My, but this thread is depressing. And yet, I’m going to add to it.
I’d have to say that the suicide of a lover when I was 18 was probably the most traumatic experience I’ve ever had. I’d go into more detail, but I still don’t like to talk about it.
1> Finding out at 16 that my girlfriend had a miscarriage before I even knew she was pregnant.
2> My grandfather passing away the day before I was supposed to visit him.
3> The first realization of the nature of infinity.
The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
3rd) Having to have my dog put down because he had developed a hostile streak and was biting people.
2nd) A certain nightmare. Can’t give any details on that … too personal.
1st) Being stabbed twice in the back and once in the chest, fighting off the assailant, collapsing to the sidewalk and walking up in the hospital.
3rd) Having to have my dog put down because he had developed a hostile streak and was biting people.
2nd) A certain nightmare. Can’t give any details on that … too personal.
1st) Being stabbed twice in the back and once in the chest, fighting off the assailant, collapsing to the sidewalk and waking up in the hospital.
0th) Double posting.
When my mom and dad got into one of their arguments, and he pulled her into the bathroom with a gun. I was sure she was gonna die. I was 12. Long story short, the cops took him away, he got more psychological help, and it seemed like he had finally gotten over his paranoia.
Having the only grandfather I ever knew die when I was 13.
Coming home a month later from school, to find out my father had died. He shot himself outside of Lake Charles, and to this day, I still remember seeing the bloodstain on the seat of his truck.
Watching the brother of my ex-girlfriend die in the cancer ward. This was 5 years ago. He was my age.
You say “cheesy” like that’s a BAD thing.
My mother’s death on my 10th birthday.
I’ll tell you about an interesting experience my friend had.
He was talking on the phone when he heard a really loud band, like someone slamming the door. He and his father went upstairs an saw that their tennant had commited suicide with some big gun and his head was lying in pieces on the floor.
My friend was about 13 then I think… but that wasn’t the traumatic experience. He’s a tough guy, so what’s a dead body here or there?
Now after the police have taken away most of the body it’s still the owner’s (my friend’s family’s) job to clean up the blood. So the entire wall is covered with blood, and this guy who killed himself he’s Italian, so obviously he’s got this big cross on the wall. A huge cross, like a couple feet high. My friend takes down the cross so he can clean the wall and he sees the reverse image of the cross, in blood, on the wall, cause the wall was all red except where it was covered by it. That freaked him out more than the body.
Some of mine:
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Being hit by a car as a pedestrian and being knocked out of my shoes and thrown 37 feet across the pavement. Then waking up in the hospital, not knowing how I got there and after being told what happened, realizing that my girlfriend was with me. I asked how she was and the nurse gave me a sad look and told me her room number. I went there and found her with her head shaved and pins coming our of her skull and attached to weights. She had broken her neck in the accident. After having a very emotional visit with her, I hobbled out of her room just in time to see her parents coming down the hall and as her mom sees me she screams “It’s all your fault”! Which it wasn’t of course, but it hurt like hell anyway.
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Looking at my newborn son after he came out of the birth canal and noticing that he had an unusual birth defect.
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Being told after 15 years of loyal and very successful service with the company that my position was being eliminated and I no longer had a job.
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Finding out that my 38 year old wife had breast cancer and would have to have a mastectomy followed by chemotherapy and radiation.
Those would be my top 4.
I would like to start out and apologize to shawdowfox for her psycho boyfriend. Not all men are that way.
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When I was 16 (and a suicidal youth) I had a dream that my elder sister was going away and completely sat up in a cold sweat at about 3 in the morning. The next day, Good Friday, I was awakened early in the morning on by the police knocking on my front door. At the time, I was living with my father and grandparents since my father just moved back to Texas and I moved in with him. Anyway, I walk out of my bedroom in a daze and say, “What has Debbie done this time?” (BTW, I have 4 sisters, Debbie was the one 4 years older than me). By that time I knew the police were in the house. Well, I saw and heard everything that they said to my father but was in a daze still. My grandfather took me back to his room and told me to sit down and that Debbie had died. The dream itself was pretty traumatic. It felt very real but after I woke up I thought it was just a dream. Anyway, at the moment my grandfather told me that she was dead, I lost a part of my soul. I cried and told my grandfather, “I’m not going to school today.” (I had my priorities even then, I did not want to go to school and have a bunch of jerks call me faggot when I was in such a state of being.) Anyway, I was in too much shock to hear how she died at that time. A few hours later I found out that she pointed a gun into her eye, did not close her eye, and shot and killed herself. I thought it was bad enough just learning that she was dead. It was even worse finding out that she had killed herself. Later that day, I went to her apartment with my father to clean out some things. Seeing her bed completely covered with blood. Seeing her dog, that she stopped feeding because she was depressed dying of starvation (her dog died within a week of her), finding out that she had a rabbit that was also dying hiding behind her refridgerator that her best friend gave to her for Easter. She left no suicide note. But we all knew the reason (I won’t go into that here, it is too personal.) Seeing my sister in the coffin and thinking that she does not look like my sister. There are other things that relate to this but I won’t go into them now.
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Thinking I was dead when tripping.
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Having a dream that my sister really didn’t kill herself. She came back into our lives and said that she had to get away from some people who were trying to hurt her. All the instances were explained. Well anyway, as the dream progressed she went out and moved into her own apartment. The dream seemed to take days to complete. Anyway, after she moved into her own apartment she shot and killed herself again. This time her body in the coffin looked like her. It was another of those cold sweat nights.
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Having the person I considered my husband of almost 6 years (at the time) tell me he no longer loved me. That one hurt almost as much as Debbie’s death.
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Seeing my family at Debbie’s funeral form a circle around her coffin and dance around singing “Ding Dong the witch is dead.”
Now guess which one is not true.
HUGS!
Sqrl
btw, I would love to have “Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead” played at my funeral.
Gasoline: As an accompaniement to cereal it made a refreshing change. Glen Baxter
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Discovering that, following my parents’ divorce, my mother made deliberate attempts to destroy the relationship between me and my father, going so far as to steal mail from him to me, to lie about him not making support payments, and to lie about events in their marriage. This resulted in a period of some 4 years where I refused to speak to or see my father, and changed my name in order to hurt him.
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My mother discovering things about my sexuality at age 15 that bothered her enough to send me to a psychotherapist to “fix” me.
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Having a girl I loved very much, and intended to marry, suddenly dump me my sophomore year of college in order to date a competitive bodybuilder, sending me into a cycle of drinking and skipping classes which resulted in my flunking out of college.
“I love God! He’s so deliciously evil!” - Stewie Griffin, Family Guy
pldennison: as I am sure that you are already aware, most things about human sexuality can not be fixed. That was really awful of your mother to treat you that way. Since I doubt that you are gay, I can’t really imagine what it was that someone from the older generation would deam necessary to fix (I assume you are in your 30’s-40’s but don’t know for sure).
HUGS!
Sqrl
In more or less the order in which they occured:
Having several dreams in which I died, then waking up and discovering that I can’t breathe. (Still happens.)
Coming out of the closet.
Waking up next to my girlfriend and discovering her having a diabetic reaction, and having no clue what to do.
The two weeks between the time that my girlfriend confessed she was cheating on me with a man, and the time that her period arrived, behind schedule by several weeks.
Losing my favorite uncle to brain cancer.
And on a much more humorous note:
When I was in the seventh grade, I had a massive crush on a girl in my visual arts class, which happened to be the first class of the morning. One night, I had a dream that she died. Usually, my dreams are so ridiculous that there is no way that they can be mistaken for reality, but this one felt real. I was afraid to go to school, for fear of what I’d find when I got there. The rational part of my mind kept saying “Oh, don’t worry, it was just a dream, you’ll get to visual arts class, and she’ll be there, just like always.” Well, you can see this coming. I get to visual arts class, and she isn’t there. Class begins, and she still hadn’t shown up. I was almost in tears by the end of the class, because by now, I was convinced she was dead. Right before class lets out, the door opens, and there she is. It seems she had missed the bus that day. That’s all it was. I have never believed anything that happened in a dream since then, no matter how real it seemed.
Modest? You bet I’m modest! I am the queen of modesty!
Psycho husband actually, but I digress.
I know not all men are that way. I thank God every day for my second husband, who I married this past May. Except for the fact that he’s a complete slob, he’s a total sweetheart. Has never raised a hand to me in the six years we’ve been together.
Shadowfox
“Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with
great ambitions.”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
I won’t say I’ve never had a traumatic experience or lost a loved one, but the one thing reading this thread has done is make me want to get down on my knees and thank God for the relatively happy life I’ve led. Thanks to all of you for posting such immediate reminders for me to count my blessings. 
Can’t limit it to 3, but here are some top contenders:
Daddy beating Mom
Mom beating me
Being chased by cops
First sexual experience
Being shot at
Giving up newborn son for adoption
Watching family, friends, and pets die
Spending 2 weeks in jail
Divorce
By far the worst:
Delerium tremens, the most hellish experience imaginable
The day my dad’s mistress called to tell me he was on his way home. I had no idea he was having an affair. The bitch called me at 5am and said, “I just wanted to let you know that your father is on his way home”. Fucking bitch.
Don’t get me wrong–I love life. I’m just finding it harder and harder to keep myself amused.
I like this thread. I get to see how very very fortunate I really am.
*My grandparents were all dead by the time I was four or five years old.
*I live 800 miles away from my family, so when my dad was on life support, I didn’t have to deal with it. My last memory of him was taking him to the hospital, but he was still able to talk. That had to be so agonizing for my mother, brothers, and sister.
On a side note, my mother should be up for Sainthood. My parents divorced when I was four years old. I NEVER heard her say a bad thing about him until after I was 18, and I asked her questions. She let us visit him every summer. She took him in after being divorced for over 30 years, after he had his stroke, and wiped his butt, and fed him, and washed him. Why is this such a big deal? My dad was among other things, an alcoholic, he apparently beat my mother. He gave all of us kids $50 every Christmas, I only found out as an adult, that instead of sending his child support to her, he sent it directly to us. She let us believe that he was the big spender. My brother tells a story of my dad getting ready to whip him with an electrical cord for playing in the kitchen. My mother was ironing laundry, and held the hot iron up to his face, and said something similar to “I’ll kill you if you ever touch one of my children”.
Sorry to get off topic, I just wanted to point out the sacrafices that my mother made for her kids, so that we wouldn’t have as many childhood tramatic experiences.
Enright3
Your mother is an angel unto her own… You definitely have been blessed to have her in your life.
We are, each of us angels with only one wing;
and we can only fly by
embracing one another
Wait, I DO have a traumatizing experience.
When I was 4 years old, I went to a multiple story clothing store in the town I grew up in. It was a hot summer day, the day before we were going on our family vacation.
Upon arrival at the store, we took the elevator to the second floor. Now, this was one of these oldfashioned elevators where the cage only has a floor, a ceiling, and two sides. I hope this is understandable (as it is vital to the story), but this means the front and back of the cage are not there, instead the front and back are really the front and back of the lift shaft. So, when the elevator moves up, the front and back move down, relatively speaking.
Still with me ?
OK. So, we’re in this elevator, and I’m leaning to the back wall (which is really the shaft, remember ?). The elevator starts moving up, and because of the hot wheather, my sweaty sticky little 4 year old arm gets stuck to the shaft and is forced hand first into the little crack that separates the lift floor from the shaft - maybe 2 to 3 inches wide.
The elevator stops, but not before my arm makes a series of disgusting cracking noises.
I’m stuck with my arm between the floor and the shaft, and to top it off, the elevator is of course stuck between floors.
My mother is screaming bloody murder, my sister is crying her eyes out, my father is trying to force the elevator doors open - and I’m just sitting there, numb with an INCREDIBLE pain in my arm.
Then my father starts kicking the shaft near my arm in order to get some more space to get my arm out. It works.
After 10 minutes, firemen force open the elevator doors and we are evacuated through the 1.5 foot tall opening that leads to the second floor.
We’re escorted to the personel restaurant of the store. I look out the window, and the street is packed with people. This is not weird, as there are 2 ambulances, a firetruck and 5 police cars parked in front of the store.
Upon arrival in the hospital, there’s a lot of debate whether or not my arm should be amputated. The doctors decide to just put it in a cast and see where it leads - hey, you can always amputate later, right ?
My arm healed fine, all I’ve got left is a terrible handwriting. I got some Lego from the store, as an apology. They also installed new, safer elevators.
After 22 years, I’m able to ride any elevator just fine. Don’t expect me to feel at ease in one, though…
Coldfire
“You know how complex women are”
- Neil Peart, Rush (1993)