I’m writing a story right now and my main character suffered trauma when she was young. I know a bit about trauma, and I’ve done some research but I don’t really understand the effects it has on a person. Like, does it haunt them every day, or every moment? What does it feel like?
I'm not an expert by any means on this, but from my experiences, trauma tends to affect everyone differently based on the circumstances and how they handle stress. This isn't intended to spike pity, but to use me as an example: Growing up, I was consistently bullied for being overweight and hyperactive. (I was diagnosed with ADHD at 7 and took Ritalin until I was 18.) This impacted me in several ways. For starters, I have an inability to trust people. Despite having fair to solid rapport building skills, I always have this voice in the back of my mind that is skeptical of other peoples' intentions. Another way is how I handle my stress. I bottle my feelings up and will experience--typically monthly--a two to three day period of catharsis where I will also have episodes of paranoia, more inclined to feel that everyone is against me in one way or another. This trauma has also impacted how I perceive. I aim to rationalize everything in a very clinical, sterile fashion with an emphasis on remaining as objective as possible without considering interpersonal nuance. I also favor surface-level relationships in opposition to ones on a deeper plane. Understand that I can discuss this so nonchalantly since I have been able to--over the course of several years--become aware of my tendencies and healthily handle them in a manner that isn't negative to myself nor anybody else. Hope that provides a perspective.
I agree with the above! But id also like to add that sometimes, you may forget a traumatic event or make light of it and then suddenly it effects you years later. Like Infearofacircle, i was bullied. I was bullied because of my stutter. I was always afraid to talk about it and never really tried to bring attention to it. I shied away from situations where it would be brought up. And when i was an adult, i joined a stuttering support group. The very first meeting, we went around and introduced ourselves and I thought "this is going to be so easy! Everyone here stutters. This is great!" It got to me and i opened my mouth and nothing came out. It wasnt because i stuttered or had a block (absence of sound) in that moment, it was like i suddenly forgot what i i w going to say and i thought about all the times i was humiliated infront of my peers and i literally started crying. Right there, in a room full of people. I cried so hard i had to leave the room. I didnt know that would happen. I hadnt felt like crying. I didnt feel sad or afraid... It just happened. It doesnt haunt me... More like, after all these years, i was CONDITIONED to expect the worst. So in interactions with other people, i tend to retreat into myself in anticipation of that i just KNEW would happen. There is a picture of me that someone took my first year of college. I was invited to a game night. Card games and board games. Fun. The picture was a group shot of us all playing Cards Against Humanities, and if you havent played it, it has A LOT of reading out loud. In the picture, everyone is laughing and having fun, but i was in a corner, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around my legs, chin on my knees,and i looked so miserable, looking down at my cards. I didnt even know they had take a picture until i was tagged in it on Facebook..... I hate it. I immediately untagged myself. Its easier to talk about now. I even have a lapel pin that says "#iStutter" and i answer questions about it and stuff without crying, but i do have some bad days and triggers, that tend to bring back up the anxiety. They are few and far between now
I can tell by my example. (AvPD, Depression (I still hide from most people.)) Negative thoughts haunt a person constantly. Usually you try to drown them out with music or some kind of job, bother your head with something else. Everything gets worse at night when you go to bed, and there is no longer any way to distract yourself and drown out negative thoughts. This causes sleep problems. Constant lack of sleep and fatigue. Other people muffle thoughts with other methods, overeating, smoking, alcohol, drugs, self-harm and other. At some point, you become indifferent to your fate. Since you begin to believe that you deserve all the bad things that happen to you. That everyone would be better off if you didn't exist. Your mind is constantly under attack from various negative thoughts. It's hard for you to concentrate on something. Sometimes there is a real storm in your thoughts, because of which you literally fall out of reality. People with psychological disorders do not want to share this with relatives and friends. They are afraid to become a burden. No matter how hard it is for them, they keep everything to themselves. Until the moment when everything becomes too difficult for them. Then they just end their lives. Also, everything around is perceived from a negative angle, even neutral events seem negative. You only expect failure and suffering from the future. Every day is the worst day of your life, and you just wait for the moment to break. At the same time, in front of everyone, you play a kind merry fellow. You wear a mask as if everything is fine. You don't want others to worry. But because of the constant lies and pretense, you feel disgusting. You feel like a fake. It's like you don't even exist. Nobody knows what you really are ... Nobody knows who you are ... Everyone knows only the mask that you put on for them. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears, was there a sound? Just my example. For other people with different diagnoses, things may be different. Here are a few traumatized artists. Their art can tell a lot. https://www.avogado6.com/ https://www.deviantart.com/yuumei
I would not say I'm haunted regularly or that there is any specific feeling. Trauma shapes and distorts a person but that doesn't necessarily mean they are constantly thinking about the traumatic event itself (depending on where a person is at in "recovery"). I think the biggest thing with childhood trauma is it catches a person at a time when their personality is still developing. For instance, I'd describe myself as the healthiest I've ever been but I do not think I will ever be socially normal in my lifetime no matter how healthy I am or how much I self improve. In a lot of ways I'm perfectly normal, then there are other things that would have people wondering what the hell is wrong with me.
Everyone is effected by trauma differently and it depends on the trauma they faced and how long it went on for. If you gave us the specifics of what kind of trauma (abuse, bullying, car accident, kidnap) it would help us suggest a logical reaction. We do all experience things differently but for novels, I've found keeping to logical reactions is best because it's easy for the readers to understand without you having to explain their actions. Trauma's can catch up with you even when you think you're over it. It's not often something people consciously obsessive over.
In terms of what it "feels" like to be inside someone's head and walk in there shoes, I could be wrong here, but here it goes: Imagine for a moment that you believe the world is round. Everyone does. It seems like a very reasonable, common sense thing to do. Conventional wisdom would have us believe that anyone who believes the world is flat is kind of "nuts". You don't give it a second thought. It doesn't bother you when you drive to work or do your grocery shopping. And why would it? you don't need to think about it as it's never going to come up in our everyday lives, is it? Our sense of what is real is actually quite limited and remarkably fragile when we go beyond those limits. It's limited by our knowledge and our experiences, and very often what we do "know" is an extremely distorted and reductive version of real events because we've learned it from second-hand sources that have gone through the process of "Chinese whispers". You may have seen a picture of Antarctica, maybe some penguins sheltering in a blizzard- but reality isn't identical with the picture. It is a far cry from the experience of trying to stay warm in hostile, sub zero temperatures where you are in complete darkness for 6 months. So I would point out two specific dimensions of trauma that would come up relating to your character: The first is that this is a "reality-defying" experience. You have gone way beyond anything you've ever known or thought was possible. There is too much happening too fast. Too many ideas, emotions and experiences happening at once: So you may have believed the world is round all you life, but by some strange combination of events you find yourself at the horizon. You are at the edge of the known world. You stand on the edge of a cliff and look down to see an abyss, an eternity stretching in to darkness. You see waterfalls crashing down, roaring as it plunging over the edge, pulling everything with it. You cannot deny the evidence of your own senses. You have to reach the conclusion that the impossible is true. The world is Flat! The second element is that trauma is a failure of socialisation. Trauma is going to separate you from other people because your experiences have created the need to question things you may never have had to before. All our relationships failed to prepare us for this moment and many of them may have actively worked against lessening the stress by insisting that this kind of thing is impossible. A gulf may start to open up with people who you were once close with because the experience isn't shared. To use the round earth- flat earth metaphor again: How can the world be flat? Am I going crazy? Is there something wrong with me? Or was everyone lying to me all along? Did they treat me like a fool? Or maybe they don't know? Or they don't care that it's true? What about all those so-called "experts" who keep telling me I'm imagining things? How can they know what's real? They didn't go through what I went through? Why should I listen to them when they don't listen to me? why can't other people believe me or treat me with respect or like another human being? Now, a great deal of things depend on the nature of the trauma and how someone deals with stressful events and experiences in their lives. But I think you will find these two things will be constant whoever you talk to. On the one hand, you had an experience you weren't supposed to. There was no rule book, no manual saying "this is how you deal with this" because it was such a freak and unexpected occurrence no-one could have seen it coming. Certain forms of counselling can help and being able to talk about it and express you emotions can help the process along. But life will never be the same again, because the very sense of what is real and what is certain has been violated. your going to feel confused for quite a while. On the other hand, you have been involved in something that is almost a social taboo. You've gone beyond what other people think is "normal", "acceptable" and "possible". They lack the shared basis of experience to understand what you've been through or empathise with you. Some people will try and at times it will feel reassuring. Other times, it will feel like they are pushing an agenda, trying to force you to be "normal", almost like they are unwittingly trying to get you to deny the experience to make them feel better about the whole thing. This can elicit a full range of emotions from getting angry at people to feeling isolated and alone, despair, guilt or shame that something bad happened to you and it maybe your fault somehow. The degree to which you "recover" depends on how you respond to those experiences and what you do with them. The concept of recovery is itself slippery here, because it is so laden with an assumption of "getting back to normal". But what is normal when the world just ended and collapsed all around you? So you have to find your balance between accepting that you went through something "big" and "impossible" and that the world is going to carry on. When the impossible happens, you may feel like the world has changed, everything has gone, but then like a dripping tap the mundane certainties return. The sun rises and sets. the birds are still singing the morning chorus and flying in the sky. you listen to the rain drops falling on the window. Those little details you would never have noticed, start to take on a new meaning. a sense of familiarity, predictability and therefore security. You may feel resentful at first, like the universe is indifferent to you, it's being cruel by pretending things didn't happen to you. Yet, You start to realise how much bigger everything is than you and can start to build on those small certainties, brick by brick. So, if you have some personal experience of trauma and find out your "world is flat", yes, it is going to unsettle and disturb you. It may terrify you coming face to face with the arbitrariness of the forces of nature at work in the world and the fact the universe really doesn't care what you believe is true. You may feel helpless, powerless and alone for a while. But it can, slowly, pass. If your character had issues say, twenty or thirty years ago, the trauma may not be noticeable anymore because someone could have become so accustomed to it and overcome it. Mental health isn't actually that different from physical health in some ways. You may have had an accident and lost the ability to walk. But slowly, you learned to put one foot in front of the other, getting better at it each time, until it is easy, almost effortless. Or maybe, you lost the ability to walk completely and you never got it back. In mental health terms, you could recover- putting one foot in front of the other, taking it one day at a time- or your brain may have been so physically damaged that you lose the capacity to fully function. There is probably quite a wide spectrum of possibilities depending on who the person is, what the trauma was, how someone respond to it, and was it actually possible to recover in a meaningful way so they could function in the first place. You may come to accept the "impossible" and that the "world is flat", but it loses it's sense of threat. it goes from being new and threatening, to old and familiar. It becomes part of the furniture, gets buried under the rubble and lost in the attic. Time gives you a chance to heal and move on. The memory begins to fade; you don't think about it so much and it doesn't bother you. If it's not as threatening to you, you don't need to think about it so much, so you get on with life. You may be different from others because of the trauma, but different doesn't necessarily mean wrong, or bad, or evil, or defective as it may have felt when you first faced to shock. It just means you've seen something other people haven't.
It took me several years to realize I even had a problem. I honestly got through a lot of years of trauma without being terribly affected by it. Then being in the house of a negative person had such an affect on me that it strongly affected how I saw my past. Sure, what had happened was bad, but the concentrated negativity of this person and just allowing themself to be swallowed up by hate messed me up. Not only because of that, but as I got older and more aware of things (very naive as a kid and also a late bloomer -- bad combo) I got more upset at the things that got in the way of having a healthier life. Now my body is wracked by tension because of distrust that I'm only really now coming to terms with. Found out not too long ago that something called panic disorder exists, and it makes you feel tingly in the hands and arms, and also on one's back. Feels almost like having wings growing out of your back. So what that boils down to is that my body was dealing with all the stress that my brain was naively discounting for years. I feel okay most of the time, but I'll suddenly have feelings of anger at the unfairness of it all that I purposely have to fight against. Also, there's the struggle with heartburn and physical aches from the stress. A huge paranoid fear of anyone being too close to me or touching me. Like for my book selling job I have to take people to the things they're looking for, and have a mini panic attack until I can shift myself so that they aren't standing directly behind me. This goes away when I'm alone, but now I have to focus on self-soothing techniques, fighting down negative thoughts, and appreciating things I enjoy.
A video that came to mind talking about the creator's experiences with trauma as well some art and philosophy stuff related to abusive relationships and interpersonal ethics: You should listen to a variety of different people's experience and try to write an experience that matches your character's own personal situation including not just what happened to them but what their emotional/psychological reaction to it was and how that has affected their emotional and psychological reactions since. Even though it's dysfunctional, it's not purely irrational, but rather there are reasons why it affects people the way it does which can lead often lead to people rationalising it to themselves.
