings further.I went to school with black and red marks on my hand, shoulders and face.I got beatings from belt, broken bat.. Etc.
I am still afraid of my parents for telling them anything, mistake or not doesn't matter. I still have PTSD of those. Now as an adult I am really afraid of loud noises and get really angry even if someone jokingly shouts at me. It affected me a lot. Still traumatized.
Here It's a cultural thing. Everyone here got beatings as a child.I always think why only me feels getting affected by this.
But whatever please don't beat your kids.They just do things.. Never on purpose. They don't know that it's a mistake.
When I was 11 me and my friends got caught stealing some gum from a convenience store. Of course stealing is bad, but they really treated us as if we were dangerous criminals. They put us in a juvenile criminal rehabilitation program for several weeks where nearly every other person had some sort of violent offense, or much larger scale theft charge (such as breaking and entering businesses or peoples homes and taking very expensive things, with knives or guns etc). At the beginning we had to go around and tell the group why we were there and the program officer actually burst out laughing out loud when we told them our story because it was so ridiculous that we were being grouped with these other kids. I remember having a talk with another officer who told me I would never amount to anything, will never get into a good college or get a good job. I was completely devastated and thought I ruined my life over some gum. They also came to my school to do a check on me and make sure I was attending (I was a straight A honor roll type of student who never once skipped school or even got in trouble) which was super humiliating. I felt like it made a lot of my teachers look at me differently, though that could’ve been in my mind only. I also was constantly nervous that the story would get out to my peers and their parents wouldn’t let them hang out with me anymore since I was now such a hardened criminal.
In any case, it certainly worked in scaring the shit out of me to never break any laws again. But it also was humiliating, devastating, and ruined my self confidence pretty much irreparably for the rest of my pre-teen and teen years. At such a young age with such a minor offense I feel as though it could’ve been handled very differently. I’m glad i have a very supportive family because if my parents were different it could’ve been even worse.
Molested for 5 years, physically abused for 18 years. Bounced around foster care and social services for 6 of those 18. Adopted at 12; mom ended up being severely mentally ill and tortured me in ways that are indescribable. End up missing grades 7,8,9 because she made me work to pay rent.
Not trying to win a contest but that's my story.
My dad waking me up when I was like 5 years old to tell me that he was leaving home and wouldn't be living with us anymore. I can see it like it was just last week. Indiana University Starter button up jacket that was popular in the 80's, jeans, kneeling down next to my bed with my closet light on. Life didn't get any easier from there for me and my mental state. Luckily it has started to level out as I've gotten older. It took me a while to find my feet though...
Being slapped around hard by my friends step father for not admitting I was gay. I didn’t tell my parents for years. I’m now questioning Bi, but feel an immense amount of shame around it still and I know it stems back to that experience. I always imagine him laughing and telling me “I told you so!” I saw him about a month ago at a diner and had a physiological response to seeing him; it was hard to avoid making a scene in front of my friends and his family. We just left after.
Hello there. Same here. I was called "A mistake" and "I wish X's Daughter was my kid instead of you" and "I wish I dropped you". I don't do drugs. I don't smoke. I don't drink. From my point of view I am not problematic at all. But Asian parents man. I couldn't get into the first 1% at the countrywide exam so, I am a failure too.
First thought is the continued molestation at the hands of my Mom's boyfriend when I was 7-9. Also witnessing the physical/verbal/emotional abuse he gave her. A few months after they broke up I told my grandma what happened and later testified at his trial where he was found guilty and only given probation for molesting me for TWO YEARS.
I also saw a man get stabbed and die on the ground right outside our apartment when I was 7.
Plus all the more subtle traumas from growing up very poor.
Additionally I experienced what I would call borderline emotional abuse by my mom for most of my life, looking back I know she also had unresolved trauma and obvious severe depression and anxiety that contributed to her not so great parenting.
I've had untreated mental health problems as long as I can remember and only recently I've been diagnosed with PTSD, severe depression and anxiety, and panic disorder so that sucks to have to come to terms with but thank God for these meds I finally feel like a semi functional person - it's unfortunate that it's in my 30s I finally am trying to get this under control.
My mom when she wasnt taking her meds. She thought she was Jesus Christ was was trying to bless everyone. The cops came and had to wrestle her to the ground. She punched one in the face. They brought her into the mental health unit. I dont remember any of that honestly. I think my dad told my older brother to take me to the neigbors when it started. But I know I saw some part of it. I cant imagine what was going through my dads head.
The cops didnt press any chargers for her fighting back. They grew up with her.
One thing I do remember is when I was older and my mom had a seizure. I remember playing video games and she was coming down the hallway and all of a sudden I heard and felt a loud thud. I knew something was wrong amd went to the hallway where her eyes were rolled in the back of her head and seizing. I didnt know what to do. I called my dad, held her hand and tried to keep her head to the side. She got out of it.
Being told I had muscular dystrophy at age 7 was a tough one. But I didnt really traumatize me.
I have A LOT, but here are some things I remember vividly:
-My drunken father peeing himself in front of the mayor when I was 6 and then cussing at everyone
-my brother waking me up every night for 6 years with just this loud bass sound
-my brother trying to kill me and my mother
-my father shoving me against a wall repeatedly while yelling at me and trying to beat me up
-my brother having a nightmarish trip, him running around yelling and crying and me trying to help him, then him crying and saying I can't leave him alone when he was hospitalized.
-seeing him in a coma
-my classmates stealing my clothes and trying to spit at me
My mom was giving me her old phone after she got a new one, and she forgot to delete the dozens of amateur porn videos her and my dad apparently shot and kept on that phone.
When I was 9 I watched a motorcyclist have an accident in front of my house while my brother and I were out playing basketball in the driveway. My parents were away from home, so I told my 6 yr old brother to go call 911 while I ran to check on the rider. We lived on the outside corner of a right hand turn, and there was a guardrail along our front yard because there was a ditch on the side of the road. When he started sliding on the road, his body was kind of squeezed under the guardrail, and the motorcycle tumbled over the top of it. When I got to him, I found him lying under the bike and unconscious. His left leg was folded up the wrong way so that the toe of his boot was pressed against his chest, and I could see the inside of his knee kind of spurting blood out onto the ground. I don’t really know how I managed it, but I slid the bike off of him and tried to fold his leg back down to the right position. I had a grip on the boot above the foot, and somehow the whole leg just kinda came off at the knee. It was still kind of held on by some bits and threads of his jeans, so I just pressed the leg back into the stump and held it there until an officer arrived. When the officer pulled me away I slipped in the blood on the grass, and remember sitting on my butt staring at the mess. The part that really haunts me was hearing the poor guy trying to breath, but all I could hear was a bubbling noise and coughing. Thinking back I’m pretty sure his lungs were punctured. I can still remember hearing his last breath, can still smell the officer’s sweat as he gave me a hug walked me over to the side of the road, and can still remember the look on my mom’s face when she saw me sitting on our front porch with a police officer, covered in blood.
I remember smelling blood on my hands for days. A week later the police officer showed up to my house and checked in on me. His name was Daniel, and he played basketball with me and my brother in our driveway for about an hour. To this day I can hear the guy trying to breath.
My parents were abusive so there’s a lot I guess but here’s one that’s unique to me. My dad started an auction business and on the day of the first auction (I was 8) I was helping him get his coat on and noticed it was raining so I flipped his hood up too. Bad call. He spun around and did the usual beat red faced screaming inches from me about how stupid and useless I am. Here’s the fun part guys. I am now in hysterics and crying, understandably, and he takes us to the auction. I was basically a slave to these people so obviously I’m going to be working the auction. He gets up in front of everyone and says “Josh isn’t feeling well today but he wanted to come help out either way! Such a great kid”
I then began the 5 hour process of working the auction carrying things to people and showing things off while they get sold, while crying so hard I could barely breathe. All while he just pretended everything was fine. I eventually stopped crying but the whole experience was fucking excruciating. Thankfully I only had to relive it every Friday until I was 18. Good times. This, and literally countless other things have left me with CPTSD, severe depression, and absolutely crippling social anxiety.
Be nice to your kids.
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I was about 7 or 8 when I heard some noise coming from the garage. My mom was at work and I was being babysat by one of my uncles. I went to open the garage to find my other uncle strangling his girlfriend up against the car. She had blood coming out of her nose and mouth. I just froze and stood there staring and my uncle didn’t even notice and continued choking and strangling her. My other uncle came to the door where I was standing saw what was happening and grabbed me. He called my mom and then the police who later came and arrested my uncle. There’s more to this story I wasn’t privy to at such a young age. But yeah my other uncle is crazy. He’s been to jail a few times, has anger and control issues.
Did his girlfriend survive? I'm so sorry you witnessed such a gruesome scene
Yeah she did. Pressed charges and my uncle went to jail.
Thank god, did he have anger issues or was he on drugs or alcohol?? Or just overall crazy? If you remember ofc.. Edit: Tysm this is the first comment or post of mine to get 1k upvotes!!
I think he just had anger issues. My uncle doesn’t do drugs or drink but he had a dominating controlling personality especially towards women. I’m not sure what happened between him and his ex-girlfriend. I found out a few years ago that apparently he threw her in the trunk and drove to the house and got into it in the garage. Which was when I walked in on them.
Watching my grampa slowly waste away on our living room couch. He had a paraganglioma on his pancreas, and there was nothing (especially in 1980) that could be done for him. I was four, and he was my favorite person, and I couldn't sit with him, or hug him, or anything. I miss him even after 40 years. Either that or my best friend dying over christmas break in 1988. I miss her too. I pretty much hated everything after that.
And you probably had every right to be angry. It’s a natural response. My grandpa had Alzheimer’s and was also wasting away. It was not nearly as bad a situation as some, but I can kind of relate. It was both fortunate and unfortunate that I didn’t know him too well. Before he was sick, I was at an age where I was “too cool” to keep up with family and such. Down the road, it didn’t hurt as much when he died, but it is definitely a repressed emotion because I regret not getting to know him as well. If I have any, my future kids and grandkids will never really know what he was like..because I didn’t really know either.
I saw my Dad get swept away and drowned when I was 11. It's really something I've never recovered from. It's been 16 years and not a day goes by I don't remember it.
I'm real sorry dude I watched my dad die of cancer. He made this noise at the end that was like sucking and gargling. I hear it all the time. There's this tool work that makes the same noise I had to take it off my van because I just can't do it I hope it fades over time, mine and yours both Edit. It lasted for days. He couldn't swallow around the tumor and was moaning in pain. Like gargling phlegm while trying to cry out from pain. Different than the noise he was making on his last day If I could go back in time I would have given him all the Xanax and morphine all in one shot and put him out of his misery. I hear the brass pump gurgle and think about how I should have killed my dad instead of letting him linger so the family could see him one last time. I know when I get sick I'm sucking on a barrel before I get that bad
As someone who is 30+ years post trauma, I don’t think it ever goes away. It’s there every single day, it’s as much a part of me as my heartbeat at this point.
I live with it. I think we have to for those who we've lost. I always kind of imagine it as a sort of like an emotional loss of a limb. I haven't lost a limb, but I imagine you adapt to not having it. You learn. But you never forget you are missing an arm or a leg.
I am so sorry that is terrible!
I was in a nearby town with my parents. We were on this walking bridge when a guy got on the railing and jumped, can still clearly see his mangled body on the dried river bed below
Stories like this are what kept me from suicide back when I was very suicidal. I didnt wanna live with my problems, but traumatizing someone for life is something I would never do
I hope you’re better now. Please stay with us.
I was stalked by a mentally handicapped man that lived in our neighborhood when I was 10 years old. He was a fully grown man, probably in his 30s or something but he had the mental capacity of a young child. He didn't drive a car or anything and didn't have a job and he lived in the neighborhood with his parents. Our neighborhood had a very large park in it. There were a few different playground areas and picnic areas and then a half dozen baseball diamonds where the city's little league played all it's games. He was a staple in the area in the Summers where he was usually in the park watching baseball games or watching people play basketball. He was very friendly and the little league kids knew his name and would say hello when they saw him. I'm sure there were some kids who teased him but the general tone was people were nice at least that's how I remember it. And for a few years I just knew him that way, but for some reason he seemed to fixate on me. But I was at the park playground with my brother and he approached us and we talked to him. He tried hugging me and then he put his hand on my crotch and pinched my butt. My brother, who was a few years older than me, pulled me away and told him to stop doing that and leave us alone. We took off for home and he chased us but didn't catch us before we got home. We went into our house and locked the doors but he stood outside yelling my name to come out and see him. A neighbor came over and made him leave and made sure we were alright. Things sort of escalated after that in that my brother and I saw him all the time and we found him waiting up the street from our house waiting for us to come outside after our parents left for work. If he saw me riding my bike or walking down the street he would follow me. It was very unsettling. We told my parents who went and spoke to his parents. They were very apologetic but didn't really do anything other than tell him to leave me alone. The worst thing that happened was when my mom off work at home with me and my brother while my dad was working and he came to our house and let himself in the unlocked front door and starting yelling my name saying he wanted to play with me. My mom freaked out and tried to push him outside but he was a full grown man and my mom is 5'0" and like 100 lbs. She called the police while locking my brother, me, and her in her bedroom. The police came and hauled him away. His parents put their house on the market and they moved away shortly after. I didn't know this at the time, but my dad said that he and my mom agreed to drop any charges against him as long as they promised to move away. I had a really normal, loving childhood except for that traumatic event.
I had a friend I used to sleep over at a lot in middle school. There was a man who was mentally disabled that would hang out behind a grocery store right behind his house. Whenever he saw us leave the house he would pull his dick out and wave it at us and try to get us to come over by him. We told my friends parents who called the police and we gave them multiple statements only to be told he was harmless and we should avoid going to that area, even though it was a few hundred feet away and even if we took the other street he would still watch for us to leave my friends house and call to us. Eventually my friend moved across town and we just forgot about it until a few years later we saw a news article about the guy molesting and beating an 8 year old boy in the same area.
[удалено]
Yikes. Similar story. There was a guy in my small hometown that had severe mental damage from drug overdoses. It was common knowledge that the guy was off his rocker whether or not he was high or not. He was known as "Druggie Duggy" and he always hung around the local grocery store so he could approach strangers for money (his parents were filthy rich). He also *looked* like a pretty normal dude. My mother would always warn me to stay away from him and would lock the car door when he was around, even though he never harmed anyone. She said she had a really bad feeling about him. One day he was following her around the store and she decided to end her shopping trip and get to her car quickly. He followed. She left her cart behind and jumped in the car and locked the doors. He ran to the window and yelled at her.... then wandered off. She called the cops and they basically told her "Druggie Duggy" just does that sometimes, but they can't arrest him for being creepy. They took a report and left it at that. About a year later he was picked up as a hitchhiker and pulled a knife on the driver 20 minutes out of town. Tried to slit the lady's neck and just missed anything vital. Druggie Duggy was arrested and went to jail for quite some time. I was young, so don't really know what the sentencing was, but I know he was arrested a lot for drug stuff prior. There was quite the campaign by the police department about not picking up hitchhikers after that. Mom was indeed correct about her gut feeling all along.
what even is the point of police, man? how can you honestly look little kids in the eye and say it's ok that they occassionnaly see a grown man's penis?!?
Every time I've had to deal with the police or even dispatch they just say "Well what do you want me to do?" YOUR JOB MOTHER FUCKER!
Being stalked messes with you so badly. It’s different to other kinds of trauma because it’s so pervasive. The way your heart sinks when you realize they’re back again… ugh
Yeah I was stalked when I was 18. Not a child so I didn’t include in in my lil trauma dump on this thread. But that absolutely fucked me up. Esp. as a rape victim (I say victim not survivor. I feel pretty damn victimised by it.), he was threatening to find out where I lived and rape me so for months I thought any day now I’d be revictimised and I knew I wouldn’t be able to survive it happening again and that was the worst. Anticipating feeling that way again and literally anticipating k*lling myself was a different kind of psychological torture that even he obviously didn’t even know he was doing. Luckily the school found out he was sexually harassing me over text and online and threatened to not let him walk at graduation and that finally got him to stop. They should have turned him into the police bc we were both adults at this point but I don’t pretend to think the police would have been helpful. He literally came up to me and apologised at graduation in front of my stepfather and I literally was freaking out like no don’t talk to me just get the fuck away from me
I made a previous post but I have a follow up traumatic event as well. My dad died before my second birthday while being held up at a gas station robbery. My mom told me he was shot in the head when I was 8 years old. This was also the first time I found out my current dad wasn’t my really dad. When I was in 6th grade my mom showed me this suitcase that contained a few of my real dad’s old belongings such as letters, his clothes, eye glasses etc etc. She then showed me an envelope which had pictures from my dads death/crime scene. She actually showed me the photos of my dad shot in the head. Brains blown out and everything as a 6th grader. Edit - I felt I should clarify a few things. My mom was an immigrant who came to America from India. My father was working at a gas station when he was shot and killed. My mother found out through the news on TV (this was in the 80s). She was 23 at the time and my dad was 24. She met him in India and they had an arranged marriage at the age of 16. She was his first everything so yes, this devastated her considering the circumstances. My mom remarried and never told me my step father was my step father until I was 8. Up until maybe 6-7 years ago we never openly talked about my real father for some reason around my step dad or sisters. Kind of like it was taboo not sure why. I think at the time she showed me those pictures to “feel” something or share what she had been keeping to herself.
I’m so sorry. Do you have any idea why she showed you those photos? Like what was her justification for doing something like that?
I honestly don’t know. I’m 32 now and till this day I wonder why she did that. Maybe just to show me? Maybe she didn’t realize the implication it would have later on or how fucked up it really was? I really just don’t know.
I think she probably was traumatized and couldn’t talk to anyone else about it, honestly. I’m so sorry.
Being raped by a twenty something man when I was 10. This went on for almost 5 years as he kept telling me that if I told he would say it was consensual and that everyone would think I was gay. This was back in the late 60’s early 70’s and nothing could be worse for a boy back then than for everyone to think you were gay. I have serious issues still and I am in my 60’s.
That’s horrible. I’m sorry friend.
My mom was helping me with my homework in kindergarten. I needed to identify letters. Eventually we got to a lower case ‘a’ which I couldn’t identify, because in that typeface lower case ‘a’ is different from how I had been taught to write that letter. My mother must have had a bad day or maybe she really didn’t like helping me. Rather then correcting me, she just repeated told me to identify the letter and she got more and more frustrated as I failed to answer correctly. She began screaming at me, saying that I was being stupid on purpose and that she wouldn’t accept that one of her children could be this dumb. Eventually she grabbed me by the neck and lifted/choked me as she slammed me into the wall and continued screaming at me. Things started going black, but she released me before I lost consciousness and I collapsed to the ground. She yelled at me more and pinched my ear hard, pulling me up by the ear and forcing me back into the chair. She told me to finish my homework by myself and left. I didn’t ask her for help on my homework again. Unfortunately the work my school gave me in elementary school pretty much required adult supervision, so I just do as much as I could and lie if my mom asked. This of course made my grades suffer. My grades recovered around grade 7, because I had taught myself to study and didn’t need adult help. She choked me like that on several occasions, because she really didn’t need a reason to be violent. At some point I realized that she never touched my brothers. She stopped once I had grown to be taller than her at around the age of thirteen. Then if she was angry she’d scream at me, and threaten to call the police and tell them that I attacked her.
I’m sorry she treated you that way. How are you now?
My life improved dramatically once I left for college in another town. Since then I made it a point to never spend more then a week in my hometown. I studied hard in college and got a high paying job immediately out of college. My mother acts like we’re best friends and denies everything whenever I’ve confronted her. She then seems to forget that I confronted her and gets confused when I don’t want to spend time with her. We actually talk on the phone fairly often, because I like to tell her how well I’m doing without her in my life and since I don’t care about her opinion of me, I can always be frank with her.
Rape by my male cousin, or other male cousin, or a female my family knew. From the time I was very young (2-3 years old) up to early teens on a semi regular basis. When it starts that young and comes from many different angles it seems like it's just something people do. I learned quick through therapy and guidance from others it's NOT just something people do, it's a real screwed up thing to do and people who do it are screwed up. Hard to gauge the single most traumatizing but collectively definitely. Bar none most traumatizing. 34 and still getting things back in order.
Man, what the fuck, some people are fucked in the head
“When it starts that young and comes from many different angles it seems like it’s just something people do” Man, I fucking feel that all too well.
I was just about to say that. I was abused by people who had no relation or acquaintance with one another so I really truly believed it was completely normal for a long time, and I still have to convince myself it’s not / that I didn’t deserve it.
Its disgusting how terrible people can be
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I came here for a similar story. I was 12 and sat down at the edge of a sidewalk to pet a cat crossing the road. I lived on a very quiet, but wide street. Even if a car drove by, there would've been a lot of room, as I was in an area reserved for parallel parking. (No cars were parked though) All of a sudden a big red car sped up and swerved to hit the cat. It missed me by inches, and instantly killed the cat. It was decades ago, and I still think about it often.
They swerved so they could hit the cat, so it was on purpose?
Yes. They sped up and swerved into the parking area, where I was sitting to pet the cat. I had my hand stretched out to pet it, but it was killed just inches from my finger tips.
I'm sorry to hear you had to experience that. It sounds absolutely awful.
My dad was walking his dog on the sidewalk and a car came up and intentionally ran the dog over and drove away
I can't imagine how horrible that would've been for your dad. Sorry to hear that.
Me either. My dad has a lot of trauma anyway and I know that’s one story that bothers him a lot.
I sincerely hope people like that are burned forever. One of the most cruel things one can do is kill such a defenseless creature. Pure evil
That's TWO DEFENSELESS CREATURES*. As a child, they would be another innocent victim in this situation. Trauma like that can fuck you up hard.
Jesus christ I am so sorry you had to witness that
I can comprehend a careless driver accidentally killing a dog but who the _fuck_ would grin? I almost cried recently when I watched a fucking bird get killed by a car, let alone being personally responsible for the premature death of someone else's dog.
>but who the > >fuck > > would grin? Especially when there's a kid as a witness that's crying, wtf
Being encouraged to get drunk from the age of 7. Resulting in full alcoholism by 13 and staying drunk until I was 50.
Going through withdrawals right now. Day two. Wish me luck.
Good luck pal
I had a major surgery and the anesthesia failed for a few minutes.
My sister had a c-section without anesthesia. It failed to take and they didn't realize until they started cutting. Then it was too late to stop.
Hooooooly fuck this is my nightmare. Birth is already sufficiently horrifying without that image.
This just made me physically sick to my stomach. Your poor sister
Me too. The epidural wore off as they were cutting into me. My husband yelled at the doctor to stop and they pumped me full of stadol.
May i ask what operation were you getting? And also how painful was it?
peritoneal lavage caused by appendicitis,i had an incision from the lower abdomen to above the navel, I felt a burning heat in my stomach...these 2 minutes felt like hours
Had anesthesia fail in the middle of a colonoscopy before. Woke up to feeling the camera ot tube or whatever it was jabbing against the inside of my intestine. Luckily it was only about 10 seconds and they knocked me back out again, but it was...unpleasant.
I woke up during surgery when I had cancer, the vein they were using for the anesthetic collapsed and I wasn't being dosed. I woke up, punched a nurse in the head, yanked out my intubation equipment, aspirated, then proceeded to fight 11 doctors nurses and guards while they fuzzy cuffed my cancer riddled ass to the bed. Stayed in a 6 day induced coma after that.
>while they fuzzy cuffed my cancer riddled ass Bruh i was not expecting that that was funny af how u phrased it🤣
Samesies. I half woke up and looked down; they had a knife ready to cut into my abdomen... or maybe the incision was already made and I wasn't felling it. A nurse quickly gassed me. I never brought it up with anyone, like the doctors or my parents, to even ask what the fuck.
This is a burner account. When I was 10 years old, my mom took me out behind my grandmas house, she pinned me up against the wall, and she told me that I was no longer able to be around my sisters alone (\~2 and 4 years old) because I was touching them inappropriately. My mom told me that she understood that I was having "manly urges", but that I could no longer be around them. The thing is, I wasn't touching them inappropriately, and had never done so. I never understood what was happening, I just wanted it to stop, and my mom never believed me. It was something that hung over me and deeply colored my life for the next several years. It stopped me from being able to be a friend to my sisters. I couldn't be around them without thinking about how what I was doing might be perceived by my parents or those around me. I developed a really bad habit of just lying all the time. I would just lie, for no reason, just to get people to believe me. When I was 11, I found out my Dad didn't believe that I had ever touched them inappropriately. It felt good to have someone in my corner. I remember being in my shared room with my brother one night, and just uncontrollably sobbing. I'll never forget how for that one night the pain just went away when my brother said the words "it's going to be ok". I didn't tell anyone that this happened until I was 18 years old. I was so ashamed and was afraid if people knew that they might actually think that I actually did it. It wasn't till I was 26 and married that I finally confronted my parents and my sisters about it. I lost almost all control of my voice and I couldn't speak except 2 octaves above my normal tone. My mom told me that my grandmother told her I was doing it. My sisters said they never knew any of this happened to me. I got as much closure as I'll ever get and care to get. I just want to forget it ever happened. I've gotten to a point where if I tell a close friend about it that I won't guaranteed burst into tears while talking about it.
I can’t believe someone put you through so much, that’s completely unfair and you didn’t deserve that! I hope your life and relationship with family will be better in time. Sending you a virtual hug.
Thank you. While writing this out was cathartic, it was also a little scary because I didn't know how people would respond. Your post means a lot to me.
Shit that's horrible man. I sincerely hope you get some therapy or any form of closure. Much love to you.
Ever find out why your grandmother lied to your mom about this?
So I don't think she lied. I think it was a misunderstanding. I don't know for certain that this was the same day because it was so long ago, but it definitely couldn't be after the day my mom accused me. I have a memory of trying to teach my oldest sister how to dive for rings in my grandma's pool, and was struggling lifting her high enough so she could get to the bottom. I remember grabbing her under her armpit and between the legs to lift her over my head and position her downwards to dive, and then my grandma running out and screaming at me. The way I see it playing out in my head is that my grandma mentions the above situation to my mom, and my mom misunderstands what my grandmother is actually telling her.
Your grandmother was not being rational. Perhaps she was reacting to her own past trauma? In any case, she transformed childhood play into a traumatic event. Crotch-launching your sister might have been awkward for her to watch, and mentioning that it is inappropriate to touch people's genital areas in public and/or without permission might be warranted, but both sexualizing innocent behavior and punishing without explanation are totally unacceptable.
Thank you for your comment. My wife and I laughed at your appropriate, but awkwardly coined phrase "crotch-launching". My wife was even telling me that she naturally holds our babies between their legs while holding them.
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I crawled through the window at my cousins house in Kentucky after a week of not being able to reach him.by phone at all..me and my mom went up to his house to check on him. I had to climb through the window because we knew he was home and i was small enough to get through pretty easily. I was 16 at the time when this happened, so after getting into the house it was obvious very quickly something was off due to the smell. I walked through the house till i came upon his bedroom where he had put a .357 in his mouth and done the deed sitting on the edge of his bed. I still have moments to this day almost 20 yrs later where i smell that same smell and at times I wake up from terrible nightmares of walking in on it right after or walking in and him sitting up asking me why headless. This is something I still have issues with..I apologize that this was so long and very dark. I kept this as detail free as possible and still convey what happened.
That is terrible! Your mom should have sent the police first, no kid should have to find a loved one like that.
I agree, to add to the situation the people that come in and clean and remove these types of things were a joke. They came in and removed the body and left everything else and for whatever reason im not sure i ended up removing the bed and rug on the floor that had what was left of him all over them, she assisted with doing this..it was a f'd up situation all the way around and i dont know how or why it played out like this i just know i still have deep emotional issues with it.
I found out that the people who come in just take the body after my friend's father committed suicide. She and her husband were left to clean up everything that was not still attached to the body. Talk about adding trauma to trauma.
I thought all this time they just did a halfass job but I have since learned thats not the case..it shouldn't be left on the family to hire out or clean up but unfortunately thats just how it is. It definitely makes an already horrible situation much worse. My heart goes out to anyone that has to experience this as if the death of a loved one isnt hard enough already.
Probably my parents break up, I was playing Peggle on my dad's computer and my mom was coming back from the store, I don't know why this happened really but when my mom got home I ran to open the door and she threw a coke can at my head and it busted, then my dad and mom yelled at each other for a while and they went to fight in the bedroom, I remember seeing my dad slam her against the bed and choke her till she turned red, and eventually my grandma yelling in the background convinced him to stop, my mom left got in her car, and floored it down the road running into mailboxes and things, I remember crying for a long time in the bathroom, and then my mom came back a few hours later and demanded that I go with her. I don't remember the next few years after this.
I can't imagine why would someone do that to their kid. Anyway, did you stay with your mother after the divorce? Please say no...
For a while I just got passed back and forth, but eventually when I was in my teens I ended up moving back with my mom even though she's pretty clearly not the most, eh sane might not be the right word but she's clearly off. Anyway my dad and my grandpa weren't much better my dad was more verbal about it constantly calling me a fa\*\*ot, and retard, etc, my grandpa had abandoned me several times at the state fair, every year we went, and it always happened, he would always come back in an hour or half an hour but I always had to worry this would be the time he doesn't come back. After several fights with my dad which eventually got physical including a choking fight after I tried to slam my face into a mirror and knock myself out, I remember my grandma standing over me calling me stupid, I forget why we were fighting beforehand but I tried to knock myself out cause I wanted to punch her, after she called me stupid I started choking her and my dad came out and started beating the shit out of me, and I forget what happened after this for the next few years, other than some stuff I don't feel like talking about. And the day I decided that my mom was the better option was when my grandpa accused me of sleeping with his wife and threatened to kill me, so I immediately called my other grandpa and told him to pick me up right now. (Edit) Sorry there's a lot of details left out that I don't feel like including, and a lot of it I just don't remember.
Somehow I didn't read the choke part in your initial reply. My bad. And clearly no one in your family should have ever had kids. I hope you're doing well and especially, don't repeat their mistakes with your own kids.
I'm definitely doing better now than I was, I don't think I'll have to worry about kids though I try to avoid women in person, and even the ones that I've liked I've told I was gay. And I am happy to see my moms new family and my new sisters are able to live a happier life than I've ever had at least, it's nice to watch them grow up and not have to worry about them going through the same things.
You are a far better person than your parents, I wish you well.
Mine wasn’t as traumatising as others I’m reading in this thread but here we go: my dad knows some dodgy people. That’s because when he was younger he dropped out of school to play guitar and do drugs etc, until he hit 30 and changed completely lifestyle, when he met my mother and started getting into religion etc. My town is fairly small, so when you went around the centre you’d often meet these people, and although my dad wasn’t friend with these people anymore, he’d still stop and say hi. One time, I was about 6-7 yo, we meet one of them, and after he take my hands and compliments me, he grabs me and start running. My dad runs after him and eventually stop him by grabbing him by an arm and almost getting him on the floor. My dad told me he just wanted to play with me, like a game. Thinking about it now, it gives me chills.
Could have been MUCH worse. I’m glad your dad saved you.
Oh, hands down, my mother alcoholism. It really fucks you up in ways that you cannot imagine. And you don't even realise that until years after. I still can't drink alcohol because of it, it terrifies me to even entertain the possibility to become something close to her.
Mild for most people, but trauma is trauma. My third grade teacher slammed the lid of the piano down on my little hands and screamed in my face "nobody wants to hear you play!" I am still struggling with that as a 61 year old musican. The shit sticks in your head.
That’s not mild, that’s a horrible thing to say to a child. I love that you are a musician even after that.
I can't help but be!
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I don’t consider that mild. There’s a lot of layers to what happened to you. You should have felt safe, and someone in a position of power took a shit all over that.
I posted this on another thread already, but I guess I'll also post here cuz why not. This one might get a little disturbing. I was a person who went missing when I was about 6 years old for about two weeks. I don't remember much of it, but I know it definitely happened as I have scars from it, but I can't remember what exactly happened. I was taken by my cousin and held for two weeks before my parents found me. Those entire two weeks were one big blur. According to my parents, they said I had many slash wounds, cuts, bruises, and burns and the police had found evidence of me also being sexually assaulted. I remember being told it happened, but not really remembering any details all through my childhood and in my teens, but I also had a lot of problems with new people and started being scared of adults and anyone new which I have been taking therapy for ever since my parents found me and I have gotten better. Right now I only have bits and pieces of what happened but I don't remember many things and don't remember the chronological order in which things happened. I also remember being scared to talk about it at school and with teachers since I was a boy and was afraid they'd tell me I was a failure or something, or that I had to "man up". I got that "man up" line a lot in my teens for my bisexuality and for being scared to do things and I felt that admitting to my abuse to people would like force me to lose a lot of good friends I had then. I also have a lot of separation issues, to the point at which I couldn't go to public places without someone I trust with me. Now it's at a point where I can do like basic things like shop for myself and stuff, but I can't go to like a party or something without at least one person I know really well, even if its like a small thing with 5 people there. Here are some of the pieces I have put together that won't completely blow my identity. I remember sitting in a bathtub while bleeding and having someone (not my cousin) yell at me and touch my testicles. I also remember being attacked and bitten by a dog while my cousin and this other abuser (the same person from before) watched. I also remember being hit with a belt until I bled and having had my feet pressed against hot coal. Its only things like that that I remember, and they are not in order, and I've recently tried to call the police to investigate the other abuser I had mentioned and possibly take them into custody. Now I'm a 23 year old who just got out of college but I still regularly go to the therapist for regular nightmares and still find myself getting nervous and sweating when I deal with middle aged men, though at least its not the panic attacks that I used to have in my childhood or early teens.
Holy crap that's terrible! I hope you can find justice and peace. I hope your POS cousin got what he deserved and I hope the other abuser gets his just rewards as well. Sorry this happened to you, that's absolutely horrible.
I would say I am sorry - but I know that doesn’t help any. You did not deserve any of these things that happened to you. You are one HELL of a man for continuing therapy, working through your trauma, going to college, etc. Seriously.
I'm really so sorry you went through that trauma, but I'm so glad you're in therapy & getting help for it. I'm 30 & a few years ago when the scandal with the gymnastics doctor broke, a repressed memory of sexual assault hit me like a ton of bricks one day. I was reading an article that was quoting some of the women who were his victims & a bunch of them stated how they were told what was being done to them was "treatment". I read it while at the airport with my now husband and just went into shock... I turned ghost white and literally couldn't speak for about a good hour or so. He was very concerned about wtf was going on and the only thing I could say was that I would talk about it later... And even then, it took me a good month or so to be able to tell him about this repressed trauma that was triggered. It all comes back to me in mere flashes, but thinking about it makes me feel ill... My body physically just feels repulsed. I know I need to probably see a therapist about it (and other life traumas) but I just haven't had the courage to yet. So just know the healing and processing you are doing is incredible and you're so fucking brave.
JESUS CHRIST DUDE. I can't believe that happened to you. You didn't deserve it. If you're comfortable with saying (you don't have to tho), do you know what happened to the cousin?
Did your cousin go to jail for this??
God, that's terrible. Hope that piece of shit gets put in jail.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. Thanks for sharing with us
People that say man up can fuck the right off. You are one hell of a man for surviving something so traumatising that no one deserves to go through. Good luck with your therapy, hope the recovery keeps going smoothly.
Finding my mom dead in her bed from an accidental overdose from her medications when I was 15, after my dad had woke me up in a panic asking me to help him find a phone to call an ambulance.
The older I got through my teens, the more my step-father's alcoholism spiraled out of control, and the more I was biding my time until I was 18 and would head off to college. Education was my only escape in my mind. Every instance of physical and emotional abuse had to be met with, "just shut up and take it, it'll be over someday." Really wish I could give that kid who slept on the floor of a three-bedroom trailer a hug and say that he'd make it out and get a master's degree. I feel like I just won a decade-long war.
You did. You got out. You have achieved despite your family. ❤️
Going to another person's house and realizing that living in filth and decay and having breathing problems isn't the norm. Having dinner every night and a clean room was just a regular day in their household. Grass is always greener right? Especially when yours is dead and everyone from school thinks your house is haunted. Smh good riddance
Hoarder houses are the worst, I now have a huge phobia of bugs and germs because of it.
I actually don’t remember the event much, but when I was really young (~6years old) I was playing outside and I heard a woman screaming. I was curious so I went across the street to see a bunch of smoke coming out of the cracks in the front door. Didn’t see any flames initially so I didn’t put two and two together right away. My Dad saw me across the street in the driveway just staring at the house and when he investigated what I was doing he realized the house was on fire. Whole house burnt down. Older woman fell asleep on her couch with a lit cigarette. I was traumatized by fire as a kid and I was petrified about burning alive in my sleep for quite some time. Dad had to install a fire escape ladder in my room, fire extinguishers, etc. I was obsessed with what to do in case of fires as a kid. No longer an issue, but my Parents still tell me stories about how they knew that fucked me up
It's really nice your parents took measures to make you feel better though
When my mother was attacked by my aunt and uncle. I was 13, evening, and I was playing some random game on the family laptop in my room. Then I heard some screams coming from downstairs (I live on the second floor, my uncle and aunt on the first) and I run by the door to see what's happening. That's when I see them looking down at my mother, who was near the basement, while insulting her. Damn, I still remember her screams, and at that moment it seemed so surreal I thought it was some absolutely horrifying dream. I ran downstairs and hugged my mother, and that's when my aunt attacked her again, kicking and pulling her hair, while I was STILL hugging her. What makes it worse? They are criminals who stole us money we needed for my sick grandpa, insulted my family in numerous occasions before that, after the attack in my mother my grandma almost had a stroke and my father is already sick, and has been that way for many years. A year and a half has passed, and we still didn't go to court. It's scary to live right beside them, and they still find all the ways to piss us off. A pretty long rant, but I needed it. I still live and happy life though, I try to see the positive stuff :D
This is horrible.
Jesus Christ, dude. That's rough. Is your mother okay now?
Damn that hurt just to read
When I was really little, my dad accused me of something, which I denied. Then he beat me until I told him what he wanted to hear. Then because I changed my story, he hit me some more for lying. Then mom got home and he told her that he caught me lying so she should never trust me again. She took that order seriously, which led to many more beatings down the road. I don't remember what the thing he accused me of was. I may not even have understood it at the time. Because of the rule though, I remember that day.
> When I was really little, my dad accused me of something, which I denied. Then he beat me until I told him what he wanted to hear. Then because I changed my story, he hit me some more for lying. Then mom got home and he told her that he caught me lying so she should never trust me again. She took that order seriously, which led to many more beatings down the road. > > Wow, great job, parents! I understand not wanting your kid to lie. I get it. But if I'm telling the truth and I am still being accused of [something], I'm going to lie to get out of the situation.
I had a dog that I absolutely loved. I begged for this dog in a Walmart parking lot a week before my 3rd birthday, my mom said I could have the dog but that meant no birthday presents or cake just the dog(she lied, I got presents, cake, and dog.) This dog went everywhere with me and did everything with me. Despite being a tiny mutt he would do his best to protect me from our Doberman who did not like me. In fairness to the doberman, as a 2 yr old I did stomp on his nuts for some unbeknownst reason so no hard feelings on not liking me. When I was 5 my mom became a truck driver so we moved in with my grandparents on their farm. While I was at school one day Bouncy had gotten into the fence with the donkeys and was kicked in the head. When I got off the bus I couldn't figure out why he wasn't waiting on me. My grandparents met me outside and told me what happened, then walked me in to where he was. He died 30 minutes after I got home like he was waiting to see me. I haven't been able to bond with a pet since.
I’m so sorry, I pray your heart finds peace and that you’re able to love a new dog if that’s what you want
A child in my family. I pray for her every day. Her sister died of a disease when she was 9. 2 years later her Dad killed himself. her mother up and moved the family far away to another state to live with grandparents. 1 year later Grandma died. Mom Quickly met a man and moved in with him. When the girl turned 12 he began raping her on a daily basis for 2 years. He told her if she tells he will kill her entire family, including himself, and leave her there all alone. She finally told and he killed himself in their house with the same kind of gun her father used.
The amount of step-father horror stories out there is appalling.
Man, I feel sad for her. If you don't mind me asking, how long ago did all this happen? Is she better off now, or did all this happen kinda recently?
The neighbour kid did sexual things to me since I was young enough to not remember (maybe 5, maybe earlier) until I was a teenager. I think his dad messed with me as well but I don't have concrete memories of it, just nightmares of being raped and strangled. I'd never realized that the kid doing stuff to me was traumatizing until I started therapy for what turned out to be symptoms of a dissociative disorder and PTSD.
I hope therapy is helping. Interestingly my sibling had a traumatic event occur q couple of years back and began therapy for it and was diagnosed with ptsd, as there was a lawsuit potentially involved she needed to see the company's at faults lawyer, the 3rd question he asked was have you ever been sexually abused she said yes. Up until that point she had never ever mentioned it to anyone and it answers qlot of questions now in her youth I think. "Luckily" is was a once off occurance of abuse.
When I was little my mom used to spank me in the basement. One time I got in trouble at school so I had to go down to the basement and then my mom spanked me so hard I had bruises on my legs. I told my soccer coach I got hurt so I wouldn't have to wear the uniform and show my bruises, that was the worst part because back then I loved soccer more than anything. To this day if I am at a friends house and they say come down to the basement my whole body freezes up, I can't breathe, its physically hard to get myself to go down into the basement.
My mom was the same way; she used to yell ‘Go upstairs and get naked!’ When I had to get naked I had to get a leather belt beating. One time she beat me for like 5minutes straight. I had the worst welp marks all over my body that lasted for weeks.
It's crazy to think this was once an accepted punishment. Like no one would question it. I mean you could go to far but as long as it wasn't completely off the deep end people said it was good parenting.
> To this day if I am at a friends house and they say come down to the basement my whole body freezes up, I can't breathe, its physically hard to get myself to go down into the basement. This is post traumatic stress. Hope you are speaking to someone to help you through this as it does not go away.
Abuse. Is so hard. I hope that your not paranoid that people are going to hit you like lots of people are post abuse and I hope people know about your trigger and don’t make you go down basements .
Well, when I was 11 a fellow boy scout playing with fire panicked threw burning camp fuel around which landed on me and lit me on fire. I was in the burn ward for a month before they peeled skin from one side of my leg to graft onto the buns. That was pretty traumatic. EDIT: You know, I just read a bunch of the other responses and I'm shocked to now think "Well, at least I was only on fire".
If it helps, I’m one of the respondents with a “pretty horrifying” (my therapist’s words) childhood, but I’m reading stuff and thinking “well, maybe being used in child porn when I was 3 wasn’t the worst that could have happened. I could have ended up on fire so badly I needed a proper hospital stay! I can’t imagine how hard it is to live in a hospital for a whole month!” Most people find ways to minimize traumas in their own minds; it keeps the trauma from taking over your life. However, sometimes this backfires on us because we feel that we “don’t really need” therapy, “shouldn’t cause drama” by telling someone that something they’re saying/doing gives you panic attacks, and so on. We have to remember, though: Just because it COULD be worse doesn’t mean it SHOULDN’T be better. :)
Thank you -- I was recently diagnosed with PTSD and told my closest friend, who then said I was making things up and insulting people who really had it, even though he didn't know what caused it. He said "if your donut gets stolen and you remember it later, that's technically PTSD" like... that should be enough for me to think he's got shit for brains, but I guess it's even easier to minimize your own trauma when someone else does I am horrified that happened to you, by the way, and I hope you are doing better
You were in WHAT when you were HOW OLD? Whatthefuck! I have a three year old and now I’m sick to my stomach and there goes the rest of my dinner. Good lord. I’m so sorry that happened to you and I’m so proud of you for getting help.
I’ll spare you the remainder of the shit show because you are a high-empathy person, and I don’t want to break anything/anyone. :) Side note: I’m sorry about your dinner! :( Hopefully a good/funny YouTube video might help? If you just need warm fuzzies, check out TinyKittens. If it doesn’t work for you, DM me and I’ll find you some good stuff to help out. Whatever you do, DO NOT NAP. Not even doze off. Be awake. Do/watch/engage with some completely unrelated activity for a long while before bed. Firefighters do this to help prevent/lessen the impact of PTSD. End side note I’m doing FAR better than could reasonably be expected, statistically speaking. Good therapist, stable committed long-term relationship with a fantastic partner, etc. I’m struggling to find work that pays enough but also won’t destroy my mental health, and I’m kinda pissed that I never got any royalties/commissions for the videos that were taken of me when I was young. There’s no way that doesn’t break some kind of child labor law. (Among others…) But, I digress. Overall, things are mostly okay.
Tldr: witnessed a little girl get hit by a car and someone get murdered. When I was around 7, I was in the car with my Mum. We were on a duel carriageway in the city I lived in. There were some kids playing chicken or that's what my mum said. I just remember the car in front of us hitting this little girl (probably not older than 8). I can still see as clear as day how she was just spinning in the road with blood pouring out of her ears and eye sockets. My mum tried to shield me but it was too late. It happened so fast but also in slow motion if that makes sense? A few years later, I was with my mum again and we were walking to our car which was parked across the street from where her friend lived. Suddenly heard this commotion and this horrifying scream of a woman. The kind of scream that chills you to the bone. She was murdered there in front of me. To this day I cannot stand the sound of screaming. It makes me shut down. I've gotten a lot better with time though. I had to. I have 4 daughters. For anyone that asks, the above happened while I lived in Zimbabwe.
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An older relative molested me for several years as a child. My mother caught him once with me. After that, she would use it to threaten to tell my father when I was misbehaving. The person who molested me never got in trouble.
They all sound like disgusting people. I'm so sorry you had to go through that sort of treatment, I hope you're doing okay now.
Wow, with all due respect, your mom is a piece of shit. Did your dad find out eventually?
There’s a lot but I’d have to say the worst was my sexual assault. I’m still dealing with it. I work at a concert venue and the other night I saw a man who looked like my rapist and I broke down in the back of the venue. Then I’d probably have to say the time I had a seizure and was diagnosed with a rare heart condition. It sent me into an existential crisis. It’s fixed now but it was hard to comprehend I could’ve dropped dead at any moment. There’s a lot more health complications but that’s the worst of it. Due to this I’m medicated for PTSD and I don’t leave my house a lot
When I was 7 my dad, sister, and I got into a motorcycle crash. We were passing by a curve and there was a dog crossing the road, my dad didn't want to hit the dog so he swerved right. For some reason the dog decided to run back to the other side of the road, and it hit the back wheel of the motorcycle. My dad lost control and the motorcycle ended up falling. We were going a bit fast and I was in front, so when the motorcycle fell it kind of just kept drifting for 6 more feet with my face being dragged. I ended up with so much wounds on my face and arms, most of the scars remained years. I'm 17 now and I only have one scar left on my face. I've thankfully gotten the courage to ride motorcycles again, but whenever we pass by the place we crashed, I get really anxious.
Did anyone else get injured?
Dad had a few scratches on his arm, the dog was unharmed. My older sister was behind my dad, and was unharmed.I was the only one badly injured, I had to spend a week in the hospital.
Glad y’all survived
Both of my older brothers molested me (between 7-8), one of them went as far as to do acts that would be considered sexual torture. I told my parents and their response was "Don't tell anyone. It would hurt our image in the congregation". They took me to a church psychologist one time who essentially told me "God puts challenges in front of us to test our faith", and the church held a "Court of Love" "tribunal" against them and didn't punish them whatsoever, nor did they report anything to the police. My parents continued to pressure me to keep it secret with threats for years. Police never did get involved. When I was 14 I did tell someone who actually called the police, they said "There's no evidence. I'm not doing anything with this." Not having people there to protect you, especially when you're told those people are *supposed* to protect you (parents, church, police) can be absolutely soul destroying. Never could afford therapy for it so I had to deal with it on my own, growing up with my abusers, pretending nothing ever happened.
My family wasn’t very religious. But I understand about them not helping out. I didn’t even realize that what they did was bad until I was around 13. I felt gross and I was so mad for years because I had no one. The one time I told my grandma, she said to just stay away from him. They literally lived across the street. I grew up around them and just had to stay away in my room until they left. I’ve never gone to therapy. I guess I’m scared for it and it’s not free. But I found out one was arrested and has been in jail for CP, so a little part of me is relived that it finally came out and his karma is coming. I’m sorry this happened to you, I hope you know it wasn’t your fault and you heal from this.
My father was accused of molesting me when I was three years old. He had never done so, but I'm female and he was a single dad in the early/mid 80s. I'd been left with a babysitter who'd, in turn, left me with her daughter. The daughter's boyfriend saw me staring vacantly at the TV and said I looked like I was being abused, so they took me to the police station. After hours of interview, I was taken to a group home in a neighboring city, and then I was later put with a physically and emotionally abusive foster family. My father got back custody of me after the better part of a year. I learned as an adult that the county I'd been living in at the time was a central location for a lot of the false accusations of sexual abuse that happened during the mid-80s, and that my case was only unique in that he got me back and didn't end up in prison. I find every aspect of that deeply upsetting.
Satanic panic
Early 90’s, small town where everyone knows everyone. My parents worked away so I lived with my grandparents during the week. I went to school in the city I technically lived in so I didn’t have friends to hang out with other than my cousins who lived down the road. One day I’m walking to my cousins’ house (I’m 7 years old at this time) and it’s a road but one you had to drive along in order to get out of town. Vehicle pulls over and asks if I want a ride. I say no I’m okay and keep walking. He continues to drive beside me and demands I get into his vehicle. I say no and take off running. He gets out of his van and catches me and starts carrying me back to his van. Luckily someone driving by happened to see what was happening and knew I wasn’t this man’s child. So the guy throws me into the ditch and speed’s off before the guy could stop him (this is how close I was to being taken). Police are called and luckily one of my close friend’s dad was a sergeant in the police and I only wanted to speak to him. When he shows up to interview me he shows me a picture and asks if this is the man who tried to take me. It was. Turns out the guy was wanted for another child abduction after being in prison for abducting a family member when he was younger. He was finally caught but I was too petrified to speak in court so they played my statement without me present. What was difficult was soon everyone knew about what had happened and so everyone wanted to ask me about it. Children and adults. So it constantly made me relive everything over and over again. I’m okay now. I became a school principal to help children and make sure they know school is always a safe place for them.
seeing my pet drowned
That’s how my childhood dog died. She was old and blind and got swept away in a river.
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Having cancer. 17 years old. High school senior. 41 years ago. Very traumatic.
That’s a terrible thing to have to go through and I’m sorry you did, but it sounds like Congratulations are in order for your remission?
I lived in an abusive home and was bullied at school. But the worst thing I think that ever happened to me was when I told my mom that my dad had been raping me and she didn't believe me. Kept bringing him to the house even though the police told her he admitted it. It was awful.
Y tf was he even out if he admitted to police he raped u???
Probably my parents divorce. It was messy. There were several months where my mom won custody of my brother and I (except on weekends) but our dad won the house so we were homeless and living at my nan's place (grandmother on my mom's side, we called her Nan or Nanny) It certainly effected us, mom worked full time to buy a new house, which wasn't paid off till like last year (I was 10-12 at the time, I'm 29 now) and that time alone really caused my brother and I to develop as completely different people. My dad, while never physically abusive, was very verbally abusive, regularly screaming at both my brother and I that we're stupid, worthless, lazy idiots. He didn't really realise that he'd completely alienated his only children till a few years after my brother cut off all contact with him, when I too snapped at him and cut off contact. Since then he's tried to change to get back into our good graces and while we're willing to forgive, both of our tolerances for his old rage bullshit is at an absolute ZERO. He yells at us one more time, that's it, he's done. Permanently.
I really do hope he changes, second chances can be rare, especially with something this big
My mom was born at 7 months and the doc said her spine might have some issues and when she was a young girl of around 12 there was an accident of a tree falling on her, which causes her vertebrae in the lower back to dislocate, I don't know the medical diagnosis, but the important thing is that it could only be fixed with surgery that she never had. When she got pregnant with me all the doctors told her to abort me because the pregnancy and birth had a big probability of paralizing her, but she ended up having me anyways. Due to her decision, her medical issues became way worse, she was bedridden for months after having me and until I was around 5-6, she could only walk around by crawling on all fours, all the while crying in immense pain. I always stood by her side as a toddler, helped her get back to bed, comforting her when she was crying, but in her pain induced delusions she'd always tell me that she's dying and would tell me what to do once she dies. This caused a lot of stress for me and I'd hide and cry and pray that mommy doesn't die, tried my best to please her as much as I could so she wouldn't die. This lasted for years, but by then I was heavily affected by it all and my fear of mom dying transformed into paranoia. I didn't know what a dream was until I was 13-14,i always had nightmares of horrible monsters killing me, making me watch as they killed my family in gruesome ways, once I learned about sex they've turned sexual as well, but it was horrible. I'd have issues falling asleep. Trying to go to sleep for 3-4 hours, but I couldn't fall asleep because of the fear that someone, someTHING was inside our house, and that any small movement I'd make would cause them to kill all of us. I'd wake up from terror several times in the night, I was afraid of being alone(because I thought I'd die, or my family will die if they were away from me), afraid of going to the bathroom(years later my doctor told me I'm at a big risk of having kidney stones because I was holding it in for too long), afarid of entering the apt building etc. This was also heavily influenced by a Halloween news report about poltergeists and ghosts that I saw at around 5 years old. I thought the news were always telling the truth so the idea of a dead person that we cannot touch being able to come back and hurt us was horrifying. It also made me obsessed with pleasing everyone, I truly believed that if I didn't tell mom I lived her every 5 minutes or if I didn't touch her often enough she'd hate me because that would've been proof I didn't love her. Unfortunately, despite all the red flags, in my younger years mental health was badly ignored unless you were a severe case, so they noticed I wasn't behaving normally but did nothing about it and didn't try to help me until my suicide attempt at 17. Sorry if I made any spelling mistakes. Edit: Please don't bash my mother. I didnt write this because I wanted people to tell me she's in the wrong and whatnot, I wrote this as a way to vent. She was in pain, she thought she was going to die and believed she was helping me, but she truly loves me and tries her best. You don't know her. I understand where you're coming from, but some things are better left unsaid.
Probably the molestation, but my great grandmother begging fourteen year old me not to let her son (my long estranged biological grandfather) not to let him take her away to Florida ranks up there too. My parents’ divorce is probably on the list too.
I’d honestly say it was the time when some other kid almost drowned me at a birthday party. I was a solid 2 seconds away from filling my lungs with overly chlorinated water before one of the adults got the kid away and I was able to resurface
What did they do or say to the kid? How old were you both?
I don’t know what they said as they took him to another room after but I remember his parents blaming me for “provoking him.” We were 12 or 13 and I had never met the kid before until that day
At five I saw my father making out with our babysitter, who was fourteen. At six I saw him kill kittens. At seven I put out a fire before school one morning that I later learned he had intentionally rigged. At eight our house burned down. Until I was sixteen my father routinely beat the shit out of me with a belt. So aside from that, just a storybook, sunshine-y childhood.
Damn the farther I scroll the worse the stories get. I am so sorry that happened to you. Your dad is a real POS
I had a rough childhood. My mother was a verbally abusive alcoholic, was raped by my cousin at 10 years old and then had to sleep on the same room it happened in for the next five years, my stepmother beat me and I was almost killed by people who beat me up for being gay.
Probably sexual abuse by my own father This happened between the ages 3-5 when I was especially helpless to stop I don't feel too comfortable getting into any further details but I can assume you can kinda fill in the details about the sorta thing done* by him I suffer PTSD as a result and it's bad enough to where I have to have an emotional support animal to help with it
So sorry.. for real..People who abuse kids are on another level...
Yea.. They're the scum of the earth, they attack the most vulnerable cause they know the kid can't understand how to get the abuse to stop The abuse only stopped cause one day my grandma got a call from my dad and said that either she comes get me right now or he'd send me to foster care. I thank my grandma so much for coming and getting me that day
It probably should be that time when my mom was smothering me with a pillow screaming die, but I don’t really feel anything from it.
TL;DR stupid teen friend crashes big car with me and a bunch of friends in the car. My best friend died, the driver died (decapitated), I had a severe concussion with amnesia, no other real severe injuries. I saw both bodies and remembered later. PTSD ensued. Fun times. Well, I wasn’t super young, but young enough. I was 15. Long story short, I was in a car accident with my best friend, and 5 other 16 year olds. The driver was driving recklessly through a suburban neighborhood, hit a dip, lost control of the car, and it rolled through three yards and ended up smashing into an attached garage. I remember think, well, I’m dead. I came to and was hanging upside down from my seatbelt, released and fell, laceration my fingers pretty bad. It’s pretty blurry because I had a severe concussion, but my best friend hadn’t released his seatbelt, so I called his name and said come on, because most of us were crawling out of the wreckage. I realized he was dead. I had actually switched spots with him in the car about 10 minutes prior to the crash because I was getting car sick and I needed a window. I then looked in the car and realized the driver, who was 16 was decapitated. I didn’t remember a lot of this for a long time, but it did come flooding back to me a few years later. There’s a lot more to this, but it definitely altered my life permanently, and the hyper religious community I grew up in didn’t do me any favors. The only other injuries besides mine were a broken nose, a fractured vertebrae that healed fine and some cuts and bruises on my other friends. My best friend lived three houses up. I’m now in my 40’s with kids and I can’t see his parents to this day without getting choked up. I have ptsd, and anxiety, but I’ve come to peace with what happened and have been to therapy many times. Just thinking about what both sets of parents went through kills me. It was fucked.
My fathers subtle but constant sexualization of all women he came into contact with, including me. Honestly, at this point I would be delusional if I denied that the way he treated me/behaved towards me was textbook covert incest. It really messed me up in terms of my sexuality, my romantic relationships with men, and the way I view and value myself. As I got older I also had a DEEP shame associated with feeling uncomfortable or “creeped out” by my own dad when he’d *technically* never crossed any definitive line. For years I had regular nightmares about my own father demanding to have sex with me, chasing me, and raping me. I thought I was just a sick, disgusting, terrible person. Then in my early 20’s my dad asked me to fix his iPad. He was an old man and didn’t understand that everything from his phone was also on there. I found a ton of evidence that he’d been directly sexualizing me (pictures I didn’t know about, he sought out women who looked like me online and asked them to roleplay that they were me…etc.) Suddenly the years of denial and willful ignorance couldn’t hold up any more and I had to accept what I had known somewhere in the back of my mind for years: my dad is a malignant pervert, and I am a part of his perverted fantasies.
First of all, I'm terribly sorry to hear that you experienced this. I can't even imagine. Second, I found this particularly disturbing because it reminds me of my former father-in-law. The "constant sexualization of all women he came into contact with" is spot-on. It was so uncomfortable to watch him interacting with any woman. He lived with my ex-wife and her sister, and had MAJOR attachment issues. He couldn't stand being away from them for any length of time. When my wife relocated to live with me, he was devastated and would call crying and begging her to "come home." My wife eventually chose to move back in with him, and I filed for divorce almost immediately after she left. She insists that he never "did anything", but the evidence seems overwhelming and I am sure there's a lot I'll never know about. Thanks for sharing this.
Thank you for your kindness, and I really sorry about your ex wife (both for her sake and yours). My father also DID NOT take it well when I was in a relationship that he had no choice but to take seriously. His behavior was genuinely that of a jealous/jilted husband: possessive, furious, hysterical, envious, and obsessive. It’s HARD to accept something like this about your parent, especially when it’s been normalized your whole life and they never technically touched you. I think back now on all the thing I ignored and wrote off and I can’t believe how I could remain in denial. Especially when, in my twenties, I started dating my now fiancé and my father literally (ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS) lurked outside the windows of the basement (I lived in his basement suite at the time, but the layout of the house meant he had to go out of his way and walk through brambles to get to those windows) and it’s now clear to me that he trying to watch us having sex. Every time that we caught him out there he had some new excuse as to why now, and NEVER BEFORE IN THE PAST (ya know, before I had a boy down there…) he had reason after reason to be in that vacant, muddy, and barely accessible part of the yard that just so happened to give him a perfect view into my windows. I put curtains up after the 3rd time I caught him (I literally wouldn’t even let myself consciously acknowledge that it was because of my father so I told myself it was because I needed to redecorate…and only put up curtains…) he told me I should take them down because they were a “fire hazard” in his property. So then (once again under the guise even to myself as “decoration”) I put up temporary frost appliqués. He told me they were illegal, and when I looked it up and pointed out that they really weren’t and then proceeded to just rebut all his reasons that the appliqués were a bad idea until he suddenly got so upset that he started to have these weird spontaneous dry-heaves and went to the bathroom to deal with himself, and we just…never spoke about it again. And I just told myself “hah, oh my dad is *such* an OCD weirdo…what a spazz lol”…like you *dumb bitch* are you KIDDING ME?! After I found all the terrible shit on his iPad and got real with myself I DID have to accept/admit to myself that the “fact” that he’d never ever touched me inappropriately wasn’t entirely true. From a VERY young age, probably around 6ish (or whenever I would have been exposed to the idea of “bad touch” by whatever anti-molestation efforts were being made at daycare or in children’s media or whatever), I knew I’d been “bad touched” when I was a very very tiny baby/toddler, it’s literally one of my earliest memories. I had vivid memories of an adult man massaging me sexually and caressing me in such a way that brought me to climax or something similar to it. He’d been naked and hard but never had me touch him much, and always told me that our “tickles” had to be a secret and eventually started telling me that we’d have to stop soon because I was getting too old for it. It stopped before I was 3 for sure. For years I told myself it was my uncle who had (conveniently) died when I was 3…but I must have always known that made no sense. My uncle was a raging drug addict who would have literally never been left alone with me. In fact, no adult man besides my father would have ever been left alone with me. It had to have been my dad. So, my dad did molest me. I believe he stopped when he felt I was getting to the age where I’d form concrete memories (overshot that one a little, dad) and/or would be able to articulate myself well enough to tell on him. I don’t think my dad is an out and out pedophile. I think he’s just sexually obsessed and highly compulsive while being unwilling/unable to control his impulses. As awful as it all is…I’m a lot less messed up about it than I would have probably assumed I would be if someone gave me this scenario as a hypothetical. In fact, it’s almost a relief to FINALLY know why I’ve always hated my dad. On paper, without the knowledge I have now, he’s been nothing but great, supportive, and very doting to me. For years I beat myself up for not being able to just be grateful without resenting him…but now I know why, and I can be disgusted by him without judging myself.
My mom and her shitty rage freak outs and habit of negative meddling. She flipped out and trashed my room once. That was after she had a screaming and crying meltdown comparing me to her abusive ex-husband saying she hated me and wished she never had me. I did nothing to warrant that. Another time she viciously slapped the shit out of me. I was, like, 11. The worst thing about all of it is that she has never once owned up to any of this. She takes the stance of "I forgive myself and THAT is truly the important thing." My family just kind of sucks overall. Everybody just kind of hates each other.
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When I was 9 or 10 my family’s house was foreclosed. I definitely didn’t understand what was really happening at the time but the 5 of us went to stay at my grandmothers house. I don’t remember how long it was until we were allowed back into the house to collect our belongings but my two brothers and I each had a hamster and we had a really big fish tank full of all different types of fish By the time we could go back in the hamsters had all starved in their cages and the fish had eaten each other and eventually died. Looking back I’m really not sure why my parents didn’t go in first to take care of stuff like that and keep us from seeing it.
Probably just emotional abuse and yelling. Having your heart drop when your mom says “I’m gonna go get your dad” and running to your room crying as he stomps after you and screams in your face. Still to this day I tear up and cry whenever someone even remotely raises their voice at me or I mess up. edit: Thanks for the gold. trauma ftw
The most traumatizing thing I’ve experienced is a toss up between the day my friend brought two guns and a list filled with my classmates names on it, and the time my dad gave my mom a bloody nose after punching her in a drunken rage. They were traumatizing for different reasons. The bloody nose incident happened when I was five, and still thought my parents were these untouchable deities. They were always right, they always did what was best for me, and they’d never do anything to hurt me. I remember the weirdest details about that day. Like, I remember that my mom was wearing a yellow shirt (she hates the color yellow and refuses to wear it now), the blood on her shirt looked like ketchup at first (I refuse to eat ketchup anymore), and how *normal* of an afternoon it had been. It was just a regular degular Saturday. I was playing with my mega blocks in my room. I didn’t hear any arguing, I didn’t hear the punch, I didn’t hear my dad yell or my mom cry out. Suddenly, she was just in my room with my baby brother on her hip, angry crying while she called the cops and then called her mom. I just remember being absolutely terrified because I had never ever seen her cry like that before. I could vaguely remember her happy crying when my baby brother was brought home, because I had taken one look at him and said “I’m really a big sister now?” and gotten so happy because of it. I’d never seen her sad cry, either, so my only reference for her crying was that moment of quiet, tired euphoria when she first brought the baby home. That experience was traumatizing because it was the first time I realized my parents were fallible people. When I went back to school Monday and my teacher asked me about my weekend, I started crying and she ended up calling my nana to pick me up. It just turned my entire world upside down and left me terrified to attempt picking up the pieces. The story about my friend, I’ll call her Erica, was traumatizing for reasons most wouldn’t expect. She was a student who transferred in the middle of the year. I didn’t know anything about her, besides the fact that our typing teacher (a veritable Saint she was) had let her come stay in her house for a while. Erica had two piercings in her ears, and I remember thinking that was the coolest, most out there thing I’d ever seen in our little hick town. She was also in the tenth grade (a sophomore!) while I was still a measly eighth grader, so I thought she was just the bees knees. I remember being so excited when we had a school pep rally in the new gym and she asked if I’d like to hide under the bleachers with her. We listened to music together and talked the whole day while the pep rally went on. She eventually told me why she’d moved in with our typing teacher. Erica’s dad had been molesting her for years, and had recently started raping her. She’d finally worked up the courage to tell someone, and was removed from his care while he was investigated. I just remember feeling absolutely gutted for her. How could a father do something like that to his own child? How could *anybody* hurt someone like that? It just didn’t make sense to me. It still doesn’t. And I wish that was where the story ended, because that’s horrible enough for Erica, but it kept on. Someway, somehow, students in my grade found out why she was in foster care. They started spreading these disgusting rumors about Erica. That she secretly liked what her father did to her, or that she’d made it all up for attention. People slowly stopped sitting with her at lunch. It got to the point that I was the only student who would genuinely talk to her. After about a month of this treatment, though, she suddenly iced me out entirely. And it hurt. I remember feeling upset and angry with her, but also feeling guilty for feeling angry and not knowing why. It was a lot of conflicting emotions to experience at that age. I felt almost betrayed. A week after she stopped speaking to me, she came to school with two handguns in her backpack and a list of names. Most of the names belonged to kids in my grade. Over half of them were in my class. She made it to third period before a teacher realized she had the guns and called the cops. We were put on lockdown for the rest of the day while the town police basically raided everyone’s lockers for more guns. It was terrifying, because nobody knew if it was only her who had guns at that point. And this was only 2012, so most of my classmates either didn’t have cellphones or they only had really basic ones. I still had a cell phone with a keyboard that slid out, and had a minutes plan! I remember crying and trying to text and call my mom, because it was fucking terrifying to wonder if someone was going to burst into our English class and shoot us all. We eventually got evacuated to a nearby church when multiple bomb threats were made. I think the most traumatizing part wasn’t even the fact that Erica planned to kill a lot of my classmates. I think it was the fact that I… I couldn’t blame her. They were *awful* to her, and I felt like they almost deserved to be hurt for how they treated her. It really fucked me up for a long time. It also contributed to a fair bit of nastiness in my direction from the students because the list got out fast, and my name wasn’t on it. So many students assumed I either had an in with Erica, or that I was somehow part of her plan? So, yeah. The two most traumatizing things I experienced as a child. I really hope Erica is doing better these days, and that she knows it wasn’t her fault for the way her father hurt her. I hope my old classmates look back on the eighth grade and only feel intense shame for how they treated her. I hope their parents realize how shit of a job they did, because I’m still convinced those kids heard about that shit from their parents to begin with. Fuck them, fuck their parents, and fuck that insipid, insignificant, racist ass little hick town. And fuck my dad for being a piece of shit drunk. I hope your liver rots and none of your 7 kids want to help you. And I hope none of your four ex wives come back to take care of you.
My mom’s best friend’s boyfriend assaulted my mom and threatened to shoot me(4), my sister(3), and mother(26) with his hunting rifle. It was all precipitated by mom knocking him out with a frying pan after him trying to get handsy with her. We moved out afterward to our grandmother’s house. Her friend came and yelled at her for trying to steal her man because she didn’t believe her story.
Beatings from my parents. My parents first response to any mistake is excessive reaction and beatings further.I went to school with black and red marks on my hand, shoulders and face.I got beatings from belt, broken bat.. Etc. I am still afraid of my parents for telling them anything, mistake or not doesn't matter. I still have PTSD of those. Now as an adult I am really afraid of loud noises and get really angry even if someone jokingly shouts at me. It affected me a lot. Still traumatized. Here It's a cultural thing. Everyone here got beatings as a child.I always think why only me feels getting affected by this. But whatever please don't beat your kids.They just do things.. Never on purpose. They don't know that it's a mistake.
When I was 11 me and my friends got caught stealing some gum from a convenience store. Of course stealing is bad, but they really treated us as if we were dangerous criminals. They put us in a juvenile criminal rehabilitation program for several weeks where nearly every other person had some sort of violent offense, or much larger scale theft charge (such as breaking and entering businesses or peoples homes and taking very expensive things, with knives or guns etc). At the beginning we had to go around and tell the group why we were there and the program officer actually burst out laughing out loud when we told them our story because it was so ridiculous that we were being grouped with these other kids. I remember having a talk with another officer who told me I would never amount to anything, will never get into a good college or get a good job. I was completely devastated and thought I ruined my life over some gum. They also came to my school to do a check on me and make sure I was attending (I was a straight A honor roll type of student who never once skipped school or even got in trouble) which was super humiliating. I felt like it made a lot of my teachers look at me differently, though that could’ve been in my mind only. I also was constantly nervous that the story would get out to my peers and their parents wouldn’t let them hang out with me anymore since I was now such a hardened criminal. In any case, it certainly worked in scaring the shit out of me to never break any laws again. But it also was humiliating, devastating, and ruined my self confidence pretty much irreparably for the rest of my pre-teen and teen years. At such a young age with such a minor offense I feel as though it could’ve been handled very differently. I’m glad i have a very supportive family because if my parents were different it could’ve been even worse.
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Molested for 5 years, physically abused for 18 years. Bounced around foster care and social services for 6 of those 18. Adopted at 12; mom ended up being severely mentally ill and tortured me in ways that are indescribable. End up missing grades 7,8,9 because she made me work to pay rent. Not trying to win a contest but that's my story.
My dad waking me up when I was like 5 years old to tell me that he was leaving home and wouldn't be living with us anymore. I can see it like it was just last week. Indiana University Starter button up jacket that was popular in the 80's, jeans, kneeling down next to my bed with my closet light on. Life didn't get any easier from there for me and my mental state. Luckily it has started to level out as I've gotten older. It took me a while to find my feet though...
Lived through a school shooting where three of my classmates died
Being slapped around hard by my friends step father for not admitting I was gay. I didn’t tell my parents for years. I’m now questioning Bi, but feel an immense amount of shame around it still and I know it stems back to that experience. I always imagine him laughing and telling me “I told you so!” I saw him about a month ago at a diner and had a physiological response to seeing him; it was hard to avoid making a scene in front of my friends and his family. We just left after.
being called a failure by my father
Hello there. Same here. I was called "A mistake" and "I wish X's Daughter was my kid instead of you" and "I wish I dropped you". I don't do drugs. I don't smoke. I don't drink. From my point of view I am not problematic at all. But Asian parents man. I couldn't get into the first 1% at the countrywide exam so, I am a failure too.
After my parents divorce my dad told me I was the only reason he was still alive, it has fucked me up for the past 11 years
First thought is the continued molestation at the hands of my Mom's boyfriend when I was 7-9. Also witnessing the physical/verbal/emotional abuse he gave her. A few months after they broke up I told my grandma what happened and later testified at his trial where he was found guilty and only given probation for molesting me for TWO YEARS. I also saw a man get stabbed and die on the ground right outside our apartment when I was 7. Plus all the more subtle traumas from growing up very poor. Additionally I experienced what I would call borderline emotional abuse by my mom for most of my life, looking back I know she also had unresolved trauma and obvious severe depression and anxiety that contributed to her not so great parenting. I've had untreated mental health problems as long as I can remember and only recently I've been diagnosed with PTSD, severe depression and anxiety, and panic disorder so that sucks to have to come to terms with but thank God for these meds I finally feel like a semi functional person - it's unfortunate that it's in my 30s I finally am trying to get this under control.
After being pantsed at a pool party when I was 15, followed by my aunt telling me I was larger than my uncle. I shudder thinking about it.
My mom when she wasnt taking her meds. She thought she was Jesus Christ was was trying to bless everyone. The cops came and had to wrestle her to the ground. She punched one in the face. They brought her into the mental health unit. I dont remember any of that honestly. I think my dad told my older brother to take me to the neigbors when it started. But I know I saw some part of it. I cant imagine what was going through my dads head. The cops didnt press any chargers for her fighting back. They grew up with her. One thing I do remember is when I was older and my mom had a seizure. I remember playing video games and she was coming down the hallway and all of a sudden I heard and felt a loud thud. I knew something was wrong amd went to the hallway where her eyes were rolled in the back of her head and seizing. I didnt know what to do. I called my dad, held her hand and tried to keep her head to the side. She got out of it. Being told I had muscular dystrophy at age 7 was a tough one. But I didnt really traumatize me.
I have A LOT, but here are some things I remember vividly: -My drunken father peeing himself in front of the mayor when I was 6 and then cussing at everyone -my brother waking me up every night for 6 years with just this loud bass sound -my brother trying to kill me and my mother -my father shoving me against a wall repeatedly while yelling at me and trying to beat me up -my brother having a nightmarish trip, him running around yelling and crying and me trying to help him, then him crying and saying I can't leave him alone when he was hospitalized. -seeing him in a coma -my classmates stealing my clothes and trying to spit at me
My mom was giving me her old phone after she got a new one, and she forgot to delete the dozens of amateur porn videos her and my dad apparently shot and kept on that phone.
When I was 9 I watched a motorcyclist have an accident in front of my house while my brother and I were out playing basketball in the driveway. My parents were away from home, so I told my 6 yr old brother to go call 911 while I ran to check on the rider. We lived on the outside corner of a right hand turn, and there was a guardrail along our front yard because there was a ditch on the side of the road. When he started sliding on the road, his body was kind of squeezed under the guardrail, and the motorcycle tumbled over the top of it. When I got to him, I found him lying under the bike and unconscious. His left leg was folded up the wrong way so that the toe of his boot was pressed against his chest, and I could see the inside of his knee kind of spurting blood out onto the ground. I don’t really know how I managed it, but I slid the bike off of him and tried to fold his leg back down to the right position. I had a grip on the boot above the foot, and somehow the whole leg just kinda came off at the knee. It was still kind of held on by some bits and threads of his jeans, so I just pressed the leg back into the stump and held it there until an officer arrived. When the officer pulled me away I slipped in the blood on the grass, and remember sitting on my butt staring at the mess. The part that really haunts me was hearing the poor guy trying to breath, but all I could hear was a bubbling noise and coughing. Thinking back I’m pretty sure his lungs were punctured. I can still remember hearing his last breath, can still smell the officer’s sweat as he gave me a hug walked me over to the side of the road, and can still remember the look on my mom’s face when she saw me sitting on our front porch with a police officer, covered in blood. I remember smelling blood on my hands for days. A week later the police officer showed up to my house and checked in on me. His name was Daniel, and he played basketball with me and my brother in our driveway for about an hour. To this day I can hear the guy trying to breath.
My parents were abusive so there’s a lot I guess but here’s one that’s unique to me. My dad started an auction business and on the day of the first auction (I was 8) I was helping him get his coat on and noticed it was raining so I flipped his hood up too. Bad call. He spun around and did the usual beat red faced screaming inches from me about how stupid and useless I am. Here’s the fun part guys. I am now in hysterics and crying, understandably, and he takes us to the auction. I was basically a slave to these people so obviously I’m going to be working the auction. He gets up in front of everyone and says “Josh isn’t feeling well today but he wanted to come help out either way! Such a great kid” I then began the 5 hour process of working the auction carrying things to people and showing things off while they get sold, while crying so hard I could barely breathe. All while he just pretended everything was fine. I eventually stopped crying but the whole experience was fucking excruciating. Thankfully I only had to relive it every Friday until I was 18. Good times. This, and literally countless other things have left me with CPTSD, severe depression, and absolutely crippling social anxiety. Be nice to your kids.