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Notes -
I had an interesting experience this year on the topic. I'd always thought of myself as a Trauma-free guy, I've had a lot of bad shit in life roll right off my back (now, the cringe moments I remember are a different thing - "hey, remember when you mixed up Colin Firth and Colin Farrell in front of your high school crush? Or when you told a table full of people that Wes Anderson directed Trainspotting?"). But at the start of 2025 I slipped in an ice storm, seriously injured myself, and took about six hours to get seen and fentanyl'd by the doctors, would rate it number one most physically painful experience of my life (maybe in top ten most painful experiences if you include women and hangovers). I didn't think much about the incident for quite a while, since I was focused on rehab, but I found that occasionally, when I passed the place in question, walked down dodgy stairs, or when ice came back on the street and I had to cross it, I'd feel an entirely non-voluntary twinge of discomfort/fear/pain. Never more than a twinge, but a very noticeable one precisely because it was so non-voluntary. I can absolutely see how with other personality types, particularly with more serious traumas, this becomes the kernel of some kind of crippling phobia, if you ruminate on it and let it spiral in intensity instead of shrugging it off. Not saying all Trauma is like that, but now I've seen the involuntary mechanism up close it seems to me a fair bit of Trauma is a bad way of responding to something real in the mind rather than a purely constructed narrative.
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