trauma's results

while reading:
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/390/like_wandering_ghosts
about "post-traumatic stress disorder," i'm thinking:
we've got a lot of people with pain, which we try to medicate with positive thought or denial... positive thought is nice, but perhaps not healing.

new theory: i broke down in major depression when i dealt with so much exposure to domestic violence in my first job out of college. the psychologist in the above story said he got secondary post-traumatic stress disorder from exposure to the soldiers' traumas, and i was also diagnosed with this after so much exposure to connecting to the hearts and souls of battered women. this PTSD/depression also awakened the trauma in me of losing my mom and not knowing what the hell to do with my life in the wake of my biological role model's suicide. i was somewhat suicidal and felt like i needed to feel that way to understand what the hell happened to my mom.

my mom's first husband, like my mom, was raised by a world war II vet with lots of problems. he became an alcoholic instead of dealing with the traumas within him.

i think that when people have trauma, they try to live on the surface while having great depths of pain. they want to live on the happy surface. but when something asks them to be honest, they retreat. they don't want the pain to come out. by keeping it in, it stays in, and they stay isolated.

many people are afraid to be vulnerable with anyone, so it stays in. they try to love their children as best they can. that's about all they can do except perhaps keep a job and perhaps keep a relationship for awhile before they need to retreat again. they can't find happiness with other people because they can barely find it alone.

said from experience.

Some pain breeds recluses. Some breeds attempts to heal and thus writers. Because sadly, people only want to hear happy stuff (the stuff of popularity). Not the sad stuff. That's reserved for talking in little rooms with strangers in medical facilities. People you can't have a relationship with. And we wonder why people in pain struggle to find connection. We have AA rooms and Al-Anon rooms full of people struggling to cope through pain. Apparently everybody else wants to go to church and hear about heaven and hell being somewhere else so they don't have to feel the pain of living ghosts and, perhaps, "catch" it themselves. we'd rather watch reality tv?