My parents’, stop crying or I will give you something to cry about, keeps me from being able to handle my 5yo when he’s getting emotional or crying about something I see as trivial or is a resolved conflict.

I feel embarrassed when someone, even my wife, sees me cry. I usually break down alone and as quietly as possible to avoid being caught. I’m better at letting that shit go, now, and allow myself to break down in front of my wife, but no one else.

Lost everything in a house fire, an electrical fire, in high school. So 30 years later I’m nervous around new appliances or lamps or, really, anything that plugs in except low-voltage. I don’t trust PoE, I don’t plug things in overnight until they’ve logged some daylight hours under monitoring, etc. My sister keeps a number of fire extinguishers around the home, so I think she’s got some PTSD over it too.

House fires change lives.

I’m 44 years old and I still can’t stand people standing behind me if I’m sitting down. When I was a kid and I did something wrong my dad would sit me at the table while he walked around yelling at me and every so often he would walk behind me and slap the back of my head.

To this day I still get so uncomfortable that I have to get up or ask the person to move. Even if it’s my own kids, I can’t stand it.

My first car crash was someone slamming into the back of my car on the highway when traffic came to a sudden stop.

I was not injured at all, but 20 years later, I still sometimes check my rear mirror when it happens. For years it was a constant thing, but lately, its just in really abrupt stops.

I don’t like being around drunk people, and I rarely drink myself. My father was a very abusive and violent drinker throughout my entire life. He is still alive now at 70 years old and has drank himself to-the point of feebleminded. He is still very ignorant and yells at anybody for absolutely no reason when I am not around him I feel the need to face him for all of these years of abuse, but if I am ever in his presence, I always feel like I am a small child curled up the corner. I do and have enjoyed drinking, but only one drink here or there once every couple of months and even then I can’t fully enjoy it because it puts me in his mindset and I just can’t enjoy myself.

If something breaks I have to spend a beat to fight the urge to hide the evidence and then hide myself.

Never wanted to rock the boat and never felt the need to growing up. Or at least conditioned to feel that way. Now I often screw myself over by nodding and agreeing as my default response. I like to think that I have ideals, but I hardly defend them, can’t bring myself to be reasonably confrontational. Also really bad at coming up with and asking questions and end up nodding along even if I don’t really understand.

in my late teens and early adulthood i’d lash out for being slightly teased about relationships or sexuality. back in my early and mid-teens i would frequently be bullied about not performing manly enough, not having a girlfriend or even having a slightly deviant (or maybe syndromic) look. even now, if i see something that passingly reminds me of these experiences, i play along, but then after i have to take sometime alone to breathe and reassure myself that these experiences are not related.

I mask around white people to appear non threatening and I don’t like it

I tend to be distrustful and keep people at arm’s length. Sometimes it’s for the best, but other times it has probably cost me the formation of close relationships.

If I have access to free food, I eat it. Doesn’t matter if I’m hungry, as long as I physically can I will.

I was only broke and homeless for a little over a year, and now I always know wherey next meal is coming from, but I can’t seem to shake the mindset of that low point in my life.

Reflexively answering to an innocent question with a harsher tone than I meant to.

I’m a queer person raised in the US but now living in a saner country. I’m slowly realizing how much living in the US has traumatized me.

• Whenever I go to a large gathering I instinctually look for the exits and try to stay near them.
• Still scared to go to the doctor.
• Minor one, there’s a lot of apartment buildings around me named “__ Arms”. In the US, I would expect anything with that name to be a huge gun store covered in white supremacist branding. I still side eye the sign whenever I pass by.
• Expecting government offices to be heavily armed and require going through TSA levels of security. Turns out other countries aren’t police states that treat you like a criminal by default.
• Same thing for small venues
• Driving is its own ball of anxiety and trauma
• Expecting anything with sugar to be sickly sweet. It’s no wonder why the US is so obese

I keep back any feelings in arguments, most interactions and also intense situations. Makes me loose a lot of arguments because I almost freeze and I appear as a person which distances from others. On the other hand I am able to keep calm in a lot of professional situations and act deescalating.

Living like a hermit, go to work go home, maybe go grocery shopping one a month, repeat forever.