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#black trauma
gwydionmisha · 5 months
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Exploring the Emotions: Black Trauma vs. Black Horror
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sonderpoison · 10 months
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🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️
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ausetkmt · 2 months
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YourTango: If You’ve Been Keeping Your Childhood Trauma A Secret, You Need To Read This
You’ve kept your childhood trauma a secret out of shame and fear. There was no one safe to tell. Now, you don’t know who you can trust. If you open up, you’re afraid of being judged or punished. It’s a lonely way to live and bad for your mental health.
Childhood trauma is devastating, no matter what form it takes. It affects your self-esteem, trust, future relationships, and sense of safety in the world. And, no matter what you do to forget, the secrets haunt you every day.
You know some of the reasons you’ve kept secrets, but is there more? Plus, you wonder, are some of the things you’re struggling with caused by your secrets?
Yes, keeping secrets can cause psychological symptoms and problems. So, let’s talk about 6 reasons why you might be keeping your childhood trauma a secret, how secrets lead to psychological problems, and what you can do about it now.
You have your reasons for keeping your trauma a secret. Everyone is different and trauma uniquely affects each child. Yet, there are some common things.
They have to do with what you felt, what you believed about people and yourself, and the only way you knew to manage your trauma. Maybe you can relate to some of these 6 reasons for keeping trauma a secret.
RELATED: 5 Ways To Heal Your Childhood Trauma (So You Don't Have To Suffer Any Longer)
1. You wondered if it was your fault
If your trauma was a form of abuse or even a loss, you might feel it’s your fault.
Children often blame themselves when they have no other way to interpret what happened. Or, when you got yelled at and felt bad. Even if you lost a parent, you might think you made it happen because you needed too much or got angry.
It’s not true. None of it was your fault. But, you’re vulnerable as a child to what you’re told. And to your fantasies and misinterpretations of your trauma and early life.
Now you have a taunting self-critical voice in your head that tells you all kinds of negative things about yourself. That voice makes you feel bad.
If you were yelled at, called names, or criticized as a child, it’s the voice of the parent who picked on you. That voice lives inside you and makes you feel to blame for everything.
This is a terrible thing to live with.  It makes you close off to people. You can’t openly be yourself because you truly feel you have things to hide. Or that no one will like who you are.
When you live with such bad feelings, it’s hard not to feel shame. If you can’t be openly who you are, you can't open up about your trauma.
All you want to do is forget what happened. You don’t see any other choice.
2. You don’t want to remember
“Forgetting” or, at least detaching from the feelings you had in (and about) your trauma, is a typical reaction. It’s called dissociation. And it’s a way of protecting yourself during the traumatic experiences — to feel as if you weren’t there.
This kind of self-protection continues if you don’t get psychological help.
You might live a fairly detached emotional life. Maybe you even have OCD to control your feelings. Of course, you don’t want to remember.
Childhood trauma is too scary and the feelings are overwhelming. Especially when there is no one there to help you or understand the feelings you have. You were alone with it.
You try your best to push aside memories if they start to come back. What else can you do? When you convince yourself not to talk about it, then you are alone now too.
3. Remembering makes you relive it
One of the reasons you don’t want to think about it and try so hard not to, is that remembering makes you relive the trauma. Sometimes it comes back in flashbacks. You feel like you are there. Little and scared and helpless. It’s all real.
So, not only does the idea of telling your secret make you feel ashamed and afraid of humiliation. But, opening up your childhood trauma in any way makes you feel that it’s happening all over again. All the feelings flood back into it. It’s just too much.
You tell yourself, you can do it. Just push it away, don’t think about it, keep yourself busy. You’re convinced it should work. There isn’t any other way to deal with it. You keep telling yourself over and over, “It’s in the past. Isn’t it? Just move on.”
RELATED: The Common Phrase People With Unresolved Childhood Trauma Say Without Even Realizing It
4. You wonder if it is better to move on
You don’t want to open up your secrets. That’s too scary especially when thinking about it by yourself is overwhelming. The only thing that makes sense is to “forget about it” and move on.
You can’t think of any other way to deal with your childhood trauma. So you have to believe that just moving on is the only thing to do.
Yet, sometimes you still have flashbacks. or memories. Even symptoms of anxiety and depression. You feel socially anxious. It’s hard to relax and completely trust. That’s one reason you keep secrets. But, it’s also a difficult way to live. You can’t get close to anyone and it’s sometimes a lonely life.
But, the very thought of letting your secret out to anyone, makes you wonder who? You’re not sure if anyone is safe enough to trust. Who wouldn’t humiliate you? And, you don’t believe that anyone could understand.
5. You think no one would understand 
Childhood trauma makes it extremely difficult to trust. So, you’ve had to go it alone in most ways in your life. You were betrayed by the people you were supposed to trust, the ones who were supposed to take care of you. They didn’t understand. Far from it. Instead, they deeply hurt and emotionally scarred you.
Sometimes you think that no one you meet has suffered the way you have. Intellectually you know that other people have suffered trauma too. But, you don’t know anyone who has. Or, at least, no one has talked about it either. So, where would you find someone to understand? It seems virtually impossible.
And, what if you tried to talk to someone who hasn’t had trauma? Could they remotely “get” what you’ve gone through? How hard it is to open up?
Not believing anyone can understand makes you more lonely. Plus, if you’ve been hurt a lot since childhood, this only reinforces your conviction that keeping your secret is the only way to go. Yet, is it?
Here are some reasons why keeping secrets might not be in your best interest:
1. “Forgetting” doesn’t work
Remember. “Forgetting” is the very common psychological defense of dissociation, detachment, or numbing. Every traumatized person reacts this way. It’s the only way you can protect yourself when you’re being hurt or abused as a child. Especially when the ones who should be helping you hurt you instead.
You want to believe you can forget. Forgetting is your best attempt to keep your trauma a secret from yourself. You think, at least you want to believe, that if you don’t open it up in your mind, it will go away. Certainly, you wish it would. But, it doesn’t work. If you stop to think about it, you know that too.
You are still suffering.
RELATED: Experts Reveal The Most Common Childhood Complaint They Hear In Therapy
2. Secrets eat away at you
Your secrets are living in your symptoms. Eating away at you. You’ve tried your best to move on, but you still have flashbacks or nightmares. Intrusive thoughts and memories enter your mind. Even if you don’t realize it consciously, it’s true.
These secrets of your childhood trauma affect your life every day.
No one keeps a secret unless they feel it’s too awful to tell. And, childhood trauma is awful. That’s the truth. Childhood trauma leaves deep scars.
But, if you live with your trauma in secret, it affects you more. Those secrets eat away at you. They eat away at your self-esteem. Secrets make you feel worse about yourself because you think there’s some shame in telling. There’s not.
But, if you believe that, you can’t get help. Your symptoms continue, even if you try to forget.
3. Untreated trauma creates symptoms
The symptoms of trauma take many forms. You’ve tried to forget and go numb.
Yet, you might still experience persistent episodes of depression. Maybe an eating disorder. OCD is a frequent result of childhood trauma. Even unrelenting physical symptoms, such as gastrointestinal problems, can be the places where your childhood trauma lives.
You can’t go on forever in a state of numbness. Eventually, like novocaine or a sedative, it wears off. Something in you comes alive.
If you don’t have a conscious memory or flashback, you have anxiety or depression. Sometimes it can be really bad. Or your OCD takes over and gets worse. You might even feel panicky and not know why.
These are all forms of the psychological problems a secret begins to take. Yet, these are symptoms. And, underlying these symptoms are deeper scars.
The scars of childhood trauma affect your self-esteem and your trust in people. They're expressed in your difficulty forming close relationships. Even having the work or creative success you want. These scars hide away in your symptoms of depression, anxiety, panic, OCD, physical problems, or eating disorders.
But, these psychological symptoms are clues. They’re signals that your childhood trauma is trying to get your attention. That you need some help. And, keeping secrets makes it impossible to get them.
Secrets make you stay away from psychotherapy too. For childhood trauma, therapy can change your life.
What needs to be understood are the very particular ways your trauma is repeating itself in how you feel about yourself, your dreams, the critical voice in your head that creates your shame, and your fears of closeness and intimacy.
What is being played out is unique to you and your history, different for each traumatized child.
Think about it. Keeping secrets might have seemed the only way to go. Especially since you’ve been convinced you’ll be judged or hurt again. Or that no one will understand. But, there are experts in treating childhood trauma.
And, these experts do know about and understand the reasons for secrets and your distrust.
Where do you start? Look for a psychotherapist who specializes in childhood trauma. If you can, find an expert who also has psychoanalytic training. Why?
Because a psychoanalyst has the knowledge to get to the early roots of your trauma. You aren’t just living with symptoms. The symptoms are expressions of what happened to you.
Once you can take the risk and decide it’s best to tell your secrets to someone who understands, it's important to be in a therapy that gets to the roots of how your childhood trauma, earliest relationships, and history still affect your life.
You don’t have to be alone with the feelings you’re so afraid will all come flooding back.
You need kindness. Understanding. Help develop trust. A therapist who not only gets to the roots but will invite and be with any feelings you have, including your anger. There are therapists who can. If this isn’t happening, move on. In good therapy, telling your secrets and getting help will change your life.
RELATED: The Sad Reason Why Childhood Trauma Is Holding You Back As An Adult
Dr. Sandra Cohen is a Los Angeles-based psychologist and psychoanalyst who specializes in working with survivors of abuse and childhood trauma.
This article was originally published at Sandra E. Cohen's blog. Reprinted with permission from the author.
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jamerasjournal · 1 year
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Spare the rod and spoil the child. Spare the eyes and spoil the system. I will give you violent movies and call them action films. I will give you Call of Duty and you will call yourself a gamer. If you massacre enough bodies in the metaverse, the reality of real violence will be easier to stomach. I will teach you to be desensitized to seeing death. Apparently your humanity needs death to appreciate life.
And when I ask you what you get out of watching black bodies be brutalized on camera, you stutter over your words. Because you haven’t even realized that you’ve been brainwashed yet. Black trauma sells like sneakers. You watch black death like leaked sex tapes. You don’t even have too look to hard because Facebook will bring the lynching to your front door. You gather around cellphone screens instead of the tree. How many people can you send it to before it gets deleted? But everybody don’t want a glimpse of that strange fruit. You give no trigger warning just like these cops who think it’s open season.
How you watch them beat a black person blue. Maybe it’s cuz that person don’t look like you? Police brutality is the latest genre of porn. Have they killed enough to keep up with your blood drive? How many times a month you need til you satisfied? Forgive me for being prude but black trauma porn don’t give me wet dreams. Cuz when I close my eyes I can still see Floyd and Sandra Bland’s eyes. I still see dead bodies and hear pleas of life. I don’t want to watch a grown man plead for his momma. Ain’t nothing about that salacious to me.
It’s starting to look like gun violence is the latest American kink. A knee of the neck will never constitute as breath play. How many videos do you need to see before you don’t need to watch it no more. Every time it happens you’re throbbing to see more. The solution to stopping violence isn’t to build a tolerance to it. So let me ask you: how many more tapes you need to watch til you finish?
- jamera naquai, Black Trauma Porn
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ciegeinc · 8 months
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Movie Review...Brother
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(4/5) Black Trauma movie alert...lord I don't know why I did this to myself on a Monday. This was a coming of age story that was absolutely soaked in grief. I haven't had a reaction to a film like this since Moonlight. The silence between the dialogue is heavy and it illustrates grief to the point that it sticks with you after watching the film. I slept bad and this morning is heavy.
Even though it's a story we have seen before, the movie is layered with so many aspects of the experience of being a Black man.
Layered stories ranging from being the parent of an immigrates, single parent home, the eldest having to take on adult responsibility, dreaming, sexuality, relationships between mother and sons, older and younger brothers, first crush/love, masculinity and much more. All that plus police brutality and the trauma and grief of loss.
If you watch have your tissue ready...
Adapted from David Chariandy's award-winning novel of the same name, Brother is propelled by the pulsing beats of Toronto's early hip hop scene following the story of Francis (Lamar Johnson) and Michael (Aaron Pierre), sons of Caribbean immigrants maturing into young men. A mystery unfolds during the sweltering summer of 1991, and escalating tensions set off a series of events that change the course of these brothers' lives forever. Brother crafts a timely story about the profound bond between siblings, the resilience of community and the irrepressible power of music.
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Black people, especially Black women, Black disabled people, and Black queer people talk about how white people are so desensitized to Black pain, even to the point of finding humor in it. And we already know human DNA can passed down through epigenetics.
I wonder if a lack of empathy or desensitization to Black trauma can also be passed down in a similar fashion. I especially think of that even I hear Black historians talk about picnics.
-fae
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pieckthecart · 1 year
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It’s crazy how we as black people can say that we feel discriminated against or not heard or ignored and everyone else will just be like “uh you’re wrong”
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slimbug · 1 year
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@jamerasjournal
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kika501 · 1 year
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A hot take:
I was watching bones and all and could not help but have the profound realization that white America are like cannibals. The feast on the the body of color, whether it be Latino, native, southeast Asian, etc, but especially upon the black body. They consume all that there is to consume: our food, our music, our voices, our art, our words, our poetry, our creativity, and our culture. But that's not all, they always want- NEED, more. They consume our bodies, our labor, our time, our blood, sweat, tears, mind, heart, liver, every single morsel they consume. Bones and all.
And once the hunger is temporarily sated, they go to their white pickett homes, stomachs full and warm and. Then they gaslight us into believing that we are lesser. They pack us like animals into pens of poverty and say it is our fault that we live in such a state. They mock us for our culture and creativity that they so readily consume. They say stop and wait your turn. Don't you see this is the land of the free?
As a black woman in America, I live in such fear that all that I have will be taken away. I fear for my love ones, my little brother and cousins. I live in such fear that I refuse to have childern in this country, for where would I go? To the doctor that mutilates my body, forces a c section when not needed, refuse anesthetics because they are taught that black people can't feel pain (and yes even in 2023). Why would I bring a black baby girl or boy into a world that hates them? No matter were we go we are met with mockery, disdain and violence. Our original homes are raped continuously by colonizers so that I am force to seek sanctuary in their arms. Why would I bring a child to such a world that seeks to erase and rewrite our history so white America can still believe the lie that this is a country stands freedom, independence, and justice for all?
I cry myself to sleep knowing there is no where to run to find peace. That, at 22 years old, I find comfort in knowing that I will die one day and it will be finally over. I will decay in the ground were my skin with rot away and they can no longer eat my body because it is black. This is America. This is what this country means to me.
Please understand that this is coming from a state of confusion, hurt and betrayal. The recent political climate and events have really sent me spiraling. I've come to the realization that I don't want to live here anymore. I don't feel safe. Every day there are pick up truck waving Trump flags and blue lives matter passing by my house. My neighbors wave these flags. I no longer feel safe being surrounded by white men as a black woman. I hate being constantly reminded of my skin color. I hate knowing that by brother could just be skate boarding down the street and some cop can harass him and arrest him for no reason. That no punishment will occur. I have no trust in the the police force, for they are just another gang and tool for white supremacy. I don't want to know my body could be beaten and tossed aside and not one thing would change about this country. I'm tired. Even though I understand this sounds like a generalization of white people, it's not. It's an observation of the collective white identity and whiteness and how it makes me feel. While I'm open to conversation, I know no one cares. No one will change their mind no matter how much I scream, beg and cry. No matter how much facts you place upon them they will never see us human but nothing more than the fuel that sustains there body and way of life.
Either way it was eating me inside and I just was desperate to share.
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chel52-blog · 10 months
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@CheenaSpeaks Podcast on YouTube.
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beenetworkmedia · 1 year
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BREONNA TAYLOR AND TYRE NICHOLS ARE REMINDERS OF LESSONS NEVER LEARNED.
"The public execution of Black folks will never be normal.”  
The inhumane shootings, beatings and treatment by police officers are reminiscent of the history surrounding this nation’s Culture of Violence and Trauma impacting Black Americans. BY: GEORGE ADDISON “I can’t bring myself to watch yet another video, not because I don’t care, but because we’re all just a few videos away from becoming completely desensitized. The public execution of Black folks…
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rome-theeempire · 1 year
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Being black in a Texas school:
Be bold enough to shut down racists&ppl who are lenient towards them OR Have no friends???.
I've had to deal with this since middle school and I was always taught that we as black ppl should stop racism when we see it but when I did ppl stood up for the racist, and I was gaslighted even by OTHER black ppl. So for awhile I just let ppl say what they wanted to me and THE TRAUMA
I'm sick and tired of having 'friends'
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mrsblackruby · 2 years
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I stand strong and proud in my black identity cuz I was raised to take pride in it. But when it comes to my queer identity I hide it away a lot of the times cause I don’t want it to be a “hassle” I definitely wasn’t raised to take pride in my queer identity. And I think it really shows.
I’m one to stand up 4 myself but not when it comes to my queerness. That fact makes me really sad.
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Biting and scratching and mauling every single black movie and tv show that continues to shit out black stereotypes like we’re still in the fucking 1990s, and continues to profit off of black people’s trauma, struggles and pain.
Fuck all of you. Fuck every single black actor who supports and encourages this shit.
And a humungous fuck your to all these stories about drugs, gangs and violence. It’s always this ignorant shit getting popular because of course black people can only be represented through this shit.
Meanwhile, like I’ve said before, white people get to be in fairytales riding dragons, and running through portals into different worlds.
I cannot stress this enough. Fuck. You.
This is exactly why I write my own shit.
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Calling out the industry looks like this . Not what Kanye was on
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