Do you have a question about Trauma for our next topic tuesday?

Sounds like it'll be a really interesting discussion! I'll tag a few members who may be interested in this @Powderfinger @Fizz @26aqua Absolutely no pressure on those I've tagged to add anything- just wanted you to know this event is happening & ensure you have the opportunity to shout out about anything you'd like to see covered- also feel free to spread the word to anyone else you think might be interested 😊

All my family as in myself and my 3 children suffer from various forms of ptsd. I would love to hear from someone regarding violence in the home, verbal and physical through the generations. I was only twice sexually assaulted.

For myself it was when I was a child to teenager with an alcoholic and aggressive father and then starting up again when my son2 became ill with schizophrenia. The violence lasted 6 years.

Thanks pea

@TideisTurning thanks for tagging me.

Question for tonight.

How do you deal with the trauma of losing your soul mate. Not due to decease (end if relationship) it's not the same as any other break up and can be very traumatic depending on the circumstances. Therapy in motion. It's just not enough.

I'm very interested in this but not sure my question specifically but I guess something about dissociation, trauma, and memory. I apparently have DID which is all just super confusing. I know my memory is lacking but I struggle to understand how I wouldn't remember something so significant. I know I have all the hallmarks of abuse in my 'symptoms' but I can't remember trauma. I do have one thing I think could be connected but I don't know if it's a memory or just a thought. How do you know the difference. If memories can come back how does that happen? How do you know when they're real? Can you get better if you don't know why you're not well in the first place.

I think that similarly to mental illness, ‘trauma’ is starting to lose its meaning, and that this drives genuinely traumatised people further and further underground and they are disengaging more and more.

It skews public perceptions especially as it relates to functional impairment and it increases the stigma of people that are left permanently scarred and functionally disabled. You only have to have a social media account for a very short amount of time to see how trauma has been redefined as any hurt, pain or grief that comes to pretty much every life if you are lucky enough to live that long.

The practical impacts of this are that we are made to feel like criminals whenever engaging with public services and a lot of people fall through the cracks because the government thinks we are a bunch of frauds. According to Facebook and Twitter trauma and mental illness is society wide so how do governments tell the real deal from the self-described.....they put everyone through the ringer until they break them and guess who breaks first. The real deals, and some end up on the street.

I had the horrifying realisation last year that one of my friends has lied about domestic violence involving her husband to secure housing. If she was smart she would have lied to someone who hadn’t been raised in a soup of it. You’d think that I would say something to her, but it just makes me feel so empty, powerless and mute.

I think one of the biggest challenges for organisations like Blue Knot is engaging with people that have had defeat burnt into their cells, because we give up, especially if we meet people that are gaming the system and getting away with it. When you have been physically over-powered, repeatedly, over and over again and every adult in your life has been complicit it becomes a biological reflex to say nothing, walk away or disappear into the background because you have learnt that you will always lose.

I think that as a general comment, more has to be done to educate the public about the role of women in child abuse and female abuser’s in general, as paedophiles and paedophile’s accomplices, or hiding paedophile rings in plain sight. They fly under the radar and are not often suspected.

I think that the mental health act fails the community in defining someone potentially dangerous as only being possible if they are experiencing psychosis. I think that with some diagnoses, such as Narcissistic Personality Disorder, psychiatrists should stop teaming up with psychologist’s and start collaborating with neurologists. If you have ever lived with someone with this condition who is simultaneously an abusive person you would know that it is structural and intractable from the ‘snap’. They can snap in and out of states faster than the speed of light and it has nothing to do with feelings or emotions that take time to dissipate, they just flick a couple of brain switches similar to blinking. Hence the ease with which they calm down once they have regained control over you.

Until structural changes come about it is hard to be postive.

I have a couple of questions:

1. When the source of your trauma was a supposed "helper" (e.g. a therapist), how do you proceed with getting the help you still need, while still protecting yourself against the sort of harms that were inflicted upon you the last time you reached out for help?

I can't begin to count the number of people I've encountered who (like myself) swear that they will never turn back to therapy due to the harms that were inflicted upon them there. Yet it is still abundantly clear that they still have serious problems and are still in desparate need of genuine help. We have nowhere proper to go, so we tend to linger in places like this, lost and hopeless.

So what's the solution?

2. As society seems to be transitioning from the so-called "bio-medical" view of mental health to the newer "trauma-based" view of it, what steps can we take to insure that fixations upon trauma won't blind helpers to a person's currant woes? How can we insure that peoples' "here-and-now" problems won't be overlooked, because helpers (e.g. therapists, carers, ect.) become fixated on blaming their distress on "way back when" problems (i.e. trauma)?

I ask because I've read some stuff by some people pushing the revolution to "trauma-based" mental health care, and it's worried me. Some of them insist - without compromise - that anyone's anguish, depression, suicidalness, ect. can be blamed on trauma. If you can't find any trauma that explains their grief, then you haven't dug into their history deeply enough. Trauma is the only possible explaination. Frankly, their tunnel-vision on the subject makes me feel as if they are no less dangerous then the people who want to blame all anguish upon chemical imbalances in the brain.

As someone who is depressed/suicidal because of "here-and-now" life problems, not due to any significant trauma, I'd like to know what we can do to insure that our future mental health system remains open-minded to other factors in a patient's life aside from trauma?

What a great and much needed topic, thank you @Daisydreamer .

You should do these on YouTube, as a live stream!

I really appreciate it x. The root cause of my problems is childhood trauma, so this is a topic close to my heart, despite the fact that I find it a bit overwhelming to go super deep into researching it.

My question is, to what extent do you think the similarities and differences between Big Ts and Little Ts are overstated.

I sometimes find myself downplaying my childhood trauma (bullying, between the ages of five and fourteen). It wasn't really that bad in isolation. My teachers may disagree with me on that LOL. However, I remind myself that when you cop it every single day for nine years, especially when you're only a child, it has a CATASTROPHIC effect.

Does it really matter for your treatment, though, whether it was a Big T or a Little T event, or is that overthinking things?