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Comment by Narhem | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has had early trauma it never leaves.

The worst part is knowing no one will ever understand what it feels like to have no right answers.

It’s a larger club than you might imagine, and even to the deepest depths of nigh-unimaginable mistreatment there are people who have worked through it.

The sad part is the best way to deal with it is pretend it never happened.

Feel so defeatist but that'd the reality of being a man.

That is a useful coping strategy for a child but if you can get away from the abusive family or whatever group, as an adult you absolutely can be free to deal with the effects until you know yourself as a free, powerful, and normal human being, with a life you are contented by.

The concept of normal is a childish notion, having to do with a lack of appreciation for the complexity of others

The experience of abuse, especially directed at oneself rather than towards everyone, can lead to an idea that one is uniquely, shamefully bad, cut off from others, abnormal in an essential way, as opposed to the idea of everyone is in the same boat, we share a common humanity etc. Normal in the latter sense is what I meant - in opposition to being on the other side of a glass from which one can observe humanity without feeling connected to it. Probably a sort of dissociative symptom.

I have a hard time not ruminating, but for some people it seems unavoidable

It’s both - you have to go on living an aspect of your life as if it didn’t for a while in order to survive, and then when you have reached a safer point it becomes time to start unpacking it. Burdens are sometimes carried without us knowing it.

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