We will generally hear about more life-experiences then we will actuallyexperiencein person, for better or worse. So most of us tend to have at least a basic idea of what most occurrences will look like. However, the human brain has a way of “protecting” itself, so topics like “traumaticevents” are often hard to discuss and explain.
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Losing a pet. People acknowledge it’s sad, but unless you’ve been through it, you don’t realize just how deeply it can break you. It’s losing a best friend, a daily companion, and a source of unconditional love all at once.
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Working under a toxic manager. I have work related ptsd.
Being poor/debt/financial instability.
Functioning depression. People don’t realize how exhausting it is to put on a “happy” face every day when you’re out in the world when all you want to do is curl up in a ball and cry for a week straight.
Growing up non diagnosed nurodivergence and never really fitting in and not knowing why while also not getting any support from the adults who should have noticed something.
Job searching! The fatigue of getting multiple rejections, being ghosted, while trying to pay bills can be crushing.
Feeling like no one loves you or understands you.
Becoming disabled. Nobody treats it as the truly traumatic experience it really is. There is no psychological support for us, as it happens. We are left to figure it out on our own.
Growing up as the “gifted” child, only to wind up the Family Disappointment.
Being cheated on can ruin your life.
Someone you trusted taking your deepest traumas and insecurities to ‘win’ an argument.
Being raised in Evangelical Christianity or other high-control religious environments.
Growing up with parents who simply do not love each other, who scream at each other all the time, and never get divorced.Growing up in a household where you learn to be responsible for your parents’ feelings from a very young age.Edit to add: I didn’t think this would resonate with so many people. Thank you to everyone for sharing if this hit home for you. Just knowing that there are other hearts out there who know what it felt like, and feels like to carry into adulthood no matter how old you are, feels supportive. 🤎.
Feeling emotionally invisible. It’s a slow, quiet kind of trauma that builds over time. I think people often underestimate how much it affects your mental health when you constantly feel like no one truly sees or hears you.
Volunteering with animals. it’s not just playing with puppies and kitties. i work in animal welfare now and i have years of trauma and guilt from the terrible s**t people have done to these animals.
Growing up with a parent who goes silent when angry. I never knew if it was me she was mad at, and if so, what I did. I’m 70 years old, and while I consciously fight the feeling, if someone is quiet I assume they’re angry with me, even if there’s no reason they should be.
Being laid off through no fault of your own.
Close friend break ups. Just as bad if not worse than relationship breakups.
Having a verbally or physically a***ive sibling.
Taking care of a parent with dementia. It is soul draining. It’s a full time job. It’s dirty and embarrassing for all involved. It’s heartbreaking watching your once competent, intelligent, funny parent regress until they are a husk of a person. You struggle with keeping them in their home and “honoring their wishes”. Dealing with insurance, Medicaid, hospital stays, and affording any kind of respite care is mine-boggling complex and expensive. Cleaning up grown man pee and poop from every corner of the house is maddening. The tedium of repeating yourself a hundred times a day, listening to the same questions, the same complaints and stories. The list is neverending.I wish there was assisted s****de in America that you could put into an advanced directive for circumstances like this. He wouldn’t want to live like this and it is ruining lives.
Chronic illness.
Having a boss who criticizes every little thing you do, for literally hours at a time, until finally you start to wonder whether you actually ARE that stupid and incompetent. .
Being the black sheep of the family.
Going through a divorce. Even though divorcing my ex was one of the best decisions I ever made , at the time it was so much more painful and stressful than I could have imagined.
Choking on food. It’s literally life or death and it can stick with you if you survive that scenario.
Infestations. Bed bugs, roaches, fleas, mice, you name it. Absolutely corrodes your psyche.
Legitimate near death experiences. People will say “I thought I was going to die” but if you actually have a moment when you deeply and truly believe that, it can really mess you up. If you’ve had one of those moments then you understand what I mean.
Having a confrontation with neighbors. Having anger/fear/discord invade your living space is really upsetting on a basic subconscious level.
Allowing bad friends to stay in your life for too long.Do not waste your life , energy and time on people who only take.Seperate from them and watch how much better your life gets.
Getting paid late, bills don’t stop just because a company can’t plan ahead financially. .
A book I read on trauma listed immigration as one of the top 5.
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Being adopted. Not the adoption necessarily because loads of people love their adoptive parents and feel complete in their new family, but the act of being abandoned. Especially if the child spends time in an orphanage where they don’t necessarily always get the care they need.
A toxic work environment.I’ve worked in corporate America for 22 years now and the office politics. The nepotism, the toxicity level in a corporate work environment could do irreparable damage to your ability to be creative, to communicate in a comprehensive way to build healthy and professional and Cohesive relationships in the office. It could also stifle your ability to network. It could cause you to have cortisol levels that are so high you actually may need to retire early because of an autoimmune disease.It’s just so traumatizing to work in an environment where somebody could potentially demean you, manipulate and use you, and there is nothing that you can do about it. There’s nowhere to go to file a complaint. It could ruin your trajectory to go get a job at another company. It is incredibly traumatizing.
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Recently, fire trauma. Not being ON fire but losing your home to fire. We lost our home to a fire and people have been so helpful and generous and lovely. Then LA caught on fire and all of that kindness was out the window.“They deserved it!” “They have so much money!“Like yeah but there are a lot of people who lost their home. Who lost sentimental items. Who lost pets. Who lost the places they’ve built their families. Who lost their safe place.It’s amazing how people don’t realize how traumatic that is.Sore spot for me. “At least you’re all safe!“Yeah but my home isn’t. My animals are traumatized and can barely sleep. I’m traumatized and can barely sleep. Every noise is an alarm suddenly. But yeah. We’re all safe. Cool cool cool.
Living on the welfare system. I’m a disabled single mother who has no other choice than to be on welfare but I can’t begin to describe how traumatizing this poverty stricken life has been. The amount of crime that I’ve had to raise my children around in the ghetto (government housing assistance), raising them on next to nothing in disability benefits and barely any food stamps. We’ve witnessed so much crime and been the victim of criminal acts while having to live in low income neighborhoods, there’s never enough food (I skip meals so the kids can eat), and only a few hundred dollars a month in disability to pay all of our bills and the basic needs for the kids. I will say that Medicaid has been great though.Living on welfare has been a nightmare and I wish I had another option but I’m disabled. I strive to instill in my childhood the importance of education and a career so they will hopefully one day escape the system and make something of themselves so they don’t have to suffer or struggle anymore. I wish I could have given them better. .
Growing up w a disabled sibling.
False accusations. Someone accuses you of doing something heinous and you lose your family, friends, job, future employability, financial security, if you were married with kids then you lose half of everything and all of your wife and kids, you’re now homeless. You probably become an alcoholic, possibly s***al. All because someone thought nothing would happen when suggesting you’re a rist.
Getting an IUD. Most painful thing I have ever experienced, and I managed to break and dislocate my ankle at the same time.
Death. My favorite uncle died at age 32 suddenly when I was 11. He and my dad were very close. Although he had his own family he would stop over every evening on his way home from work to visit us. After the funeral no one ever uttered his name again. I would lay awake every night for six months thinking that you just die and the world goes on forever and ever and no one cares 😢💔.
Having to get older and watch your parent become more and more debilitated. Experiencing the fear and exhaustion. Wanting them to get better and more active, but also a part of you wishing them to pass away so you can have peace. And feeling like s**t and scum for even wishing that. I feel like a horrible person.
Having your car stolen, even if you get it back a couple days later. I felt personally violated and ended up selling the car a couple months later.
Emotional BetrayalMy ex intentionally slept with somebody else to hurt me in the deepest way possible then gaslit and manipulated me. When I finally decided I deserved more that trauma lives on and is hard to get past to trust new people.
Having an addict sibling. Raising other people’s kids that they traumatized.Not being good enough in a parents eyes.Being born female when dad demanded a boy.
Being the “weird one” in the workplace. showing up to just work while being left out of all of the camaraderie is so lonely. it makes work drag. it makes life harder for no reason.
Having a manipulating partner who ends up slowly but steadily removing any signs of your own original identity from yourself and the relationship.
For me, it was a cross-country move while I was in high school. Moving is difficult when you’re a child, particularly an older child who already has established peer networks. It is true that I didn’t leave the country, but I live in a large country with distinct subcultural regions. High School is already an awkward experience but add in a cross country move and I didn’t have a chance. It took me years to recover from this and in some ways I never did.
Pain. Real pain. Humans can experience pain that is completely illogical so much that there is nothing you can do but roll around in agony wanting to die (can last days or longer). For example, acute appendicitis is f*****g horrific is not treated quickly and can cause death. To anyone who has not experienced it I hope you never do for those who have I’m sorry for your illogical pain.
Working from home and not having much of a social life outside of it, which I’ve been doing for 12 years now.The loneliness from it is a long term downer.I work 50 hour work weeks at home and once I’m done I don’t even feel like going anywhere.There are so many weeks out of my last decade+ of working from home where my only human in-person interaction is just buying something from a store clerk.I have a wonderful dog who I take out regularly at least, but unfortunately my schedule doesn’t sync well with the few friends I do have and unfortunately they don’t like going out much.Working in my pajamas and saving money on gas and time getting ready for work isn’t worth the immense loneliness working remote long term can bring.
Jury duty. People think it’s annoying, boring, and inconvenient. It is all of those things. But you’re also being dragged into somebody’s tragedy, hearing details you never wanted to know. I’ve been on a r**e case, and I just wrapped up jury duty on a manslaughter case. It’s a jarring experience, and since most people (that I know) have never had it at all, I can’t really talk about with anybody, other than to say “yeah it sucked”.
A parent that constantly yells at their children. Corporal punishment style parenting.
Contracting an STI. There’s this huge stigma behind it that you are a disgusting person and that’s the reason you contracted it when in reality everyone is a victim.
Being dumped out of the blue. He was coming over for dinner one day, broke up with me 15 minutes after arriving saying he “couldn’t give me what I needed” and left. He never told me what it was he thought he couldn’t give me. Never responded to another text ever again. It was like he died. I haven’t dated anyone in just over 1.5 years. Hard to trust when this man told me 4-5 days prior that I was the love of his life, showed me his wedding guest list. That one really broke me.
Neglect ase. Whether it’s children, partners, pets, neglect ase is at least as damaging as more obvious forms of ase, but it’s a lot more difficult to spot. Like neglecting to provide your child discipline and structure. You see a lot of kids raised that way now that end up at least as badly screwed up as if they’d been physically ased. At least then they wouldn’t have to feel guilty about blaming their c***py parents.
Caregiving. I loved my husband and wouldn’t change having cared for him for all the money in the world but it was traumatizing.
The silent treatment. It’s cruel and a***ive. Not to be confused with setting clear boundaries with someone.
Alienation. It starts in adolescence and can continue through adulthood. Bullies exist in the real world too, and feeling isolated or picked can do a number to your self esteem.
Growing up the child of a self employed father. I was an employee to him, not a son.
Being tickled without permission. Laughing does not equal consent.
Everyone thinks that moving between so many countries as a child/teenager is super fun. It was most definitely not and as an adult now makes me grasp at anything that can give me some sense of stability.
When people talk over you (esp as a shy person) and project weird things about themselves onto you without letting you speak, label you “crazy” things and do not let up on you.
Being alone most of your childhood. I was an only child, mom worked 12 hours a day and stepdad drove a truck all week.
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