I'm a 16 year old male and im so unsure whether events in my life are traumatising or have given me trauma, could someone tell me for eash scenerio whether they are bad or not.

1. When i was around 12 a classmate showed me disgusting footage of a cartel machette execution, this lead to me having nightmares for a few months and having glimps/flashbacks of the video when i see a knife similarly sized as the one in the video.

2. For context i dated this trans person bio female who identified as a man when i dated it now reverted back to female no surgery, anyways we were on and off for about 2 years when i was 12 to 14 grade 7 to early 9, despite my expressed wishes to not be touched she carressed my thighs and leaned on me when we werent together and she beat me lightly slapping me hard every now and then i flinch when raised hands are near me now.

3. My family 2 brothers, sister, father, mother and me when i was around 4 to 16 my brothers would shout and argue with my parents punching holes in walls on occasion and light violence, loud noises just make me stressed specifically voices and sometimes i want to pummel kids in my school when there being to loud.

4. When i was 14 to 15 grade 9, we will call my friend phil and his friend sam i dont know sam, phil texted me one day suicide thingy saying sorry im commiting then stops responding i text sam who says he sees him and is gonna catch him then sam texts me that he jumped off a bridge and he was gone, phils gf was texting me asking what was happening i told her i was gonna go shower, i tried to cry about my dead friend but couldnt, i got out turns out sam was trolling took phils phone which had died and texted his loved ones goodbye, this caused me to stop reacting to death 3 family memebers died since this i havent cried or cared much about it.

Thats it thankyou, i would love feedback on whether this is trauma or traumatising in anyways or your personal opinions about this.

We are all practicing together at school for a choir competition.

Without any teacher intervention, the children decide on their own who will be the conductor and the leaders for each section, and the rest follow them to practice singing.

Everyone seems to sing well, but hitting high notes is incredibly difficult for me; I can only sing in falsetto.

However, there are so many parts in the songs we sing together where I have to use falsetto. Eventually, when I was checked singing alone, the kids criticized me. I went out to sing by myself, but I was so nervous that I ended up singing even worse. Everyone laughed, and I ended up crying.

Then, we practiced again next week—that is, today—and I was criticized again. I screamed my heart out and finally succeeded, but the kids were still laughing. My head feels like it's going to explode, and I feel like I'll never be able to sing again.

But the choir competition is next month, so there isn't much time left, and I hate myself so much.

Will I only be able to solve this if I sing well? Is my mental strength weak?

For reference, the exact definition of a falsetto part is not intentionally using falsetto, but rather a part that I can only sing by using falsetto (it is actually supposed to be chest voice, and the kids tell me to sing only in chest voice. I think if I hit a wrong note while singing in chest voice, the performance will be even more ruined).

i have been raped, then sexually abused more times than i can count, srry this is corny asf. does it count as me not being virgin??? i would think i am not since it's penetration but i didn't want that, okay, i am 15

m deleting this tmr

Someone died in an accident I was involved in and now I feel like everything in my life has been a mistake and that I don’t deserve to be here anymore

Hi everyone,
I’ve recently created an Instagram page called **Her Unspoken**, and I wanted to share a little about why I started it and what I hope it can become…

I want to create a space for women who have been through difficult things - grief, trauma, heartbreak, loss, abuse, loneliness, suicide, losing themselves, or simply trying to find their way through a period of life that feels incredibly heavy. (I have experienced a huge handful of these myself)

Sometimes, we carry so much that we never speak about. We put on a brave face, carry on with our everyday lives, our jobs, and people have no idea what we’re actually going through!

Sometimes, we don’t talk about it because we don’t know how to explain it. Sometimes, we’re scared of being judged or don’t want to feel like a burden, And sometimes, we just need to know that someone else understands or has been there too and what we feel is normal.

The idea behind Her Unspoken is to give those feelings and experiences a voice!

I’d love to hear from women who feel comfortable sharing their stories, whether it’s something you’ve survived, something you’re still healing from, something or somebody you’ve lost, or something you wish someone had told you when you were at your lowest in life.

With your permission, I’d also love to share some stories anonymously on my Instagram page, so that other women going through similar experiences might feel a little less alone or that might give them strength to keep going.

**Nothing** would be shared without your explicit permission, and you would always be able to choose whether your story is **anonymous** or credited to you.

You don’t have to have everything figured out. You don’t have to have a happy ending. You don’t even have to be fully healed but I hope that being at all different stages it helps more women.

If you’ve been through something difficult, what is one thing you wish someone had said to you when you needed it most?
Or, if you’re comfortable sharing more, what is something you’ve been carrying that you wish people understood?
Please only share what feels **safe** and **comfortable** for you.

**You don’t owe anyone your story.** (But if you feel safe to I’d love to hear)

I hope Her Unspoken can become a little corner of the internet where women feel heard, understood, and reminded that they aren’t alone. 🤍

I do have plans that if this goes well it turns into more of a sociable meet ups and events in the London and surrounding areas.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

M

This is what I get for not blocking them on everything. I just removed them because I was still in a very unwell and gaslit mentality. I still thought I was the problem and that if I just fixed myself we'd be fine. So I removed them. And now I can't block them everywhere.

They're blocked most places, even the dumb petty ones purely for my entertainment, but they weren't blocked on that one. And they popped up today. Now I'm shaking. My face is warm. And I'm posting this because I need some outlet. For someone to see that I'm hurting. Because nobody believed me then.

Fuck I hate them. I hate them so much. I hate that I still hurt. I hate that it stills messes me up so bad. I hate that part of me is still scared of them. I hate that they got away with all of it and left me in pieces.

So, no, Instagram, I do not want to follow a person who broke me more than anyone. Thanks though.

Content warning- Based on true personal experiences that include homelessness, trauma, sexual abuse, emotional abuse and physical abuse. I made this article to break the cycle and to bring people together. I want to eventually make videos on trauma and regaining power back.

https://medium.com/@lifeincolorstudio/a-diary-of-an-american-geisha-content-warning-based-on-real-life-experiences-the-following-fbc5d6657db4

I (31F) was assaulted by my boyfriend pretty violently several times after I broke up with him. It really messed with me. I also had an abusive father and several other bad experiences with men.

My only safe moments have been in friendships with women and some of them have felt like crushes but I’m not really sure if it’s just because I felt safe and cared for. What I really struggle with is that I have so much fear around attraction that I don’t really feel spontaneous desire for anyone of any gender. Especially after the final assaults that happened in my early twenties by my boyfriend I completely shut down physically. I struggled to eat, to shower, and anything related to ‘being in my body’ made me feel dissociated and frozen.

I’m in my 30s now and would honestly love to have a partner at some point but I don’t even know who I’m attracted to anymore. I’ve wondered if I’m a lesbian, bisexual, straight, asexual, etc. And I really deep down have no idea what I am or how to even explore anything.

Did you struggle with knowing what your sexuality was after assault?

Paso hace mucho, pero si. Y no creo poder decir todo Pero dijieron mierda de mi en el pasillo, y caminaba por el pasillo y entre dos limpiadoras se reían y me miraban. Y escuché en los pasillos que se burlaban de mi por gorda. O sea, dijieron que estaba más gorda. WTF? Bueno ahora solo me quedan los daños mentales ojalá y me suicidó algún día después de tanta mierda ya para que vivir Pero también tengo otro problema que según la gente si me quitó la vida me voy al infierno. Ah qué asco. Odio esto. Y nadie me entiende y nadie me cree.

When I first read Trauma and Recovery (1992) in 2008, it changed my understanding of psychological trauma. Truth and Repair is its logical and conceptual sequel. Where the earlier book mapped the dialectic of trauma on the individual and collective levels, this one asks what a society owes survivors, and what it would take to deliver it. It insists, once more, that trauma is a collective phenomenon, not a private misfortune.

Herman puts the bystander at the center. Trauma on a large scale does not happen without the silence, disbelief, and convenient inattention of those who could have intervened. Perpetrators rely on this, and so do the institutions that shelter them. The responsibility therefore reaches well beyond the individual who commits the harm. Mass traumatization requires a cultural environment that supports it, and Herman names the tyranny of patriarchy as the deepest layer of that environment.

One of the book’s most sobering observations is how little we know about the motives and intrapsychic dynamics of people who sexually abuse children, even though this violence is extremely common. The field has overwhelmingly studied victims and comparatively neglected perpetrators. Could this asymmetry also be a symptom of the cultural dynamics it describes?

The ethical core of the book is a demanding definition: justice means nothing less than ending relationships of dominance and subordination. By that standard, the legal system comes up short. Courts often reproduce the very hierarchies that made the abuse possible, in the way they treat survivors’ testimony, assign credibility, and let power shape outcomes. Herman describes in detail how hard and slow cultural change is, and she doesn’t offer false comfort. But she also documents new paradigms of justice emerging, built around what survivors themselves say they need: truth, acknowledgment, accountability, and repair.

For readers in the psychedelic and trauma field, the book is a useful corrective. It is a reminder that healing individuals while leaving the conditions that injure them untouched is an incomplete project. In my own work on the Vampirocene, I draw heavily on Herman’s analysis, and Truth and Repair sharpens the conclusion I have reached from it. The basic dynamic of tyranny, from the abusive household to the authoritarian state, is trauma-based mind control. Domination is secured less by force than by the systematic production of terror, helplessness, isolation, and shame, which reorganize the victim’s perception, loyalty, and sense of self around the dominator. Through traumatic bonding, dissociation, and identification with the aggressor, the dominated come to defend the order that harms them, and bystanders learn to look away in order to stay safe. Patriarchy is the first school of this method. It teaches it within the family, where it is practiced on the smallest and most dependent, and from there it scales up into culture. The Vampirocene is this same mechanism at a civilizational level: an order that feeds on the life of the many for the benefit of the few and keeps itself in place through chronic, collective traumatization rather than through consent. Seen this way, Herman’s definition of justice as the end of dominance and subordination is both an ethical demand and a precondition for freeing our minds. It is also why survivors’ own visions of justice matter so much: they are the people who know from the inside how this control works and how it breaks.

This is Herman at her best: clear, unsentimental, and committed. It belongs on the shelf of every clinician, jurist, and citizen who takes trauma seriously.

Thank you for your participation! :)