Traumatic Experiences

[Benemal]

Many members have alluded to different kinds of traumatic experiences. Mostly just in passing, like myself. Sometimes it seems those are the experiences, that brought us here and it can also sometimes seem like group therapy. But where else would we talk about it? I mentioned something in a different topic, that I can't talk about. Simplified version: it was hell. I stole from god and was sent to hell. Was burned. All sounds really pretentious and religious. Met an angel too. A man in white, whose head was all light. He told me a decision had been made. He rescued me from hell. I think that was Lucifer. I know how crazy that sounds, but fuck it, it's too late. Besides, I am crazy, this is not the place to hide it.

Let's go people. Let's have group therapy. What bad shit happened to you?

[Cancer]

This is a lovely idea for a topic, though the intensity of the subject can easily get out of hand.

The nature of traumatic experiences is such that it's extremely difficult to disclose them, especially on an internet forum (given that one is even aware of them in the first place). I've read somewhere that trauma victims often experience two stages in the trauma, the second of which is sometimes even worse: first, there's the actual traumatic event, and second, there's attempting to tell someone close about it and being rejected / disbelieved / minimized. Everyone has a potential of acting in this dismissive way toward traumatized people, of answering "Why didn't you tell me earlier?" when confronted about some shitty behavior, or "It's unfair to paint him as a terrible person, and he has problems of his own, you know..." when it's about something bad ones friend has done. Also quite common is starting to cite bad things the accuser has done: "Yeah I might have been shitty to you that time, but then YOU were shitty to ME that other time, so we're even and it doesn't matter". I for example thought this exact thing about a somewhat traumatic relationship I was in: "Yeah [x person] was emotionally and physically violent toward me in such and such ways, but then again I also behaved horribly... so it doesn't matter". As if being properly a victim would require one to be an angel, and as if both parties being equally horrible to each other would make for a good relationship, with no traumatic fallout at all XD. I think just focusing on a person's experience of being hurt for a time, not trying to make them see things "objectively", is a good approach.

I can't really relate to the kinds of experiences about which Benemal wrote, as I've never had visions or anything like that. But I hope there are other people on the forum who can contribute to that side of the conversation as well.

[Insanus]

I can't remember or think of some critical example as the traumatic root cause of my psychic wounds. I think I have just had too long periods with extreme stress because of this and that disturbing/harmful thing, that have spiraled downwards with more goods to flow. There has simply been too much shit at the same time for me to handle and prioritizing one thing often times meant letting the others fall apart, or at least it felt like it. I don't feel like any one thing has been the ultimate wound for me, a straw just breaks the camel's back at some point. Like there's only traumatic collections of events where every single thing could probably have been dealt with had they occured one at a time. What is the difference between hurtful and traumatic? Wiki told me the experienced helplessness is characteristic of "traumatic".

[Mars]

My traumas are mostly derived from parental emotional abuse combined with very sensitive psychological structure. This has lead to depression, anxiety and intense fear, which in turn obviously have lead to more problems. To my knowledge it is a psychological consensus that the effects of emotional abuse are comparable to those of sexual abuse, and they are probably more common. There have also been some tragedies such as a suicide of a close one.

[Insanus]

I believe

(and I'm not sure at all how correct or accurate the following is because my Lacan studies have been mostly random lectures from youtube and looking up words from nosubject.org, but I'll say it anyway.)

that Lacan had three psychological types distinguished (at least) by their relationship to trauma. To a neurotic subject, trauma is something like a distant danger, it's best to not talk about it and to keep a safe distance to the related topics. A perverse subject has no problem talking about "it" and revealing all kinds of details, but s/he keeps an emotional distance to the feelings involved while doing so. A psychotic (and here this does not mean someone with a mental illness) subject creates something else in place of the traumatic event and accepts that instead. In this view, trauma is sort of an impossible experience, and there's no way to get to the point completely so to speak.

[Kavi]

I believe

(and I'm not sure at all how correct or accurate the following is because my Lacan studies have been mostly random lectures from youtube and looking up words from nosubject.org, but I'll say it anyway.)

that Lacan had three psychological types distinguished (at least) by their relationship to trauma. To a neurotic subject, trauma is something like a distant danger, it's best to not talk about it and to keep a safe distance to the related topics. A perverse subject has no problem talking about "it" and revealing all kinds of details, but s/he keeps an emotional distance to the feelings involved while doing so. A psychotic (and here this does not mean someone with a mental illness) subject creates something else in place of the traumatic event and accepts that instead. In this view, trauma is sort of an impossible experience, and there's no way to get to the point completely so to speak.

How this psychotic is explained? I know so little on Lacan and what I know is probably incorrect. Is it somehow a form where the Real is glancing which increases tension (Other or something something?) within so much that one has to create a form of self against it while simultaneously splitting the subject?
If this makes no sense for fra Insanus or readers, it's because it doesn't.

I don't know if I have been traumatized but while getting older I have certainly started to recognize traits in me that never occurred to me before. In some sense I live inside a loop endlessly. Or to quote the Godfather movie - "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!".

I have had visions akin to fra Benemal, one of them happened in the middle of guitar strumming as I saw light that descended with grace and it made me cry in relief. Maybe Zizek's perspective by using Lacan here, would give another overview entirely on the topic. Or like... Applying fra Insanus' Lacanian output - filling the abyssal mood with its opposite?
These things usually tend to happen in intense moments of crisis, at least that's what I have heard and read.

[Insanus]

I believe

(and I'm not sure at all how correct or accurate the following is because my Lacan studies have been mostly random lectures from youtube and looking up words from nosubject.org, but I'll say it anyway.)

that Lacan had three psychological types distinguished (at least) by their relationship to trauma. To a neurotic subject, trauma is something like a distant danger, it's best to not talk about it and to keep a safe distance to the related topics. A perverse subject has no problem talking about "it" and revealing all kinds of details, but s/he keeps an emotional distance to the feelings involved while doing so. A psychotic (and here this does not mean someone with a mental illness) subject creates something else in place of the traumatic event and accepts that instead. In this view, trauma is sort of an impossible experience, and there's no way to get to the point completely so to speak.

How this psychotic is explained? I know so little on Lacan and what I know is probably incorrect. Is it somehow a form where the Real is glancing which increases tension (Other or something something?) within so much that one has to create a form of self against it while simultaneously splitting the subject?
If this makes no sense for fra Insanus or readers, it's because it doesn't.

I don't know if I have been traumatized but while getting older I have certainly started to recognize traits in me that never occurred to me before. In some sense I live inside a loop endlessly. Or to quote the Godfather movie - "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!".

I have had visions akin to fra Benemal, one of them happened in the middle of guitar strumming as I saw light that descended with grace and it made me cry in relief. Maybe Zizek's perspective by using Lacan here, would give another overview entirely on the topic. Or like... Applying fra Insanus' Lacanian output - filling the abyssal mood with its opposite?
These things usually tend to happen in intense moments of crisis, at least that's what I have heard and read.

Someone with a psychotic structure does not need to have symptoms of an illness. Such a person just does not have the prohibitive function, symbolic father (or the - name- of - the - father? To hell with this jargon ffs..) so instead of repressing (like the neurotic) or disavowing (the perverse), s/he forecloses. The point is these three psychological structures are ways of relating to the Other and not sets of symptoms as such. But hell if I know, the lacanian system is impossible to understand as a mere hobbyist like myself and everything has the reals symbolics and imaginaries (and so on and so ons) so I just cherrypick stuff that I can understand something about intuitively like a dirty cheater.

[Benemal]

In the experience of avitchi I also went insane. Psychotic. That's the trauma. I saw people as dead fake zombies with black eyes. Everything was a little hell, reserved for me. I could look at a pen on a table and sink into the abyss inside it. My mum and sister were dead I had to communicate with these dead husks that were pretending to be them. Everyone I loved was just dead and replaced with a body snatcher. I was fully aware of everything, that was happening and constantly thinking "what is happening to me, what is happening to me". Seeing myself sinking into black insanity. It was like the film Jacob's Ladder. Couln't let anyone know what was happening. They'd lock me up. All my energy went into faking normal, for three years. Then the man in white appeared and ended everything. Not just the avitchi, also medical problems and the horrific dreams, where I was murdering people. The white man said I'd been unjustly burdened and that it had been desided to take that burden away. Then I woke up and it was just over. Just like that. Naturally I've wondered if the man in white was just an aspect of insanity. I've always come to the same conclusion, no, he wasn't imagined. How could a non-existent man end my migraines permanently? Maybe this is all really boring, but I have nowhere else to turn. The last psychiatrist told me to go away and not return, so no help available.

I watched a video on YT about Finland being the happiest country in the world. I wanted to punch the assholes in the face. Seven people in my life have killed themselves, including my best friend and my grandmother and my uncle. I walk in the streets and there's people talking to invisible people and deranged methheads and hobos and nazis and and I wonder how far am I from becoming one of the people in the streets. Some things happened, that I'm not posting in a public forum. Also I was at a party where some of my friends were doing amphetamine and I just felt like I don't know what's going on anymore. It's meth central where I live. Even hipsters artists are doing it. It's base of operations for the biggest criminal organization. It really is a shithole. Fuck this methhead hockey fan town called Lahti. It's even a shit name.

[Smaragd]

In the experience of avitchi I also went insane. Psychotic. -- Everything was a little hell, reserved for me. I could look at a pen on a table and sink into the abyss inside it.

This reminds me of somewhat psychotic episodes I had as a child, to which I have alluded to many times earlier here. They only lasted for some minutes or half an our or so. Everything I would cast my attention to became a sort of portal to a terrible black void which was sucking the reality apart. Even perfect stillness of a room became an unbearable horror. I call them psychotic because these things overwhelmed me and I could not always make a proper distinction what was real and what was not, as I began to prophetise murder (in order to prevent it) and violent astral visions flooded my visions scaring me that my family would be in danger. I was afraid these episodes would happen when I was in school, and I would loose control in public. But overtime these episodes fascinaded me and when "the feeling" started to creep in, I learned to overcome it, not to fall in to it. As for me personally, these things happened in such a small time frame, only an ~hour or half at worst, that I don't consider them as traumas that would still affect me in a negative way. I see them as trials well answered to.

[Insanus]

In the experience of avitchi I also went insane. Psychotic. That's the trauma. I saw people as dead fake zombies with black eyes. Everything was a little hell, reserved for me. I could look at a pen on a table and sink into the abyss inside it. My mum and sister were dead I had to communicate with these dead husks that were pretending to be them. Everyone I loved was just dead and replaced with a body snatcher. I was fully aware of everything, that was happening and constantly thinking "what is happening to me, what is happening to me". Seeing myself sinking into black insanity. It was like the film Jacob's Ladder. Couln't let anyone know what was happening. They'd lock me up. All my energy went into faking normal, for three years. Then the man in white appeared and ended everything.

Sounds kind of familiar, but I don't feel too comfortable discussing those experiences on public forum. Also I have trouble remembering things from that time and I can't even really relate to that person from the past very well.