I have at least TRIED to come to peace with it, as much as I have been able (I am not young), but it resurfaces in ways that catch me off guard. Triggers that I have a hard time identifying (and that seem minor or inconsequential from a logical point of view) can instantly send me into a spiral of depression that can be very difficult to get out of. I have a hard time hiding it at work (in tech, higher up) when it gets bad but I feel that I must.

—————

1. Share a thought

2. How does that thought make you feel?

3. Why does it make you feel that way?

4. What is another way of thinking about that thought?

5. How does thinking about it differently change the way you feel?

6. What new opportunities are possible by thinking differently about this?

I wasn’t molested in the sense I think you mean, but over the years I’ve been close and cared deeply about some who were.

I’m not qualified to say much about this, but I can share that I’ve seen people do the hard work and make wonderful lives for themselves after that kind of tragedy.

God speed.

I admire you greatly for fighting your traumas. Going to that dark alley to mop up what would feel like the sea.

I am really noone to give advice but I will try to give you what guiding words I have.

Try to find your strength. Look for the spark. Use your powers to do good. Leverage the perspectives you've gained in life. Noone can do so, and noone has them, but you. Try to find a way to use the bad to do good.

If you manage to do this, you or others might find yourself a gem too valuable to have even dreamt of finding.

May God help you.

This is something that really upsets me as a father to multiple children.

Is it even possible for a biological father to do this? I've been meaning to google but I'm afraid of seeing the results.

I always assumed this would be limited to step parents, but Im afraid the truth is darker than i thought possible

Once I had my first child I was holding and rocking him back to sleep after a late night feeding and I forced myself to imagine doing to him what my father did to me and it completely wrecked me. I just lost it. It was utterly impossible and horrifying to imagine doing that to any child, let alone my own. I thought it might help me at least gain some insight into him, however feeble, but it didn't... it made me feel an even deeper burning hatred for him and what he did. Pedophiles like he is are simply defective and need to be kept away from children lest they succumb to their urges.

As someone in their mid twenties, I am aware of _some_ past traumas that effect me but I have no clue how to make peace with them. It's been a few years already and I barely see any natural progress. Makes it hard when these experiences are quite actively blocked by our brains. :(

These 'ticks' are quite automatic and it is hard to deal with in the moment at least for me. Sometimes I'll get random anxiety from a conversation with someone when my brain matches some pattern with the trauma. Very annoying!

I've had dreams that enlightened me to certain things. So that's interesting.

Meditation? Psychedelics? Cognitive behavioral therapy? I know some people swear by ayahuasca. Anyone got any thoughts?

I was pretty skeptical of therapies for the longest while but this past year finally wrung up enough effort to go hunting for a trauma-specialist (PTSD and CPTSD flavors) therapist. There's tonnes out there (psychologytoday has a good list if you're in the US where you can search by specialty + location). Remote friendly, etc.

Personally found exceptional results with IFS (Integrated Family Systems) which was recommended by a trauma therapist. Had quite a few skeletons in the closet about a childhood full of medical fuckery and it feels like it's a healed scar now, mentally, versus an open wound with a band aid slapped over it.

I wish you the best in wherever your journey takes you.

The scarce commodity, maybe the only one more scarce than time, is the short-term-finite capacity to do difficult things. Discipline/willpower/etc. is (unlike time) renewable, but grow a new forest renewable, not write on the other side of the paper renewable.

Big picture it’s time that has to be budgeted. But in the small: improving our lives, being better custodians of our resources, relationships, and reputation, is hard work. You have to find the high leverage stuff.

As an example, I’m just way more effective if I keep my place tip-top. If I let it get to be a mess, it’s friction on getting out of bed. So I try to tidy up and wash dishes even after a long workday. But if I work too long, not happening. I have to actively budget it.

That’s just an anecdote/example, but we all have the stuff we know we ought to be doing and aren’t: bin-packing the highest leverage stuff before saying “fuck it I’m ordering a pizza and a six pack” is the unglamorous work of striving for a better life.

It may take a few therapists before you come across someone you feel you can build a good relationship with. You also need to fully commit to the therapy - a therapist can only take you so far, otherwise.

Personally, I did not find CBT all that helpful for dealing with known traumas. I did find Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy resonated with me, which I discovered through that book.

I also agree with you on finding the right therapist, and also on taking the work seriously. It's like a running coach or a personal trainer: they can point you in the right direction, but they can't work out for you.

And for youniverse, one way I've found it useful to look at therapy and meditation as self-instrumentation. As you've already started to do, you need to pay attention to correlations and unexpected reactions. At first you will notice these things with a fair bit of delay and thought. But with time, you can gradually become aware of the reaction in the moment. Once you've gotten there, you can begin the debugging work. Often that's just giving yourself a different experience in the moment. E.g., you'll feel the anxiety spike, recognize it as trauma-related, and then take a few deep breaths and consciously relax. In the same way your body learned when it wasn't safe, it will gradually re-learn when it is safe.

For me it's also been helpful to build a pretty chill life for myself so that anxiety stands out against the baseline. For me that means things like living in a quiet place, going to bed early enough that I don't need an alarm clock, and strictly limiting intense media and video games. When I was your age my life was pretty intense and anxiety-making not because I had to, but because that was familiar to me. If I was a bit frantic all the time, it was much easier to ignore trauma reactions! [taps temple in I'm-so-smart gesture]

Neurofeedback works great for physical traumas. I found some really good content for IFS[1]. It is probably something that would be good for all parents so they are careful not to pass traumas to their children. [1] http://sfhelp.org/

I wouldn’t self medicate with psychoactive substances. I’ve tried that and it just led to worse traumas after a period of being distracted from my problems by the chemicals. This is what led me to realize resiliency is the difference between living well with trauma and living in trauma.

Instead:

* Internal Family Systems

* Books: Body Keeps the Score, CPTSD: From surviving to thriving, Whole Again.

* Get validation of the abuse/neglect you suffered.

* EMDR

* Yoga with a focus on emotions stored in your body

* Emotional mindfulness, emotional vocabulary (alexythimia).

* With the previous one, paying attention to your needs.

* Boundaries

* Changing self-talk

* Foster the opposite of resiliency. Traumatized people have had to be strong and resilient their whole lives. What they need is softness, to be heard, to be seen and feel understood. To be vulnerable, to rest.

* (...)

Being resilient isn’t white knuckling through things. It’s building a threshold of mood and perspective that allows the trauma to be examined without creating a feedback cycle. Meditation and CBT allowed me to create an internal reference system that wasn’t wrapped up in the emotion of trauma and allowed me to modify my perception of the trauma. Doing so allowed me to see pathologies in my various feedback cycles and work on breaking them at the weakest part.

I would ask that you give your own advice without invalidating the experiences of others. Humans are complex and there is no magic incantation you’ll provide. I’m glad these worked for you.

I'm sure you're more functional now, but know that being more functional doesn't equate to actually having healed anything. It can just mean the person learned to cope better.

In fact, the initial stages of healing from childhood trauma are expected to be less functional, less productive, and yes, more depressive, because for the first time in the person's life, they're feeling, in a compassionate way, what they've been pushing down all their lives, because they had no one safe to go to, and often there's a lot to unpack. It definitely is tiring and often just exhausting. But it's the only way. Because without feeling you can't heal.

Also, childhood trauma doesn't create "pathologies" it creates coping mechanisms which any healthy person would develop in the same circumstances, which need to be understood, and which will subside on their own without the need for behavioral approaches (aka symptom fixing) like CBT.

We are all humans, so we can't keep saying "what works for me may not work for others", at the core we do have many things in common, we all have feelings, we all have similar needs. And we all get traumatized in similar ways. So while there might be some differences, at the end of the day, some things will work for everyone, and those things are the ones that relate to the things we ALL have in common.

The reason it became so ingrained in psychology the mentality of "what works for you may not work for others" is because we've been in the equivalent of the middle ages of psychology for trauma treatment.

I’m genuinely wondering how you can be so confident. You’re telling someone to follow your universal prescription, and insulting their suggestion taken from person experience.

Let alone the fact that you’re arguing against “resiliency” being a positive trait to foster in any human being, regardless of past traumas.

Do you at least acknowledge your confidence? You’re telling somebody off for sharing a reasonable mental health approach.

And what if I said I completely agreed with GP, on account of my person experience and reconciliation? Not everybody breaks in the same way; why do you then think that putting a person back together must follow your prescription?

Re: boundaries, I found this book quite interesting https://www.amazon.com/Set-Boundaries-Find-Peace-Reclaiming/...

To me it was extremely easy to see what the therapist wanted me to say and say it.

Sometimes I had the impression that I had to protect the therapist from the reality that some people have really, really, really shitty lives behind thei control and their thinking is not a cognitive distortion: it's the rational response to a disastrous situation.

This is easy with everyone, but seeing as you're the one paying for them to listen it seems a little weird to meta therapy like this. If you feel that need, just don't go.

> Sometimes I had the impression that I had to protect the therapist from the reality that some people have really, really, really shitty lives behind thei control and their thinking is not a cognitive distortion: it's the rational response to a disastrous situation.

Any therapist will explain to you that your environment and your behaviour (if they are as connected as you say) have to change together: The former because it is almost impossible to change yourself in an identical context, the latter because otherwise you will create the same environment in a new place.

From what you said, you had both bad therapists and did not want to participate in therapy. It's no wonder it doesn't work in that case, every good therapist will tell you this.

Ayahuasca with proper support is very beneficial for a lot of people. Some other therapies (someone mentioned EMDR which is excellent, also somatic experiencing) are incredibly synergetic with it. They are very good at showing you the root of the issue, but they are absolutely not magic. It takes quite a bit of courage to go in and face yourself and to do the necessary work. Often the work doesn't start until after the ceremony finishes and you're back in "real life".

I've seen a lot of positive change from plant medicine. I've also seen a lot of people rebound back in to darkness after failing to do something with the message they got (after an initially positive experience)

I've done psychedelics plenty of times over 25+ years and can see the potential they have but I'd never in my life do so in one of these retreats.

Drugs aren't, alcohol isn't, etc.

What seems to work is... work. Working on yourself, trying to confront past traumas, talking to others about it, opening up. You know, the sucky parts that everyone hates to do.

i’ve been dealing with low grade trauma for a long time so kept doing the work

i will never know if i finally put enough work or if going crazy on moderate shroom trip rewired the brain just enough to see

this stuff is so hard since personal experiences are hard? unwise to generalize.

yet, feeling better about existing is nice.

also recovery is always tenuous since life can deal you a hand that can break you and maybe your new healthy mindset can’t handle it.

yet, the old broken mindset would have at least kept you alive.

too young to comment on which it will be for me

People do and can get to the bottom of what is ultimately is driving them in their own humanity.

You can go in circles trying different spiritual practices. You can have earth shattering changes with plant medicine too. You can do dream work with dream yoga too (google Andrew holecek). The rabbit hole is long and wide. I would not swear by ayahuascha. All of life is ceremony. It might help in the short term but what you are seeking is an active thing and high effort thing until it becomes effortless. To be curious about your pain, fear and anxiety. Even to see the beauty in them. To have humility. To listen. To surrender it all.

There is no magic pill though. I’ve tried many things. I’m not the same person. You can change. There is a way out but the way out is not what you might think it is. The way out is the way through.

For Methylation, B viatmins, Zinc, Folate, can all change DNA methylation https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/11/3979

Histone modification seems to be controlled by fatty acids https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8273343/

There is a technique called "Parental Timeline Reimprinting" where you go back in time to before you were born (or before your parents were born) and give your parents (or grandparents) more resources to be able to change their behaviour and so raise you differently in a kind of imaginary parallel universe. Despite being imaginary this alternate universe "you" can "merge" with the "real" you and typically deep and pervasive healing often occurs.

I only did a short period of Schema Therapy, but the cognitive part of it was the most helpful thing in my overcoming of my BPD, I can only imagine how great the non-cognitive parts must be.

The best advice is therapy. Internal family systems is said to be by far the most effective and there are others similar.

So first, a question; What are the ramification of ridding our trauma and not passing along those epigenetic changes to out children?

Also, if you want to rid yourself of epigenetic trauma you need to understand DNA methylation and histone modification.

Both can be controlled by diet.

For Methylation, B viatmins, Zinc, Folate, can all change DNA methylation https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/13/11/3979

Histone modification seems to be controlled by fatty acids https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8273343/

IMHO, I feel the reason obesity is so linked with trauma is this attempt of the body to fix histone modification.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016517810...

If you’re not genetically predisposed to aggression then beating your kids might have the opposite effect.

The answer is if you’re aggressive focus on fixing yourself and don’t worry about your kids.

The book is only $10 so if it doesn't work no big loss.

I have literally no fear of heights now, nothing. I first noticed when I took my daughter on one of those high wire adventure things. Suddenly I was aware of something odd - there was no fear, no reaction to the height, absolutely nothing, flat.

So if you can play the game and occasionally climb and build up slowly to the point where you don't even think about it in VR - then you will have solved the problem in real life (anecdata).

People don't fear things when their frame of reference includes way more extreme things that are fine.

Obviously not everyone can just fly a bunch to do half assed exposure therapy, but maybe something like VR?

But for exposure therapy, you're probably going to want to go with Microsoft Flight Sim 2020, right? I think it supports VR and it's probably the most visually accurate experience. I could be wrong though as I've never played it myself.

I also played a bunch of Warthunder in VR. The sense of height in those smaller planes is really freaky.

Well there's your issue. Anxiety attacks are like a rushing river, if you try to swim against or stop the current you'll get nowhere. Ride it out and know that if you felt things got really got bad, you could ask any airline attendant for help - they deal with nervous flyers every day across tens of thousands of people every year and would help you through it compassionately and respectfully. We're all in this together man, nobody is going to make you feel bad for being human.

I used to date a physiologist researching/specialized in how to overcome anxiety.

We all see people advising stupid things every day, because it's worked for them so far. There's the lichtenberg wood burning people who explain how to pull out a microwave transformer and use it to burn patterns into wood... and fail to acknowledge just how likely it is to kill you.

It’s like the limp you often still have even after the busted knee has healed.

I’ve always wanted to map a system like this into more traditional ones to see what kind of patterns might emerge. I’m not sure how that would look but I think there’s still a lot to be discovered.

[0] https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/how-the-enneagram-system-...

I spent a lot of my early adulthood thinking the depression/anxiety/dependency that afflicted me was the fault of others, including parents, peers who'd bullied me, former partners/friends who'd betrayed me, etc. And on one level there's truth to it, until you realise all those people were acting in reaction to abuse and trauma they'd suffered, so it's futile to scapegoat everything onto particular individuals or categories of people.

For what it's worth, I am personally trying to undertake work that over the long term would help society to be better at alleviating these trauma cycles and avert the patterns of abuse we see everywhere, but I'm under no illusion that it will be fast or easy, or even that it's likely that the approaches I've found to be effective would be embraced widely enough to have any impact at all. I'll keep trying, however.

To go from zero positive role models to one for a child who is suffering would already be a life changing event. If the responsibility for child raising can be shared among more people in society I truly believe it would smooth out the negative actions of single individuals who are the only meaningful influence in a child's upbringing. Having engagement from one adult who demonstrates compassion, who can create a safe space, and who can act as a role model for how to positively integrate in to society, would provide the child with visibility of what exiting their situation looks like, illuminating a path that they are entirely blind to without this.

At least in my own anecdotal experience you are completely correct that externalising blame, even where warranted, is not the solution. Understanding why these external situations happen and acceptance of them only provides so much too. Engagement with the child from invested individuals may not solve the problem entirely, but it will shift us on to a corrective path that would have a massive impact on society a few generations from now.

Yeah just my own 2 cents on the problem. I wish you luck with your vision.

Do you shout at your toddler when it does crazy stupid & dangerous things, or do you just let them suffer the consequences of their actions?

Often these goals require conflicting choices. The solution, so far as there is one, is to do everything with love and humility. Then, even my mistakes are learning and bonding opportunities.

There is literally zero dichotomy between preventing toddlers doing crazy stupid & dangerous things vs causing them trauma via words. Toddlers can be annoying and don't respect you are tired mentally or emotionally. People loose their emotional control, it happens, especially when there are other stresses. But, saying that it is about safety is simply not true.

You can't go all the way to escalating to remove children from their parents care, but then who are they to be cared by? Other abuse victims.

It's very easy to say "prevent x from occurring", but then there's people and religion, and politics, and culture, and...

requiring parents to be financially stable would cut out a way to large portion of society. you only want rich people to have kids?

how about building a society where raising children does not cost money? free schools, healthcare, financial support (basic income?) for having children, can go a long way.

same for emotional support. instead of attempting to weed out potentially bad parents, provide a support system where parents can get the help needed if they struggle with their kids.

With the emotional and financial angle, I was getting at abortion as well as contraceptives and sex education. If an individual/couple get pregnant but they themselves don't feel they are emotionally or financially prepared, pushing them down that path (especially with poor support) immediately puts them and their child behind the eight ball. Obviously it's a particularly contentious topic in some countries.

I can't find the link now, but I was reading stats about foster children the other day which were quite incredible. Encouraging an environment where children are with parents who want them seems like something we should aim for.

but wanting children and being emotionally fit to take care of them are not the same thing. and denying someone the right to have children is completely inappropriate, as is trying to convince them that they are not capable.

This furthers the huge amount of resources society puts into the positional good known as education. If you make X level of education free and universal the X+1 level will soon become mandatory for a decent job even if it's irrelevant to the work.

> healthcare

This is a bottomless pit. A gov can spend almost arbitrarily large amounts of money on this (easily orders of magnitude more than total GDP), so you'll need to put a limit on it in some way.

not true. the US is the fourth highest country in number of students with tertiary education. notably europe (eg germany which has always had free universities) has only half as many students (and those even include trade-schools, which are absolutely relevant for work)

https://ourworldindata.org/tertiary-education

what possibly drives irrelevant higher education is high unemployment. if there are lots of applicants to choose from, you may tend to choose the higher educated ones. reduce unemployment and demand for lesser educated people should rise.

healthcare: This is a bottomless pit

literally ever country in the world spends less on healthcare than the US.

the limit on spending comes from insurance and governments not allowing exploitation by healthcare providers.

https://ourworldindata.org/financing-healthcare#healthcare-s...

To see it that way you’d either have to have too little or too much of it. I doubt you’ve had so little education that you see no real value in it. So I guess you’ve been privileged with so much of it that the marginal cost of more education for you doesn’t provide any further value. Fair enough - for you.

Education in the normal sense of the word is valuable in itself, regardless of the value other people place in it. If that’s not your experience you’re very much doing it wrong and should stop.

You're completely right.

Let me respost this I saw the other day:

"What almost nobody realises is that prescribing "social interaction" is almost like prescribing homeopathy to someone with cancer.

The real cancer is trauma.

Trauma.

We live in an epidemic of emotional trauma and few people see it.

It is trauma that causes parents to neglect their kids, to have low empathy for their suffering and not be able to realise they are not ok. Parents, or whoever is taking care of the kids, with the "help" of "modern" society in fact, cause kids, through action or inaction, not to be ok. Do people think these kids just happened to be born with a "social isolation gene"? Or "generalised hatred" gene? Nobody is that way, they were made.

The person you're replying to is an outlier and very lucky to have found people that were supportive. But I'd say by far most won't. And there's a reason for that and it's not their fault. Traumatized people are not very popular. Trauma itself is not very popular and most people have no clue about it, or how to identify someone who is traumatized, because the very nature of trauma causes them to conceal they have it to fit in and be accepted. And the ones who don't fit in are just seem as "there's something wrong with them". Kinda reminds me of the state of medicine in the middle ages.

What these people need is not social interaction.

They need

    Compassion

    someone to listen to them, to hear them, to be with them with their pain.

    to hear their story. Not to be asked "what's wrong with you?" but "what happened to you?"

    be told there's nothing wrong with them. They are this way because it's one of the ways a healthy mind copes with extreme emotional neglect and maybe abuse.

    to have a secure attachment. Someone they can count on. All the time. Unconditionally.

    a sense of belonging. To a community. To a shared sense of purpose. That they are needed and wanted. That they are valued. Desired.

Things have changed so much and so quickly that we're totally unaware of how screwed up and how much we were not made for this "modern" lifestyle.

We were not made to live with only 2 adults who have to take the role of a village to single handedly rear a child.

We were not made to attach primarily with people of our age. First in kindergarden, then school, then college. There were always several people and of all ages who we humans attached deeply to, who we matured emotionally from, whose more mature behaviors we could emulate and learn from.

We were not made to, if those 2 people fail to provide us a sense of safety, have no backup. There would always be someone who we could chat. We would always be with company of other people in the tribe. There would always be a "loving grandma" or an "older brother" who we could go to.

We were not made to have to pay someone to give us a simulation of unconditional love, and safety that our group would provide. This person, who we know in the end does it for the money, and to help, but without money they wouldn't do it. How can we think this is OK and normal and that people are having their emotional needs met in these weird conditions?

How far have we gone the far end to find ourselves proud to conclude that social interaction increases lobgevity? Are we in the future going to be so dry that people will be proud to conclude that drinking water increases longevity too?

In the conditions we live now it is no wonder emotional neglect and abuse has been happening so much. The very way the social foundation is layed is lacking and so easy for trauma to happen and propagate.

The covid pandemic we hear about it. The trauma pandemic, which is equally transmissible from generation to generation and between romantic partners, very difficult to heal and causes unimaginable silent pain to millions of people... Nah. We blame people for being wounded. We call them lazy, and angry. We give them condescending names like "Karens" to make it seem like they're different and their own species and not that their extreme sense of entitlement actually comes from feeling worthless inside. Or accuse people of just being unempathetic angry and selfish as if all their life hadn't been nothing but an experience that would make anyone become that way. No shoulder to cry on. No motherly voice to comfort them. They can't be anything but unempathetic, angry and lonely. People are not mentally ill. People are mentally injured.

And I say pandemic because it is everywhere. In the politicians who seem to only care about themselves. In the influencers who seem so fixated in having people provide them validation in being seen highly by others and in feeling important. In the people who commit crimes. And I mean financial and ethical crimes too. How can they do that? Maybe crimes happened in their childhood and nobody cared. In the bosses at our jobs who seem to only care about maximising profit as a proof that they're being the best to compensate for how not good enough they always felt like. In the clerks who seem to enjoy the little power they have over people and exert it to the full extent to compensate for the powerlessness they felt all their lives since they were a kid.

We have been so conditioned in our society to accept trauma as a common and normal occurrence that we hardly pause to acknowledge it. It's no wonder many people suffer in silence.

And nobody seems to know about this and only talk about social interaction, making friends, focusing on the positive, being more out there and looking at traumatized people like they're some weirdos that came through a membrane from another universe.

Are we being so different from the people that in the 17th century burned "heretics" or in ancient Rome sheered for the blood spilled in arenas as criminals were slayed to death and who we now regard as barbarics?

Sorry about the long rant, but I needed to get this out of my chest."

By /u/astronaut_in_the_sun

If you are not immune to stress and fatigue changing how you respond to people and external stimuli then you will be an abusive parent, and you are an abusive partner.

Also, it can be harmful to shelter your kids from all stress and normal human behavior and reactions. It's all very non-precise.

They come into the office, and truly belive their childhood was normal.

I busted a mental gasket in graduate school, and thought Therapy would fix me.

I look back, and talking about my childhood did absolutely nothing. I was young, and very verbal too.

Just don't steal money from work to pay for the sessions. Yes--I was so young, and naieve; I really thought those pricy 50 minute sessions would cure me. I never got caught. It was a liquor store owned by the wealthiest guy in my county, so feeling bad over larceny was not a problem.

I still don't belive my childhood was the cause of my problems. My parants tried. I did feel like the only adult in the family though, but being first born I just thought that came with the birth order?

I also haven’t found any correlation between expensive mental healthcare and effectiveness. This is sort of different to like surgery where the standards of success are more clear-cut and the ballers get paid a lot if they are motivated by money.

Getting help can be as simple as finding a group in your area, it’s not always a huge barrier to entry to see improvement.