#trauma

#trauma

"I had ears that stuck out, and I'm sure I was teased about it," Trocino, now 36, tells TODAY.com. "But it wasn't something that I remember being so impactful that I was begging my parents for it. I didn't even know that this was something you could do to your body."

He clicked on a video. A girl was sitting in an adult bed, a child's picture book beside her. Squire watched as a man came into the frame and began reading it to her. For a moment, it could have been a normal scene maybe it would be until the man proceeded to remove the girl's clothing. Then he raped her. Squire watched her endure it it looked like her soul left, he says.

Today I saw images of students leaving their school with their hands raised in the air, hours after cowering in fear and terror in barricaded classrooms. Nine dead and twenty-seven wounded in the tiny Rocky Mountain town of Tumbler Ridge. The mayor, Darryl Krakowka, said, "I have lived here for 18 years. I probably know every one of the victims." And this in Canada, which often seems to us Americans like a bastion of sanity and normalcy in comparison with our madness.

The structure of the Emmy-winning HBO Max drama The Pitt, where every episode covers a single hour in the life of a busy Pittsburgh emergency department, might suggest it's about how much can happen in 12 or 15 hours. In Season 1, that meant deaths, a mass casualty event, a doctor caught stealing pills, a charge nurse being assaulted by a patient, and a fourth-year medical student who spends the whole day being splattered over and over with things that force him to change

As Valentine's Day approaches, we start enjoying images of ruby-red hearts, kisses, and holding hands-ideals of romantic love. But what happens the day or week after? For some, there are engagements and celebrations; for others, hurts, disappointments, breakups-some of those ruby-red hearts, broken or cracked. Lasting romance is built on a kind of love that requires more than sexy lingerie and roses; it needs trust, openness, and mutual acceptance.

When I took the assessment, shortly after leaving my partner, he scored an 8/10. If I had gone through with our pregnancy, he would have scored a 10. But we didn't have children because five years earlier, in a Chicago clinic, I'd had a medication abortion. At the time, the danger only registered as a faint sense of unease, nothing like the five-alarm fire my life would later become.

The famed installation, if you're unfamiliar, is a dishevelled unmade bed topped with stained sheets and surrounded by an array of empty vodka bottles, condoms, underwear and pills. Emin created it following a dark four-day period of binge-drinking and smoking following a bad break up, but its rawness upset a lot of critics and it sparked a fierce debate over what really constitutes a work of art.

Banned as it's been, everybody knows what The Bluest Eye is about: a little black girl who wishes she had blue eyes. That's not really a spoiler. Besides, Toni Morrison didn't care about spoilers. In fact, she gave away the whole plot of her very first novel in its opening narration: "Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby."

The Metropolitan Police's covert Special Demonstration Squad spied on relatives who started a peaceful campaign called Justice for Ricky Reel in the belief he'd been murdered. David Hagen an officer known as HN81 gathered information about them and their supporters as they travelled nationwide trying to expose apparent failings in the original investigation. On one occasion, Hagen drove Mr Reel's mother Sukhdev from a McDonald's in Stratford back to the family home an address she wanted to keep private.

"We don't have a bomb shelter near our house, so we were just sitting on the floor in the corridor all night," Katia said.

Someone says something to us, and we are suddenly struck with a sinking feeling in our stomach. Someone does something, and instantly we become enraged or alarmed. Someone comes at us with a certain attitude, and we go to pieces. We hear mention of a person, place, or thing that is associated with an unresolved issue or a past trauma, and we immediately feel ourselves seize up with sadness, anger, fear, or shame.

I am lying in bed listening to the radio at my boarding school as my roommate is getting dressed. As she walks out of the door she says, See you at breakfast don't be late. I'm about to get up when the early morning news comes on the radio, and I hear the announcer saying my parents' names. By the time my roommate arrives at breakfast, everyone has heard.

If you grew up feeling emotionally unsafe, unseen, or unloved, it's natural that your adult relationships might carry some of those same fears. You might unconsciously recreate familiar dynamics, because the brain often returns to what it knows, even when it hurts us. Much of early relationship conflict stems from our unhealed wounds. Tension often arises not just from our own behavior patterns, but from a lack of understanding of our partner's attachment needs and behaviors.

He describes turning to steroids after several spine injuries in the line of duty, the nightmares that haunt him from the day a tried to save a 2-year-old girl who drowned in a backyard pool, and the fateful morning where FBI armored cars drove onto his lawn and burst into his home with flashbang grenades while he poured milk into his kids' cereal bowls.

Already she remembers scenes, so many- her mother walking in through the front door with her wrapped-up baby brother; that time the big dog gobbled up her toast before she could take a single bite; that day a bad man pushed her so hard on the swing she spun out, landing face down in the dust. Also, sometimes, some first happy thing she barely senses anymore- a soapy bath toy, warm in her baby hands?

Has this happened to you? You run into someone, and they ask about something that you shared with them that was painful. They start talking about it, and there you go, hurting again? You weren't thinking about it, and the next thing you know, it hurts like it just happened. There are occasions - holidays and family gatherings - where the effects of a past painful experience will reemerge and trigger emotional pain all over again.

To start resolving our hurt, it helps to pause and ask ourselves a different question: What kind of wound am I dealing with? Many painful experiences-rejection, disappointment, humiliation, betrayal, exclusion-do not leave traumatic injuries. They leave emotional wounds. These wounds are real and impactful, even when they do not necessarily involve threat, terror, or a nervous system focused on survival. And yet, they can linger for years, shaping how we see ourselves and others long after the event has passed.

At the core of violence lies emotional rupture, not only when harm is inflicted intentionally, but also when life is interrupted by forces beyond one's control. Forced displacement is one such rupture. It does not simply change location; it reshapes identity, possibility, and the nervous system itself. For those who leave home under threat, hunger, or despair, exile is not a chapter that closes. It becomes a psychological terrain carried within the body and mind.

No one should ever have to go through one shooting, let alone two.

This can be hard for onlookers to understand, but for people who have lived through trauma, chronic emotional invalidation, or unsafe relationships, self-blame can become an organizing principle. It offers a painful kind of order. If suffering is my fault, then at least it makes sense. Over time, that belief does not stay confined to memory. It begins to shape behavior.

When desire fades or the bedroom grows silent, we often point to the surface- boredom, stress, a lack of spark. But let me tell you, sexual problems are rarely about sex alone. Sometimes, they're about unresolved trauma -a quiet force that shapes how we love, touch, and connect. It's the shadow we don't see, but it moves us all the same. It makes decisions for us that we're not aware of.

The 2025 film Frankenstein reframes Mary Shelley's story as a narrative told across two worlds: Victor speaking on a freezing ship after being rescued, and the Creature recounting his long journey of wandering and despair. Healing Through Storytelling The film is structured through storytelling itself-Victor's tale told under duress, and the Creature's own response as a counter-story he had held inside for years. Their exchanges suggest how many relationships fracture when we fail to tell the stories that hold our pain

My mother-in-law said it was just thunder. I said, No, the house is shaking.' Not long after, boulders came crashing down, she recalled. My younger sibling was staying over. When the landslide happened, I kicked him to wake him up. If we had all been sleeping, we would have died in that house. Grabbing her daughter, Eleanor, Sri fled to the nearby church. From the hilltop, they watched in horror as another landslide completely destroyed their home.

When Taylor Momsen was asked to explain her "bad attitude" on the set of Gossip Girl, she answered that her parents signed her up with Ford Modeling when she was just 2 years old. She said, "No 2-year-old wants to be working, but I had no choice. My whole life, I was in and out of school. I didn't have friends. I was working constantly and I didn't have a real life."

"Most places your mind saves JPEGs, mine has text files instead." This is how Mike (name changed for anonymity) describes living with complete aphantasia. Coined in 2015, aphantasia affects approximately 4% of the population and is a condition characterized by the brain's inability to visualize or imagine images. Though not classified as a disability or medical condition, it has a profound impact on Mike's daily life.

Now is not the time to see those videos. I don't think either of you is in the place to navigate the emotions they're going to dredge up. Moreover, if and when you do see them, that act needs to have a recovery-focused purpose. If they will help you make more specific amends or if he needs you to see something specific so that you can process together, that's one thing. But it doesn't sound like that's where either of you is at present.