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> What else can you even say?
Try: nothing.
You haven’t asked why so many people get stuck. Why is it so hard to move on? Why do some people manage and others don’t?
You have to genuinely want to know these things, not just ask to check a box or make people convince you with some kind of evidence.
"Letting it go" lands the same as "excise it from your life," which isn't possible. Your body and your mind were shaped by it whether you wanted them to be or not. You have to find a way to integrate it or you'll just keep fighting a losing battle for the rest of your life.
The perpetrator (or the situation, in cases of unforeseeable accidents) makes you a victim. You do not.
Many, many wounds are debilitating for life. Body parts don't grow back, and the fact that the scar doesn't hurt as much as the gaping wound when your arm came off doesn't give you the ability to use the arm. You have to learn how to function in a world designed around two-armed people even though you can't have yours back.
Neural pathways that didn't form correctly because your childhood lacked safety similarly aren't replaceable. There is no amount of thinking about it differently that undoes what happened.
You can never be a person these things didn't happen to. You can become someone who understands that they did happen in the past, that they changed you, but that they are not happening now.
You will always have to approach reality as someone who went through what you went through, but that isn't the same as living your whole life as though it's still happening in the present.
I apologize if my replies sounded unnecessarily oblivious or insensitive; it is true that each trauma and pain is unique and we can't possibly know what other people are going through.
No, I'm even very literally talking about things like an industrial accident that yanks your arm off, or a problem that arises in surgery that leaves someone you love without any of their previous mental faculties (see original post). I'm talking about major tragedies, major losses, major grief.
If you're talking about the death of your childhood hamster or something, fine, maybe we're talking past each other, but I'm talking about the kinds of losses where you are not the same afterward as you were before, and you have to do the hard work of learning how to be your new self in the world.
Wow. Now I know why there is so much resentment towards beneficial growth outwards from trauma.... dang is insane.
Serious question. I'm genuinely wondering if there's a number.
Now I know why you're enabling the other person at least.
The truth. That there is and never will be any solution.
I'm sure what you wrote here is coming from your own learning and experience, and those are good things. If you want to talk about your own experience with difficult things, that's welcome.
However, when someone else does do, please don't reply with judgmental abstractions and supercilious advice—it's definitely not in the intended spirit of this site (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). No doubt you didn't intend to come across that way, but effects matter more than intent.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39037689.
That's bizarre to say the least.
It's not "judgmental abstractions and supercilious advice". Jesus.
Man, the replies here make me sick to my stomach and yours is especially bad dang. What an absolutely pathetic response from a moderator.
Edit: Just read your bio and the quote from Milner. I now think you just exude hypocritical thinking on the daily now, or maybe that quote was added a long, long time ago. Gave me a laugh.
I was hoping to come back and give a more detailed explanation but there just hasn't been time.
If someone is to do such poor actions, I weigh their comment as low automatically.
It would be nice to find a way out of this tangle, but I'm not sure I know how to do that. However, I'd like to try.
The reason I posted my original reply to you (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39045053) is that when someone is suffering and a person tells them what they "should" do, it tends to come across as unhelpful. For example, if someone is suffering from insomnia and I tell them they should just get a good night's sleep, that can easily come across as glib. Or if someone is suffering from anxiety and I tell them they should just breathe more deeply, or do yoga, or whatever it may be—even though those things may well be helpful in some cases, responding this way comes across as taking a superior position toward the other person. It is as if I am saying: I've been through all this and I know what the solution is and now that I tell it to you, you have no further reason to suffer.
This is unhelpful for two reasons: one is that when people are suffering, what they need most from others is not advice, but connection. There needs first to be a felt sense of human contact, like the other person cares about being with them in their pain. If you jump straight to offering advice, that skips the essential step and feels disconnecting rather than connecting.
The other reason is that when it comes to deep human challenges like trauma, each person's experience is unique and what works for one doesn't always apply to another. If I find something that works for me, it doesn't necessarily generalize to everyone else. Maybe in some cases there's overlap and I can share helpful information about my own path; but maybe not. It's necessary to tread delicately, because advice can be useful if it actually fits the other person's experience, but it can also be hurtful if it doesn't.
I have no idea if sharing this will make things better or worse—probably worse, to judge by my track record so far!—but my hope is that it's clarifying.
Not interested in whatever poor explanation you want to hand wave away actual support from real trauma victims towards other trauma victims.
I didn't read the rest sorry.
Makes it sound like you have a choice. If you could let go it wouldn't be trauma ?
A psych I saw told me to "just stop thinking about it" when I told her about my problems. Bitch I'm here for sole reason that I can't stop thinking about it.
"Just do x" is non advice.
My last psych laughed at me while I was trying to open up about the trauma and tell him about it in more detail. Some people don’t deserve to be therapists and are probably doing more harm than good to the society. He came as most recommended btw in my city.
Luckily I was able to find a good doctor later.
Did he still get payed?
Because I would laugh at his invoice.
Baffled, I was like, "In heaven? My...very mainstream religious belief in an afterlife with God? It's not like I told you I thought they were inhabiting dolls on my mantle or something."
He insisted, so I just stood up and told him I wouldn't be wasting any more of his time, because this was neither the time nor the place to have that argument with me and I left.
At least he had the good sense not to try to charge me for those three minutes.
At least she didn't do anything to compound on your problems.
Consider yourself lucky.
I never said stop thinking about it. I said think about it, pass it through your pipeline of thought and then acknowledge it and leave it.
Major trauma changes you. There is no "leaving it." There is only relearning how to be the way you are now in the world so you can move forward.
Major trauma changes you. That's why you need to leave it rather than absorbing it in your day to day life.
>There is only relearning how to be the way you are now in the world so you can move forward.
That's called leaving it LOL what.
I have both said and done. It's better for you than integrating the trauma into your personality and by extension your life.
I can tell you mean well, but there’s an asterisk to your advice your commenters seem to point out. Your advice might require years and finding a good therapist or purpose for some. Doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.
Or it may require taking the steps yourself right now because someone has helped you realise it.
Stop trying to protect people from helping themselves. If people don't want to help themselves they are free to.
Sounds like all of you are enabling the self-destruction of the above comment. That's something even I'm offended by.
I intend to leave this conversation here, though I will read and consider any response you might have even if I’m not responding to it.
This conversation can be left wherever you want. Many people here are clearly in no hurry to help the above comment author.
I feel sorry for all of you and for the people who have been hurt who are left in their state of hurt because no one wants to actually help them help themselves.
You were not wrong here and to be honest 9 hours later I feel ashamed to have made the original comment and no disrespect to the author obviously.
I’ve been having a few bad days lately and what the author and his family are going through took me back to a time when I thought could relate not as the author but someone as a family member who was affected.
I should have been more empathetic rather than making the comment about me (although I was trying not to).
I tend to not do this as therapy is working for me mostly, but times like these it brings back emotions that you cannot control.
No one cares if you comment about yourself. People support those that talk about themselves but apparently they support people harming themselves like you continue to do.
It makes me ashamed to think that you're being guided by these absolutely abhorrent people in this thread. You can help yourself. Don't let them stop you.
It's highly analogous to a deeply damaging physical wound. It is part of you now, whether you want it to be or not. You can't undo it, and denying the reality of it won't actually help you live a healthy life without it.
You can't undo it, but you can live with it and not let it fester.
No one is talking about denial. My comments mention acceptance...
The core muscles have to rebalance to compensate for the missing weight. The neural pathways have to change in realization that, for example, instinctively trying to move that arm to catch a fall won't work anymore. The whole body has to relearn how to function now that it's different, now that the traumatic thing has happened.
This is integrating. Trying to function the way it did before actually prolongs the suffering. Only healing and integration is the path forward.
It ain't rocket science buddy.
Sounds like you need to try read my parent comments again.
Anyway, I hope this is hope this is a productive learning experience.
It has been a learning experience. I learnt that there are people who really hate others improving their life to the point where they claim that help is a form of personal attack. I am just so glad that I didn't get enabled by people like those in this comment thread when I deal with my own trauma.
> Being molested shouldn't stop you getting a good education, finding someone you like or earning well for yourself
You are being downvoted (I guess) because people mistake this kind of attitude for apathy, but I think it is a valid statement, and there is research to show this attitude can be very helpful
Also known as the republican approach to COVID.
So you're saying if we cured cancer people would still willingly die of cancer because it's "too hard" to take the right approach to curing it?
Some problems don't have a solution.
Some aren't even amenable to compromise.
Sometimes compromise is even worse.
It sucks but it's the truth.
The truth is that there is medicine you can take, you just don't want to because it tastes bad.
It's okay if you want to trick yourself into hurting yourself, but don't act like it's not an option.
This problem may not always have a solution, but there are ways to minimise the problem and they're achievable by every single person.
not sure if it was effective at even stopping infection.