[cheatsheet]

I don't know if people who have not experienced it (or learned how to recognize the pattern of subconscious association) will ever understand it.

It sucks being sucked into your own black hole and I do not believe trauma victims walk into their own black holes willingly. It's a state of mind and it can be learned to be dealt with, but it requires strength.

There are lots of people who live assuming they are in control of every thought and reaction they have. Sometimes this is a rationalization to prove to themselves that they will always have control: it is meant as an affirmation because they fear losing control.

But it denies the experiences, intuitions, and most importantly - the emotional, hormonal, and physically chemical responses of others. We are human. But we are animals too, and as animals we are subject to some 'laws' of our own physicality. People are supposed to learn coping strategies to deal with stress and negative emotions. But trauma victims rarely learn these strategies, and instead learn to pick up on tiny red flags and measure people intuitively on a scale of abuse potential (which is typically heavily biased by correlative relationships).

Do you want to live in a world where everyone is perpetually judged as enemy/non-enemy, but you are constantly told by culture that your intuitions are ridiculous and irrational? Because as a trauma victim, the conditioned response based on experience tells you different even if you are a very smart trauma victim (in which you know that it's based on an outlier from which you can not judge the entire populace). Still, it can be hard to override the physical response to this mechanism - such as hypertension and other indicators of adrenaline release.

[ticviking]

Speaking as a survivor myself.

That is on me.

I can't control my first reaction, the feelings of panic, being trapped and so on. I can however choose what I do once I feel those things.

If I try to push responsibility for my safety onto others, or hold others accountable for MY psychological reactions is to insist that they participate in my treatment. It seems to be that if I need to draft my entire community in my treatment I may be going about it in the wrong way.