I took a nap after working out one day in my early twenties. I woke up and coughed one time, blood sprayed everywhere. Then it wouldn’t stop coming.
It was like a faucet had been turned on and wouldn’t stop. I had to keep spitting the blood out to be able to breathe. I stumbled to my gf at the time and said we need to go to the hospital. It was like trying to talk under water.
Eventually got to the hospital and had to have two separate full doses of the medication that helps blood clot and is usually only is used when someone loses a limb in a traumatic injury like a car crash.
After sitting for 12 hours not allowed to talk or move my upper body or clear my throat due to the chance it would jiggle the blood clot forming in my lungs, I accidentally cleared my throat and restarted the bleeding all over again.
It’s called massive or critical hemoptysis.
Eventually, the bleeding stopped and it clotted successfully after sitting awake like that for about 18 hours straight.
I still have ptsd to this day if I wake up and cough or cough in my sleep.
That is one of the most traumatic things I ever experienced.
Almost drowning in your own blood out of nowhere should not be a thing anyone has to experience.
I was playing with fireworks when I met this kid insistently wanting to play with my fireworks like the usual annoying kid. He just kept on playing with my fireworks but I let him. My relatives told me that he’s the annoying kid that keeps on wanting to play more and more fireworks; if you keep on allowing him, he’ll never stop. And so I stopped him. Later did I find out that kid died. That kid had been abused from the day he was born. We’re talking about beating, dad putting cigarettes out on him. Never had a mother. Only had a poor violent father. Died young in a road accident. Never got to experience true joy. If only I had let him play with the fireworks a little more.
My dad literally went to the store and didn’t come back until 4 years later. I was 9 years old and by myself and my dad said he would be back. I sat by the window for hours waiting for his car to come back and it didn’t. My mom was at work and I called her and she said he’s just running behind, but he wasn’t. He just left us behind. My mom ended up working 2 jobs, all while finding out she had cancer. 4 years later, he shows back up. To this day, if my husband is gone too long at the gym, I sit by the window panicking.
My childhood was pretty fucked up. Trigger warning: sexual assault/rape
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tl;dr: mom married a pedo that molested my sister when at a very young age She stayed with him so she didn’t have to work. As my sister hit early teens, stepdad started sleeping with her. I was a little too young to understand what was going on. Turns out, mom knew.
Mom refused to leave him, because she hadn’t had a job in 15+ years, what would she do, work? Finally divorced him when my sister was 17, I was 14. She immediately got pregnant from some guy from her highschool, fell to drugs, lost custody of her kid after a few years because she couldn’t keep clean.
Uhm. Yeah so. AMA I guess. I’m sure this comment will get reported or deleted as I have no idea what the rules are about posting triggering content like this.
Two weeks ago I witnessed first hand a vehicular manslaughter. It was a 19 year old nursing student who was crossing the street and an oncoming car (driver is suspected DUI) hit him going around 50 mph.
It all happened right in front of me as I was in the oncoming lane. The kid was dead on impact and as I came to a stop, his body laid right next to my car with pieces of his skull and brain matter scattered on the road with the body mangled.
That’s not even the worst part, I stuck around to give my information to the cops as a witness and hearing the screams of the hysterical father, mother, and siblings crying and asking God “why” will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I was on a lunch break and walking back to my office. While I was waiting for the light to change I saw a man swerving on his bicycle and drop to the ground. It’s an areas known for a lot of substance abuse so I assumed he was high. I yelled “sir, sir, are you okay”? The light changed and I ran over. He was still, drooling and his eyes were open wide just starting at the sky. Two women jumped out of their car and started CPR. There was no pulse. I had 911 on the phone talking them through what to do. The ambulance arrived and he was dead. I think he was dead the second he hit the ground. Knowing I watched a stranger death really got to me. He was going home with some groceries on the back of his bike. After giving my statement to the police, I walked back to work. I must have been in shock because co-workers came up to me immediately asking if I was okay. I blurted out “I just watched a man die”. I was sent home and balled my eyes out.
When I was 18 I lived with my boyfriend. He was getting more aggressive over time, even choking me at times. One day I thought he was really going to kill me. He kept pinning me to the ground and beating my head against the floor. He’d like get up and pace around before coming at me. We lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have cell phones yet, so I really didn’t know what to do. So I grabbed a steak knife, thinking he would stop or something. He didn’t. He came at me, and I popped him right in the lung. I did manage to stop the bleeding and get him to the hospital. I had to go to court because at the time, you weren’t allowed to use weapons unless the person beating you had one too. Eventually, the charges were dropped though because it was pretty clear he was trying to kill me. He still messages me trying to get back with me every few years. Absolute nutter. I’m doing well without him, though!
I drove home on lunch break in college. It was a summer school class and I needed a lab report that I forgot. At the light turning left. An 18 wheeler tboned me and drove me into a gas station. I survived, but it caused years of ptsd and phobias of driving.
When I was kid there was a senior who was good friend of mine as our family were close but at one point he started to kind of i don’t know what to say this, he started to kind of molesting me he said me touch his private part and do more things, i don’t want to go in deep in this matter. And i was kid that time i done what ever he said as i don’t know was right or wrong that time.
So this is one thing cause because of this lot of things change in my life.
Molested by mother and sister until I was 7 or so years old. Did some really heinous stuff to me that haunts me everyday and suffer exhausting night terrors most nights
when I was in school I was attacked by a girl in between the canteen and the school building. she came running up behind me and drapped me to the ground by my hair and hit my head off a concrete step which knocked me unconscious and while I was out she continued to beat my head off the step while ontop of me and I do remember hearing her screaming “why wont you fucking die” and my body shut down during it which also caused me to lose control of my bladder and piss myself which is what everyone remembers cause atleast 30 people seen it happen. I was told in the hospital that I nearly died and my brain was bleeding and I was left with memory loss, a bad concussion and ptsd. all because a psycho bitch tried to kill me over some lies her friends had told her. I don’t know exactly why it happened but the rumors that go round about it said that I either rolled up her sleeves to laugh at her scars (which doesn’t make sense cause if I did that she would attack me on the spot and obvi i wouldnt do that), I was racist against her which how tf she’s white too or I was homophobic which isn’t true cause I wasn’t but I barely knew this girl and she was just crazy ig. but it’s completely ruined my life even tho it’s been 4 years now I still think about it and I still can’t be in a trapped space, I can’t be in public without being really anxious, and I’m automatically scared and uncomfortable around other girls now so I struggle to make friends. and there was absolutely nothing done about it because it happened on school property and my parents didn’t want it being a big deal which I only realized after is so fucked up. but they basically just said that if it happened again the police would be involved.
In 2018, I joined the railways to follow in my family’s footsteps. I just wish someone had warned me what I was walking into.
During my first year on the job, a 46-year-old father of two jumped in front of my train. When I went down to check on him, he was still alive. I immediately began CPR, but he started bleeding heavily from the head and passed away not long after. I then had to evacuate 350 passengers from the train—still covered in his blood.
Eight months later, while taking a train back to the depot, we struck a woman who had run away from the hospital. There was nothing left of her.
Just four months after that, while operating the last train of the night, the train came to a sudden, violent stop. A man had been lying on the tracks and sat up at the moment we hit him. When I got out to check, I found his head attached to the front of the train, and his mangled body underneath. He had been decapitated.
Not long after that, I left the railways. I haven’t been the same since.
Sleepless nights, recurring nightmares, panic attacks, and severe mental health struggles have become my new normal.
When I was 7 years old, my family, in the chaos of taking my mother to rehab for the 6th time in a year (yeah it never stuck) pulled away from the house in NC to drive her to the facility in GA and just never came back to get me. I tried calling them but, in the days before caller id was everywhere, one set of grandparents thought I was prank calling from the other ones house. SOMEHOW no one noticed that the child was both invisible and silent for 3 months. I lived alone for most of it, then when I ran out of food, I told the neighbor who ALSO tried calling my grandparents and got ignored. So I spent meals at her house. I wound up going back to our apartment after two nights with her kids (she had 8) all sleeping in one giant cali king bed and doing things like faking seizures to scare me.
It took my mother, finally sober, coming out and going “where is my child?” for anyone to realize that no one had seen me in months.
I also lost my best friend to a child serial killer/r-worder and then faced him down with a broomstick on a playground, but that’s another story.
I was about 9 years old, I was shooting off a cap gun in my backyard when I started one of my mums horses. It jumped the fence over one of the fence posts and sliced its belly open and its intestines spilled out
Told my wife of 15 years that if we didn’t drastically change our lifestyle, we would be financially insolvent and probably end up divorced.
Five days later she tried to have me arrested for being abusive but there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest me.
She got a divorce lawyer the following day and changed her story to say I had been raping her our entire relationship.
I was arrested, lost everything I owned, and my children still want nothing to do with me.
Spent 18 days in jail because rape was a presumptive charge in my state at the time and had to wear a GPS ankle tracker for a year before sitting through a two day trial in which I presented no witnesses and no real evidence beyond my testimony while projecting nine years worth of text message conversations and FB posts from my ex.
My attorneys put me on the stand and just asked me questions about my life. They refused to cross examine plaintiff and her witnesses because they said there is no way a jury is ever going to believe this story.
They didn’t.
The jury deliberated for about twenty minutes before I was unanimously found innocent. Two of the jurors, the bailiff, the court stenographer and the two court appointed forensic psychiatrists all said this was the worst case of false accusations they had ever witnessed—a disturbing lack of convergence and at the very least grossly exaggerated claims by plaintiff, were the specific things to which they testified. They were plaintiff’s witnesses and that was the moment the prosecutor realized they had made a mistake but by then it was waaaaay too late.
During my 18 days in jail I saw a man beaten unconscious because he had a toothache and they wouldn’t give him any pain meds and he couldn’t stop screaming. Don’t know what happened to him. He never returned to the cell.
Day three of my incarceration a man tried unsuccessfully to hang himself by jumping off a 2nd tier balcony tearing the sheet-noose he had fashioned for himself causing him to just jerk abruptly but ultimately plummet to the concrete floor below. He didn’t die but he also never returned.
My cell mate was a convicted murder but we connected because I found a Maya Angelou book and read it to him and some of the other cell mates during my incarceration.
To this day, movies like Richard Jewell and anything involving wrongful prosecution are triggering to the point I shake uncontrollably and get nauseous watching them.
I can’t be followed by a police officer without having to pull my car over and let them pass.
I can’t watch people get arrested in TV without a visceral panic attack.
I can’t walk in public if police are present.
I fully support victims rights and believe that spousal rape is a valid claim, so I don’t protest publicly, but my life ended because a woman was allowed to weaponize rape charges to gain favor in a divorce and the psychological impact of having my freedoms stripped without warning and being incarcerated in a DC jail for almost three weeks gave me night terrors for years.
This country needs massive reform in the legal system and unfortunately that will come from MAGA supporters and will over correct to the days we didn’t recognize any rights beyond those of white men in this country. I fear for this country knowing how corrupt and broken things truly are and knowing the only people having any real impact on changing them are motivated by the wrong priorities, but my trauma is real and part of me silently knows that if I had been black or unable to afford six digit legal costs I would have spent a couple decades in jail for a crime I didn’t commit.
Being 10 years old, playing in the park at the back of when I lived with neighbours. Just messing around etc. I didn’t understand mental health 26 years ago. A paranoid schizophrenic, tried to take my (left) hand, I struggle but he bent my wedding finger and middle finger back to my wrist. The metropolitan police (London) let him go because he had “an alibi”. I know who it was & she didn’t care about me & I am the same age as her son.
I had to switch schools sophomore year of high-school because as a freshman an older boy had raped me and then a few days later he was mad I didn’t want to be his friend anymore I guess? He proceeded to set my hair and face on fire in the back of our high school with a can of axe and a lighter while the whole school was outside waiting to get on our busses… everyone, of course, saw.
I still have severe agoraphobia and anxiety about being alone in public places (no one “on my side,” watching my back). I have been assaulted a few more times since then but that was the worst one for sure.
It’s ok, he’s dead now 💜 and that fact makes me a little happier every time I remember what happened all those years ago.
My mum was driving my then boyfriend to work, and I came along for the ride. We rounded a bend in the road, and just ahead of us was a man engulfed in flames from the waist up. As it was summer, we had no jackets with us, but my dads hivis jacket was in the boot of the car. We put the bloke out by covering him with the jacket and rolling him in someone’s garden. I stayed with him, talking to him to get some information and to keep him conscious. I couldn’t sleep for two days and still get flashbacks if I see a film with people on fire, and I never forgot the smell of burning flesh to this day. I was 16 years old, luckily, I had red Cross training. I’m 59 years old now but I can still remember the chats finger tips on the gatepost of the garden we had used to put him out in, which had melted off as he had held onto it as he had gone through.
TLDR; I broke my neck when I was 6 and my parents lied about it and didn’t seek treatment
When I was 6 I fell from the top deck of a house boat. “Dad” and his mates were smoking glass pipes (meth) up top and I managed to climb my way up. They yelled and scared me and I fell back from the top deck to the bottom, not directly on my head, but on an angle where my head hit the deck before my legs. Instead of taking me to hospital, I was given Panadol and my brother game boy. Then I got in trouble for using his game boy. 3 weeks later they took me to the general doctors and said I just fell in the ground so the doctor said I’ll be fine.
25 years later, I have some imaging on my neck and spine due to a work accident. Doctor asked “were you dropped as a baby?!” As a joke because the top 2 vertebrae had been broken and did not heal correctly. I told him the story. Basically, he’s saying I broke my neck when I was 6. No scans, just gave me Panadol
I was left in a hot car when I was 7 out the front of my “dads” workplace so my “dad” could get tanked on beers. I screamed and screamed and no one ever came until his boss found me when he was shutting up the shed. “Dad” went home in a taxi
I also took a long time learning to swim (I still avoid it. I can float and survive but there no way in hell I can swim in a race or anything). My “dad” put a life jacket on me and just threw me off the deck and told me to swim to his friends boat. I can’t go in open water, only shallow pools.
In my parents home, there was this very old, paint and oil splattered wooden chair. Horrible shape. Had been there long as I could remember. I was chopping wood for kindling and I figured hey, I’ll save my dad some time and chop it up, assuming it was scrap wood he hadn’t gotten around to.
Chopped it into bits, Dad came home and nearly fainted when he saw the chair. He asked me why and I said I assumed it was scrap. He then told me the story of his parents home burning down, leaving nothing behind other than that wooden chair since it was on the porch and it was the last to burn. The last piece of his childhood home, only remaining piece from his grandparents and I literally chopped it into bits. I still don’t think he’s forgiven me.
The day my husband grabbed me tightly by the arms in anger, and said that he would kill me, cut my body into pieces and spread me in three countries (with his three passports ), so no one would find me, the day he dangled his 18 month old son by one arm and beat him severely as I watched his little body swing back and forth, the day he threw his daughter through a door in the bedroom and she hit the wall and slid to the floor . There is a link on my profile , this is a true account of my life . Something’s you can’t unsee or unhear.
my ex boyfriend killed my cat last year n just the lead up to how it happened will forever traumatize me. it all started off that morning when my cat had knocked over a stack of papers (most were my ex’s) that were resting on a small stool. my ex was in a light sleep so when he heard it he began to get overly upset n woke me up by saying I needed to get my cat. I told him that it wasn’t a big deal for him to get so upset about because the papers were already messy n my cat didn’t ruin anything he just knocked them over. he then proceeded to get even more mad n told me that if i didn’t pick the papers up n he had to that my cat would get it n that made me upset because i didnt understand where this anger came from n why it was being directed at my cat. i didn’t end up picking up the papers because i was upset n just snapped back so when he got up to pick the papers up he grabbed my cat by his skull instead of his scruff making his way to our back door with the plan to throw him outside. i began to scream at him asking what was wrong with him n telling him he was overreacting all while stepping in front of him n grabbing my cat back.
after that i left to my moms house with a bad feeling n sour taste in my mouth fully convinced i was going to tell him we were breaking up because truthfully i was scared at how angry he got so fast. fast forward after explaining the situation to my moms house she asked me if i thought my ex would ever kill my cat n i said no because truthfully i didn’t believe my ex was capable of something like that no matter the anger issues (how naive). i had work that day so i asked my mom babysit but she said she had plans n no one else would be home. not wanting to go back n see my ex (he’s been texting me trying to plead since i left) i just decided that i would call out n stay at my moms house until i decided what i wanted to do. my mom argued that i shouldn’t do that n that i should just go back home n go to work since my ex said he was sorry.
fast forward that’s what i ended up doing n my ex asked me to use my car so he could go pick up a couch with my brother. i said yes so he dropped me off, about 2 n a half hours into my shift my ex messaged me saying that he’s done something bad n he’s sorry n that he’s gonna tell me the truth so i can decide whether i wanna be with him or not. my stomach drops n i ask him what happened n he tells me he killed my cat (he tried to say “our son” as if he was both of ours). i immediately tell my coworkers i have an emergency n have to run to the bathroom. i call him n told him to not play like that n he says that he wouldn’t play like that. i then ask why would he do that n he claims that my cat had urinated on him so he snapped n threw him at the wall then slammed him on the floor.
i told him he had to come get me now n when he finally did he tried to cry to me as if he was sorry. when we got home i asked where my cat was n he said he threw him in the dumpster !!! claiming he didn’t want me to see him like that i said but why the dumpster ? he wasn’t just some random cat he was my animal, my best friend. i had to search for the dumpster he threw him in cause he walked away like a drama queen n wouldn’t tell me n when i did i grabbed a black bag. i opened the bag to check but also because i felt like i just had to know how bad he hurt him, i saw the image of my sweet boy cat with his limbs n neck broke, eyeball popping out of its socket just laying limp. i couldn’t help but scream. this happened last year n i cant help but think about that day n how many emotions i felt going thorough that. i don’t think ill ever forget that day.
I used to live a bad lifestyle. Was an addict, but a functioning one. Held down a job place etc but didn’t surround myself with the best people. One night I was drugged and raped and it was filmed and I didn’t find out about it till a few years later.
How I was ever that person makes me sick. I try really hard to give back and be a good person. I got sober on my own because I wanted to, and maybe I’m a little hard on addicts today, but no one will save you but you.
Once I was in a college auditorium of approximately 500 people for a history class. The professor asked a question and I confidently yelled out the wrong answer. There were crickets for a moment until he said”No…. That’s completely wrong. The correct answer is:”
A past abusive relationship with a drug addict who would steal my car while I was asleep. Even 20 years later I feel very nervous when my husband uses my car. If he’s 5 minutes late I’m in full panic mode.
I was a first time mom and my first baby had just been born. When she was five days old she stopped responding and was floppy (floppy infant syndrome). We rushed to the ER and they had to do all sorts of medical interventions. I just stood there and watched in horror as my five day old baby screamed in pain and there was nothing I could do. She had to get a lumbar puncture and I couldn’t handle being in the room during it. I went with my husband to a different room that the social worker brought me to and I just wailed and wailed. I’m sure the entire ER heard me. My tiny little baby was on the verge of death and there was nothing I could do. It was horrific. She made it through but I’ll never forget.
When I was really young before I could swim I was at the lake with my siblings, parents and grandma. My grandma would stand on the dock and throw my siblings into the water (it was a game and they were having fun). I ran down to tell them it was time to eat. Grandma thought I was my sister and threw me into the lake. I couldn’t swim and panicked. I almost drowned. Thankfully my dad saw and jumped in and saved me. I still don’t like lakes and oceans to this day. 20 years since.
My grandma had undiagnosed dementia at the time, and didn’t do it on purpose. She just couldn’t remember who was who of her grandchildren and forgot I couldn’t swim
I witnessed a car crash that killed someone before anyone knew what happened.
It was like 3seconds post crash. Orange sububru classic bone on the way to the high school. Just a turn after this intersection.
Sister of a student died and she was told her sister died in front of about 100 students from two classes. The silence was terrifying.
I actually still am fucked to this day over it. Because the week before we learned why not saving people can save your life. People don’t want to be recusitated. DNR. That was fucked teaching us that.
So I just drove on by. Thinking I’d be in way less trouble with math homework and English than saving a life from a fresh car wreck.
It was so snowy. So silent. And yet. Calm.
God i really wished I saved that kid instead of believing high school was worse than that.
When my 21 year old daughter called me, screaming, to tell me my 20 year old daughter was dead. She had just found her little sister hanging from a tree. That is some “fuck you up forever” trauma.
My mom used to work so much that I barely saw her. Her company used her voice for the phone answering machine, so whenever I missed her as a kid, I’d call the company just to hear her say: “Welcome to [company name]… Press 1 for…, Press 2 for…”
My cousin was killed beside me by a drunk driver, as we walked home from cubs, I was nine, my mother dies of lukemia when i was ten, a half brother dies as a infant while i was in the next room, My father killed him self and I found him when I was 17, Other things to but that was the worse sort of
During Hurricane Katrina, I nearly drowned in my in-laws’ house. We lost everything we owned since we had just moved to the coast 2 wks prior. My husband lost his mind and my 6 y.o. daughter was traumatized. Therapy didn’t help. He died from drug addiction, and she isnt the same either. Fuck hurricanes.
I got into an accident almost 30 years ago when my oldest was an infant.
It was a broadside.
He was in his car seat diagonally from me, the driver, in the back seat. Normally he’d be behind the driver’s seat so that my wife could attend to him while driving. The only reason he was there was because I was driving him to my parent’s that weekend and my wife was traveling with her parents. The idea being is that I could at least see him over my shoulder, hand him things, etc.
Had he been in his normal spot – he would have been killed. There wasn’t much left his “normal” seat, 99% was caved in and occupied by the rear door panel.
Still have the occasional nightmare about it. He doesn’t remember a thing about it…
Too many things starting with seeing my little sister drown in our pool when I was 6 and she was 18 months leaving her in a coma for 18 years before she passed away. Five months later my mother died. I spent the next 30 years blaming myself because I might have been the one who left the door to the pool open. 10 months after that my father remarried satan who was physically and mentally abusive to me and my older sister while giving my new stepbrother and stepsister preferential treatment. I suddenly found myself having to share a room with my new stepbrother who was literally the annoying person in my class. I developed type 1 diabetes when I was 10 which sucks for a kid – my first birthday after being diagnosed included blowing out the candles on my birthday cake, being given an apple because “diabetics can’t eat sugar” and watching everyone else eat my birthday cake. As an adult, my father went to prison for a white collar crime which was frustrating because technically it was linked to paying for my little sister’s medical care who I was still blaming myself for (as well as my mother’s death) so now I was adding to that to my internal guilt. Then my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes during Covid when they were talking about how diabetics were more likely to die if they caught Covid. Around the same time I learned that my mother’s death wasn’t natural but due to suicide. At this point, my wife and I hit a rough spot and were both talking about divorce. This probably put me into a state of mental breakdown and I almost got fired from my job of more than 20 years which I ended up quitting before they could fire me. Despite all this I still believe that I have a pretty good life because I’m still married to a wonderful woman and have two great sons.
Standing there watching my dad pass away and telling him to hold on just a little while longer until my mom and sister could make it..then the doctor telling me not to say that because it was a stupid thing to say..I just didn’t know what to say in that moment..I did tell him I loved him and that he was the best dad ever to me.
I woke up from a nap in the evening after my ex husband kept me up all night and day fighting. I had said I wanted a divorce a few days prior. The night before I said I was going to go visit my friend a few states away for a while because things were so tense. I woke up in near pitch darkness to my husband sitting across from me and telling me he shut the phone and data off to my phone and that I was not allowed to leave his house unless it was to go stay with my dad. He had cameras all around the inside and outside of the house including my bedroom. He was paranoid and “sure” that I was cheating on him with someone online (I wasn’t) that I would leave to cheat on him and was lying about going to visit my friend.
I showed him my phone. Showed him texts with my friend offering for me to stay with her. He didn’t care. It took me 6 hours straight of talking my way into getting him to turn the phone and data back on. A few days later I caught him trying to sneak a usb recording device out of my room in an attempt to catch me cheating. He did it again the next week. Said he didn’t care that it was a crime in our state and literally told me I was his property.
I stopped moving. For 3 years I sat in a recliner. That’s all I did. I was too terrified to move. I didn’t eat, and I didn’t bathe. I didn’t want the cameras to notify him. My brain decided the way to stay safe was to be a ghost. I didn’t so much as move from the chair to a bed to sleep. I slept in that chair. Since i knew i wouldn’t ever be allowed to leave in normal circumstances i spent 3 years slowly manipulating him into being okay to let me visit my friend. It was easier not to move because moving around the house and pretending like i lived there as if i wasnt being held captive was too hard for me to handle mentally. By the end of the third year he let me leave twice. I told him the last time that i would visit a friend for 6 months and had some believable excuse why. He believed I’d come back and was paranoid I wouldn’t. I took 70-80% of my belongings, as much as I could, and left and never went back. Everyone is pretty sure he’d have killed me if I went back and tried to leave a third time.
Part of my job is to investigate infant deaths. It wasn’t my first time seeing a deadly body. But the way the deceased infant lay there, black and blue, shook me to my core. The examiner during their initial review was so calculated and cold.The body just flopping around. That was years ago, and I still see that baby, naked, unalive.
When I was 15, I was the first person to arrive at an experimental airplane crash in a farm field. The pilot had built the plane in a neighbors garage. He was dead and burning strapped into the plane. The second person to arrive was his wife. Her screams of despair as she stepped out of her truck echo in mind.
My first wife woke up on a Tuesday in 2003 . She was 44 years old and healthy . Exercise regularly. She had been a nurse for 15 years. Worked at the same hospital her whole career.
7am on a Tuesday. She looked at me and said. I can’t go to work today. I do not remember how to get there.
By the time they figured out what was wrong She passed away from brain cancer. It was 7 days later.
I have never been quite right after that experience to this day.
Being dropped off with my sexually abusive aunt nearly every day for a couple of years.
One day when I was about 4, my mother dropped me off like any other day, but as soon as she left I was told to strip down naked which wasnt all that uncommon. I did so but I realized she hadn’t locked the door yet so I made a bee-line for the front door and ran down the road as far as I could without a single thread on my body. One of the neighbors who lived at the end of the road saw me and picked me up. He then called the cops and when they figured out where I came from, they returned me, only for the abuse to start all over again. I never told my mom about it as I had a particularly bad speech delay and couldn’t articulate sentences until I started primary school, which I’m sure made me an easy target. This must be genetic because my 5yo son has the same problem and is in speech therapy as a result. So I have a lot of anxiety from that because I don’t ever want to put him in the same position I was put in as a child, with no means of protecting himself or speaking out.
I’ll never forget that feeling of being returned and having no choice. To this day I’m a control freak, as a result. I don’t like being on other people’s schedules or riding with anyone. I want to be able to leave and change my setting the very moment I’m ready. And I do not trust ANYONE around my kid. Even family. Ever.
my mom and dad used to beat the hell out of me and my brother; but one time my mom hit my little brother so bad that he peed his pants (i was like 10, he was 6) and i remember him crying and screaming “mommy please stop”, and me crying because i couldn’t protect him as i was too scared of my mom at the time
im 20 now and had gone to therapy but that particular situation still haunts me and sometimes i have nightmares about it
So I’ve been put through the wringer my whole life, feel free to look up my comment and post history. But honestly? The worst thing to happen to me was when I was 3 months postpartum with my oldest kid. I was very sleep deprived, not recovering well from my c section, and a stressed out over my mom in law and teen brother in law moving in with us. My kid had head butted me and cracked my tooth. I messed up, badly, and took 3 doses of Tylenol within a few hours period one night. I was so sleepy I kept misreading the time on my phone. Yeah, I ended up in ICU due to Tylenol overdose. I ended up having stomach ulcers from where the Tylenol burned my stomach lining. I went into liver failure. For nearly a week I was in ICU fighting for my life. I even got the anointment of the sick from a local priest- we thought I wasn’t going to make it. When I was finally discharged a week later I came home to a house that was DESTROYED. A pile of dirty dishes sky high, a litter box that hasn’t been cleaned in nearly a week, laundry all over the house, mail scattered everywhere. It was looking just like my mom in laws old apartment, she’s a hoarder and brought even more of her stuff in while I was literally dying. My husband is too used to it so he didn’t care as he was more concerned with my health and our baby. I just… something in me snapped. Before this I kept my home, and yes even my mom in laws apartment, very tidy and clean. Knowing I was dying and none of them could be bothered to clean up after themselves after I agreed to let them move in was, and is, heartbreaking. It’s been 5 years, they’ve since moved out and I had another kid (woohoo!). But since then I’ve been having a really hard time with the housekeeping. The house is still cluttered and it’s to a point where I know a professional needs to come in to help me with the clutter. Out of all my traumas in my life, this is the one that’s been the most hurtful and hard to move past. I love my MIL, and I love my husband. But they really let me down and I don’t know how to move past it despite therapy.
I used to believe my dad was the best of the best and a really good man. In fact, I was made to believe he was one of the best out there and he sure played up to it. So in my mind, there really is none better than him and I’ve been single this whole time because of that but turns out he’s a closet nymphomaniac who has sexually abused me (when I was a child). And now I’m single because, if my dad was supposedly the best, that means all other men are worse and hiding something too. Or at least that’s where my brain is going w this because he’s still an alright dude just with things he’s hiding but yes it eviscerated me when I found out. So yup pretty traumatised for the rest of my life. Tell me, are there really good vanilla men out there, who are emotionally safe, don’t hide things and say what they mean and mean what they say? I’d love to know
Had a very violent and intense emergency surgery. Found out I’m one of those people who don’t have a meaningful reaction to normal doses of opioids. When it was high enough to almost manage the pain, I stopped breathing. Lower than that I was just begging for someone to kill me and fainting again and again and again for the first 36 hours after the surgery. Doctor accused me of abusing drugs and dismissed me.
When I was 15 I downloaded a video on limewire that ended up being a snuff film. I had already been pretty hardened by gore sights like ogrish but this one was different. It was obviously a woman that had been kidnapped, taken out to the desert, stripped, and the video started right as someone started beheading her with a hunting knife. It was high quality, it was close up, I still remember the sounds she made. I felt sick for like a week.
My father has been violent, dismissive, and mostly absent from my life. He has never supported me, never been really present in any way.
The only memories I have with him are the times he hit me and tried to strangle me because of his unhealed shit.
Despite therapy and distance, some things will just follow you forever.
Myself, my partner, my 3 year old daughter, and 2 of my partners nieces all watched my partners dog get run over my a truck. She was a chihuahua/dachshund mix so her little body being crushed by the vehicle caused her eyes to bulge and so much blood to come out of her mouth. The blood curdling screams of my girlfriend were absolutely heartbreaking. And I had this moment of get the kids inside before I could even comfort her. Of course they were sobbing hysterically so I ushered them into the house before rushing back out to the street to comfort my partner. That was her baby and she went everywhere with my partner. Like, there was not a single thing we could go do that wouldn’t include that dog. The lady that ran over her was petting her and shushing my partner, telling her not to scream while she was still here. (At that point the dog was gasping and slowly dying) I had to tell the lady to fuck off before my girlfriend could strangle her. We ended up finding someone to cremate her that day and my girlfriend wears the necklace with her ashes every single day. But those screams still give me nightmares.
I fell head over heels with a bad boy. Eventually, I got pregnant, and we married. He had always said he didn’t want kids, but there we were.
Flash forward, and my labor was exhausting and full of worry. My husband was a paramedic, so when I had an emergency c section 16 hours later to save our baby, the anesthesiologist put my husband in charge of sectioning my airway. Being strapped down in a T pose, feeling your insides literally leave your body, and the baby they remove from you never cry is traumatizing enough, but at some point, I started feeling sick. I threw up, and I literally couldn’t turn my head far enough to prevent me eventually breathing it in. I started choking, and no one was even looking at me. And that anesthesiologist? He forgot to open the line for the IV, so no fluids were being replaced as I started bleeding out on the table. I had an out of body experience that could only be described as what death must feel like. I was literally helpless as I sat there aspirating and struggling to make sense of what was happening. It wasn’t until my own heart rate unexpectedly dipped dangerously low that anyone even thought there might be something wrong. My husband nearly killed me because he couldn’t do one simple task. He treated the whole thing like it was just another social hour, and this was his chance to network with new people.
7 hours later, i finally met our child. I remember thinking something was wrong with her, but medicated and struggling myself, i couldn’t really pinpoint the issue. It wasn’t until my husband left me in the hospital that he could go home to shower and sleep that i asked a nurse to bring her to the nursery. I thought she was cold she looked so blue. Within the hour I had a doctor telling me that they had just performed a spinal tap on my 9 hour old baby because she hadnt been breathing and was completely unresponsive. I tried calling my husband, but he wouldn’t answer his phone. And when he did call back he seemed more upset that he couldn’t get 8 hours of sleep in his own bed than the fact that there was something wrong.
Our baby ended up staying in the NICU for almost 3 weeks after that. They didn’t know what was wrong with our daughter, just that she randomly stopped breathing, and her heart rate kept dipping. They thought it might be meningitis, but they never could explain what happened. Being discharged myself, I had little choice but to visit her as often as I could during all of this. The first few days, my husband agreed to go with me, but he always wanted to go home almost immediately after we arrived and was glued to his phone the entire time we were there. So I stopped taking the painkillers from my own surgery so I could drive myself to the hospital so I could hold her a bit longer. Eventually, she had so many tubes and cords that felt like an impossible task, so I’d just talk to her. The day she went home was the best and worst day of my life.
I was suffering from postpartum depression. I couldn’t stop crying, and apparently, the baby we brought home couldn’t either. She cried and screamed up to 16 hours a day for the first 4 months of her life. It was the exact opposite of what we had seen in the hospital. I was told how pathetic my mental health was and ordered to get my sh*t together, or my husband would leave me. No doctor knew why our daughter wouldn’t stop crying or offered any sort of help. But I had to go back to work. I’d work Graves, get criticism for how often I had to pump while at work, then go home to a pissed off man and a crying baby, and I never could get any sleep. Anyone who tried to help would not return after a few hours in that home. I felt helpless.
Maybe a month after she came home, the phone calls started while I was working. My husband couldn’t handle the crying. The conversation would always be the same. Something along the lines of “if you don’t come home right now, I’m going to k*ll her” or “I now know why shaking baby syndrome is a thing.” So I would drive home in a panic to prevent the unthinkable from happening, my husband would leave, and I would be left to pick up the pieces.
Eventually, things got better as far as the crying went. And I did eventually end up divorcing the a**hole but only after dealing with so much more trauma from him. But I will never ever want to experience pregnancy or a birth again. And babies crying gives me PTSD. The real kicker was that as soon as I asked for a divorce, he suddenly wanted (and was granted by the courts) 50/50 custody to prevent having to pay child support. Currently, he is seeking full custody of that child he hated so much.
Its been 9 years and I still worry every time she goes to his house. I feel like this whole experience just shattered me into an anxiety ridden mess of a person and made me stop trusting in humanity.
I lied to my mom sneaked out and got raped by 3 “friends” I was only 14
When I got pregnant by my ex at 24, he poisoned my dogs, (I didn’t know till after) while I was morning their death the same day, he tried to poison me by giving me tampered coffee. I drank only a bit, it tasted off and the same smell that came from my diseased dogs came from my coffee. When my mouth started to violently water I just knew, went to ER and confirmed poison, and now my daughter has issues with a dead kidney.
After my divorce I went out to celebrate, and some rando guy that knew me from facebook threw me in his van took me home and raped me. I got away.
Got married again to a lovely man, and when I got pregnant with his first, me and my mom was held at gun point in a shop. Nothing stolen from us. Was scary.
More happened throughout but it doesn’t even matter anymore.
Now I don’t leave my house, at all. I don’t trust no man, and don’t talk to people. I am safe now. And keep my daughters safe. My eldest know not to trust any man. Even family.
My father hanging himself but survived because 2 other people along with myself saved him also being choked out with my own arm in front of his first daughter which I was still pregnant .. only two witnesses! His entire family know nothing about it! I survived on of the worst relationships no man would have ever thought to put hands on me but my child’s father.. fast forward to today her dad not in the picture! I live with my mother and father where I am safe! My daughter is the smartest in her class and is about to end the school year in a 4th grade level! She will be in third grade! Oh he totaled my jeep my insurance covered the other persons bill and ambulance,er, and damages … I now have another jeep and he enjoys making fun of me on Meta/Facebook also
Carries a gun .. robbed a bank stole money from a bar (was accused) held a woman at gun point for her own purse I changed my child’s name to my name I gave him time! While he was in prison.
Same sing song story with his first daughter from first marriage! So I don’t fall in love and be with a man nor women! I take care of my family and daughter 💯
During my first year as a cop I had to attend a sudden death call of a guy who had died in the bath. It was pretty grim after 3 days in the water and immediately reminded me of my cousin who had an epileptic fit in the bath and died also. Upon needing to remove the body the removal guys needed help so I volunteered. His skin was so water logged it began to slip off in our hands. Then when we went to the morgue I had to take his fingerprints (normal part of the process). While doing the ring finger the entire outside skin slipped off in my hand. As I hadn’t finished taking the print, I had to roll the skin back onto the finger like a condom. My collegue had to leave after that bit. Eventually finished but it was pretty grim experience overall.
My drunken mom threw a scorpion at me when I was 9 years old. She was intoxicated and at a friend house and she was telling about her horoscope (she’s a scorpio). I’ve run for my life, traumatized.
My best friend from childhood developed a severe eating disorder while at boarding school. As her parents were abroad my mom and I went to pick her up, and the image of my darling friend so skeletal and sick as we pulled up to collect her from school (we were both about 12 years old at the time) is something I’ll never forget.
She was so weak and her hair was all dull and broken and she had no energy and kept her eyes closed the whole drive home. She slept in my bed with me that night and I couldn’t sleep, I was so anxious, I just sat watching her the whole night and kept feeling for her heartbeat because I was so scared she was going to die. The next morning she was taken to the emergency room because of how dire her condition was. My dad had to carry her out of the house while she screamed that she wasn’t going to go and that they couldn’t force her. After she had gone my mom, myself and my friend’s grandfather who had come to help all sat in shock in the entrance way of the house, stared at each other and all started to cry.
She eventually recovered, though the doctors said that if she hadn’t been brought in she probably would have been dead within a day or two. She stopped talking to me after that- I haven’t spoken to her in years though our parents are still close. I don’t know why she cut contact, and even now over a decade later my heart still feels so broken because of what happened.
I was standing at a four way intersection heading home after school. A car had stopped and then proceeded. A motorcycle came over the hill and plowed right into the side of car and the rider went flying over the car and landed on the other side. It was surreal. The dude survived.
And just the other night I was coming home from work late. A motorcyclist passed me going wayyyy too fast. I said to myself that dude is crazy to be going that fast at night. ( I’m guessing 100 mph ish ) A little way down the road he went right into the driver side of a work van that had pulled onto the road. DOA. I think the van was most likely done for as well.
My sister and I fought a lot. Usual sibling rivalry stuff. At the age of 14, she was 16, my mother heard us gighting downstairs. Walked down halfway and calmly announced “Your father and I have decided one of you is moving to live with him! Decide between yourselves. I can’t take it anymore!” Then turned around and walked back upstairs. My sister was abput to start her Junior year. I was just about to be a Freshman. I moved a month later.
TLDR: My mother effectively kicked me out to live with my Dad at age 14.
My kids hearing my scream when the knock on the door came to tell me my husband and their dad was killed in an accident. I still hear my scream in my head and I hste that they heard it but the conversation they had inside was the worst.
One of my children said I think I heard mommy say daddy was killed, my other child said no, he probley just cheated on mommy again.
The whole thing was traumatic and effed up.
My lovely daughter was assisting a vehicle roll over when a box truck driver operating illegally struck her at 58 mph. Then he left. Cops caught him and let him go. Zero charges. I spent two years and over 4000 hours building a case to take to the DA. (The feds refused to prosecute and waited the statute of limitations out.)
DA finally took the case. The cops, doubled down on their failure, threw the case in court. Driver ended up with a reckless driving ticket. All other charges not guilty.
Oddly enough, according to law, reckless driving and a deceased person equals vehicular homicide. Still found him NG. Afterwards the jury said they did not understand the charges.
I will never understand how the guy who murdered my daughter walked free. There is no justice.
No parent should have to do their daughter’s accident/death investigation. I will never be right again.
I had a bad SH problem one summer. My parents knew but nothing was done and they wouldn’t get me a therapist. One night I cut my hip so badly I couldn’t stand up again and I was gushing blood. I panicked, screamed for help. Bio mother came upstairs after a few minutes, saw what happened,and helped me downstairs. She put me on the living room floor and called my sister who came over, and bio mother didn’t want me to go to the hospital (she didn’t want anyone to know what happened) so they patched me up there. My sister was insistent that I needed stitches but bio mother refused. She didn’t want to miss the flight we had the next day. I spent two weeks in Florida in a wheelchair recovering because I couldn’t walk.
When I was 4, I saw my mom get hit by a car (drunk driver). I remember every detail of the day except for the moment of impact – one moment we’re walking, the next she’s covered in blood and unconscious in a ditch and I’m asking her to wake up.
She survived and told me that when she came to in the hospital, she asked after me because she thought I was dead.
I was a paramedic in a southwest metropolitan city 20 plus years ago. Death was a constant. You learn to shut it off. You have to. But it was the kids. The kids haunt me the most. In my dreams. You never fully recover from them. Not sure if I really wanted to share this. But getting it out even years later helps. Please. Bear with me.
It was actually a relatively calm night. Nothing major. Some routine calls. So I was helping out in the ER. A call came in. Single vehicle accident. Vehicle versus concrete retaining wall. Driver unresponsive according to the caller. We arrived on scene. An suv hit an open manhole cover. At a considerable rate of speed. Lost a tire and swerved directly into the retaining wall. Generally it’s not up to us to announce someone dead on the scene. But her skull was crushed. No seat belt.
As if that wasn’t bad enough. There was an empty forward facing car seat in the front passenger seat. Which was empty. I noticed blood on the floor and dripping from up underneath the dash.
I’ll save you the details of the recovery of the little one. What happened was the baby wasn’t restrained in the car seat. The air bag deployed and forced her down on the floor and up underneath the dash. Cops estimated mom’s speed at 60 mph when she hit the wall.
Fucking job. Some parts just tear your shit up still. You’ll never unsee some shit.
I pet my dogs and tell my spouse I love him every time I leave a room.
I was a teenager, just came home and met my (not biological) dad pretty much in the door. He had been working on something and was carrying planks into another room, told him I’d join him in a little bit, just wanted to leave the bag upstairs. He jokingly said I shouldn’t spend all my money on our pets, and went into the other room as I went upstairs. I was just up the stairs when I heard the thud of him dropping the planks, went to my room, put the bag on my bed and turned to go downstairs again. I called out to him, something about a recent math test, we’d get the results the next day, but I was pretty sure I had passed. I figured he hadn’t heard me, I always struggled with math and we had worked hard on it, and the lack of response wasn’t like him.
I repeated myself as I walked down the stairs, louder and with an added (joking) “you’re not proud?” just as I entered the room.
The planks were leaned against a chair, not dropped, putting them down wouldn’t have made the sound.
It was the first thing I noticed, and it took me what felt like an eternity to process what I was seeing. When I did, I realized that the way he was laying on the floor he’d be at risk of hitting his head in the planks when he sat up. His leg was bent all wrong, I should move the planks, I should move his leg, I had to get help.
I was in that room with him for over 40min until they got to us, our dog barking ballistic from where she was locked in. I wanted to get her as soon as they arrived, but they told me not to, that she might be stressed and react aggressively. So I went outside instead, a soft-spoken woman followed, asking questions about my name, who else had been there or lived with us. I told her about the planks, about his leg, that the dog is friendly, I think she’s locked in the bedroom but I’m not sure, and she said I had done good.
I was looking at the small blue flowers in the garden when I asked how long he’d need to heal, and when I could get the dog. She didn’t answer, but asked how old I was.
I left with social service workers that evening, he had died on the floor, and our dog, who he had loved so very much, was put down the following days. His son said nobody wanted her.
I didn’t get to say goodbye to either of them.
I found my Mom’s body. She had O’D and been dead for a week in a hot house in the summer. She was all bloated and I was legitimately afraid her stomach was going to burst while we were there, the skin looked like it was ripping. Her face and hands were black but her teeth were white and she had coughed blood onto the wall behind her head. That image still flashes in my brain on occasion, but the smell was the worst part. It was in the house the whole time I was cleaning it out and even when I went home and showered it was still in my nose.
My father was a police officer and later a court officer, he shared 2 stories that i have never been able to shake:
Called out to a domestic dispute between a woman and a man (not sure which was the parent) they were beating on each other because they had gotten tired of beating their 6 year old. When my dad asked the child to show him their room (to get them away from the wastes of space that should have been caring for them) he was taken to a closet in the front hall. pile of dirty clothes on the floor, garbage and some old food. I didn’t always understand or get along with my father, but seeing the tears in his eyes as he explained this to me broke me in a way I still don’t really understand.
As a court officer, a family was brought in (Husband, Wife, 2 Sons and 1 Daughter) the daughter had been sexually abused by both brothers and the father, when asked to explain why they had done this, very matter-of- factly the father replied “do you want her to learn from a stranger do you?” They knew what they were doing, the mother knew. I know my dad liked a drink but he drank a lot that night.
I was in stop and go traffic that was barely moving. Often, people riding motorcycles will zoom down the lane line or weave in between cars. A guy on a motorcycle weaved in front of the car directly behind me and they weren’t paying attention (i assume) and began to accelerate as we all moved forward and directly hit him as he zipped in front of them, and it happened right as I glanced in the rearview mirror. He rolled onto their windshield, shattering it, and the car proceeded to run him over. He was trapped under the front wheels of the car when they stopped, trapping him. Thankfully a van full of military guys (we were right next to a base) was a couple lanes over and they all hopped out and proceeded to lift the car up and pull him out. Traffic had begun to move at this point, hence why the car accelerated enough to cause this much damage, and I was in front of them so I kept driving where I called 911 to report what I saw. I saw the entire thing and it felt like it was happening in slow motion but maybe occurred over a couple minutes. The worst part is I was on my way to work, a night shift at a club, and this was all about 10 minutes before clocking in and then dealing with customers until 3 am. I don’t know if the man who was hit ended up being okay but I still feel a pit in my stomach when I see a motorcycle or I am on that same stretch of highway in traffic.
Idk, if I’d say traumatize but I’ll always have the image of that young skateboarder in the parking garage having a seizure from the brain damage of a fall as his two friends sat beside him. I parked after confirming they called 911 and saw the ambulance take him away. I don’t know what happened to him but he’s probably fucked and it is definitely odd to think how I saw some young man just like me have his entire life possibly destroyed in that moment.
I’m going for a less bad one because I’ve had plenty of people DM me about my worse stories getting off to them or assuming I’m attention seeking and playing the victim. Sooo:
I was 9-10 years old and preparing for a school play. I was cast as a rebellious teen (the character was 11 now that I think about it). My scene was meant to be a comparison with a group of younger children. The teacher are getting them to do silly movements in gym class and they all love it and participate, then the next scene was a group of older kids refusing to do them and being grumpy.
I was getting changed for the dress rehearsal, wearing what would actually become my secondary school uniform (we borrowed ties and skirts from a secondary school in my town which I’d later attend). A random teaching assistant walks up to me and decides that, to fit my character, my skirt needed to be shorter. She grabs hold of my skirt and starts rolling it up at the top to make it shorter. I’m protesting but I was a shy little kid who was terrified of getting yelled at, so I was saying things like “my mum wouldn’t like this” instead of “I don’t like this.” She tells me it’s a part in a play, it doesn’t matter what my mum wants, I’m playing a character. I remember holding onto her shoulders because she was being so rough that I was losing my balance. Two girls in the year above me (so only 10-11) speak up and say that she’s rolled it up so high that she’s exposed my underwear to everyone else in the changing room, and I’m in tears at this point. She huffs, yanks my skirt down to full length and storms out, muttering to herself.
I brought this up to my mum recently and she said I never told her about it… It dawned on me that that was the school year that she was in hospital. I only visited her when my dad was with me and I didn’t want to talk about it in front of him. By the time she was better, it was about a year later. I was a “sensitive” kid (undiagnosed neurodivergent and had mental health issues) so me crying wasn’t enough to stop her, apparently.
I was also sexually assaulted by other students (running up behind me and groping me as a dare, getting aggressively pinned down during kiss-chase, my “puppy love” boyfriend groping me even when I told him no) and every so often, I remember the abuse started much younger than I thought.
Edit: I just feel like sharing how cool my mum was as a kid lmao. I was a huge pushover and still am, I really struggle setting boundaries and standing up for myself and I was unfortunately taken advantage of a lot growing up. My school had a no retaliation policy, if a kid hit you and you hit them back, you’re both in trouble. They said if a kid is being mean, you have to say “please stop it, I don’t like it!” I told my mum that and she said something along the lines of “If someone hits you, you damn well hit them back, and I will sit in the headmaster’s office and stick up for you if you do.” I never did fight back, but it was nice to know she’d back me up if I did lol.
Was babysitting 2 children in a dysfunctional home. Their uncle and some of his friends were there. Suddenly, there was a home invasion and 2 people came in firing guns. 3 people were shot, 2 died. I tried doing cpr on one until I turned him to his side and saw most of his head was gone.
Detective said I wasn’t shot because one of them had hung out there and “liked” me. I had literally thrown the children in a closet when it all started happening. The children were OK physically.
There’s LOTS more to this story but that’s the bare bones
I was 9 and my “father” got into a rage because I wouldn’t take my asthma medication (because I wasn’t having an attack and didn’t need it. He’s too stupid to realize this) grabbed me by the hair on my head and threw me out of our hotel room and wouldn’t let me in. A stranger walked by and asked what was wrong. I told her, by then her husband was there, so they knocked on the door and demanded he let me in.
I’ve never forgiven that bastard.
I was 14. I traded seats in the car with the girl who died a few minutes later. I wanted to sit in the backseat. Her sister insisted I sit in the front seat with her. Her sister took my seat in the back seat. I lived. She died. This happened in 1992. Not a day goes by that I dont think of her.
Watching my daughter getting a rape kit when she was 2. She kept screaming what are they going to do next as they pulled out pieces of her hair. She’s 18 now and that night is etched in my brain. I’m so thankful that she doesn’t remember & has no idea what happened to her.
When I was 9 or 10, my Mom was losing a battle with breast cancer. One night I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of intense screaming. Shortly thereafter an ambulance came, and the EMT’s couldn’t get the gurney into her bedroom without opening my bedroom door. So they opened it and I could see the look of sadness on the EMT’s faces when they discovered me there. I heard them talk to my Mom and get her onto the gurney, and then they wheeled it back into the hallway. As they passed by my room I could see her, she was contorted in this horrible position that no human should be in. She was on her side and sobbing, yelling over and over again about my sister and I. “My babies! Where are my babies! Don’t let my babies see me like this!” She didn’t know my bedroom door was open. Then the ambulance left. After they left, I got up and walked around our dark house to look for my step father, or really any adult. There was no one there, they just left my sister and I alone in the house. A few hours later, one of Mom’s friends came to get us ready for school. And we went, because there was no one to look after us during the day.
Later, we found out the cancer spread to her bones, and a piece of her spine broke off during the night. Hence the screaming. Amazingly, she lived another 1.5 years and even taught herself to walk again even though she had a hunched back for the rest of her days. To this day, I can still hear the screaming sometimes and just typing this out brought tears to my eyes. RIP Mom, you were so strong.
My abusive mom almost killed me several times. She beat us often. It would start as a normal spanking or beating. Then I would try to get away or push her off of me. She would take that as me fighting back and she would escalate. She would pin me down and sit on me to beat me. I would scream as I’m being beaten, but because there was a whole ass grown human sitting on me, I couldn’t catch my breath. So I would struggle to get air, and that would piss my mom off even more because that was considered fighting back, so she’d beat me harder, and I’d scream harder, and I’d lose even more air, then I’d have to fight to catch my breath, and she would beat me harder again. There were several times where I was fighting to stay conscious. It happened several times. I was young, maybe between 8 and 11 years old.
I try to think of myself at that age and the third person, and celebrate and honor that young kid for fighting to stay alive. I would have missed a lot of joy in my life if he hadn’t fought back. That was his mother, who’s supposed to love and protect him, and here she is almost murdering him.
I now have chronic anxiety issues and diagnosed PTSD. I honestly think I have as much trauma from watching her beat up my brothers as I do from taking her bearings. I’m a functional man, with a wife and kids. My brothers are totally dysfunctional from the things that happened to them. I guess I was able to manage that trauma better than they were. I have crushing guilt from knowing that their lives were ruined and somehow I was able to manage my trauma.
I was driving my dog to the dog park & came across some cars waiting for what I thought was the school bus that was dropping kids off. Then I saw the dog in the middle of the road. This young woman had hit him with her truck. I watched her as she got out & saw what she had done. She was hysterical. The dog was a black lab. Just like mine. It’s tail was wagging. The woman got back in the truck I think to move it but she accidentally backed over the dog. It’s tail stopped. I saw it all happen. There were all this kids getting off a bus. Every single time I drove down that road I would think of it. It’s been 10 years & that memory is stuck in my head.
I feel kinda stupid for always saying this on reddit…my daughter was born with a bad heart and all her Dr’s are out of state so my mother sold her house to move in with me to help with my son while I was away with daughter…years later my mother got cancer and now I am both their caretakers on my own…one day getting back from appointment with my daughter we found my mother dead on my front porch i did cpr until ems got here they did shock her back but only lived two days after but never woke up..
When we got home my living room was covered in blood walls ceiling and carpet…it traumatized me and my daughter so badly my daughters heart gave out and she died I buried my mother and daughter in same casket I will never be ok therapy is not working medicine don’t help..my heart will always be shattered..my poor sweet baby and mom 💔
I was 9 years old, my dad was pissed off that my mom hid his percs, so he threw a coffee mug at her, dragged her around the kitchen, almost set her on fire, and eventually semi-successfully stabbed her in her arm. She had a golf ball on her wrist after that. I watched it all. All I could do was watch. It just hit me 11 years later that the officer who was asking me about cartoons, was distracting me from my dad getting arrested. I got new glasses that day so I saw everything quite clearly.
Luckily my father is clean now. I have a kid now too. I will never make him feel that way. My husband is an amazing father and the cycle stops here
I worked as a Parile Officer for the state I lived in for 7 years. 4 of those years my main job duty was to write Pre Sentence Investigation reports about felony sex offenses committed by adults. I was tasked with summarizing the official version of the crime(s) committed and then interviewing survivors to understand how their lives changed as a result of being sexually assaulted. I also spoke with the perpetrators and learned about their lives prior to the commission of the crimes. I was then tasked with making a recommendation to the court about sentence lengths and release conditions. People told me things that will probably haunt me until I die. I’ve spent a lot of time in court attending sentencing hearings and listened to numerous victim/survivor impact statements. The lack of remorse shown by the majority of offenders is absolutely staggering. Before I left, I was tasked with searching a smartphone that belonged to a sex offender living in the community because we suspected they violated his conditions of parole. They were actively trading and sharing child sexual exploitation material (child porn) with other people via a messaging app. I’d read countless descriptions of it because I’d written numerous reports about people guilty of possession but I was not prepared to actually see it. People are depraved. They do and say the most hideous things to each other but are unwilling to take any accountability, even when multiple people come forward saying the same thing. The American justice system is not built to help or benefit people harmed by crime.
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I attended the sudden death of a month old child. Father was at sea since birth, and never saw his child alive.
Opened a pistachio and there was a dried up worm inside
I took a nap after working out one day in my early twenties. I woke up and coughed one time, blood sprayed everywhere. Then it wouldn’t stop coming.
It was like a faucet had been turned on and wouldn’t stop. I had to keep spitting the blood out to be able to breathe. I stumbled to my gf at the time and said we need to go to the hospital. It was like trying to talk under water.
Eventually got to the hospital and had to have two separate full doses of the medication that helps blood clot and is usually only is used when someone loses a limb in a traumatic injury like a car crash.
After sitting for 12 hours not allowed to talk or move my upper body or clear my throat due to the chance it would jiggle the blood clot forming in my lungs, I accidentally cleared my throat and restarted the bleeding all over again.
It’s called massive or critical hemoptysis.
Eventually, the bleeding stopped and it clotted successfully after sitting awake like that for about 18 hours straight.
I still have ptsd to this day if I wake up and cough or cough in my sleep.
That is one of the most traumatic things I ever experienced.
Almost drowning in your own blood out of nowhere should not be a thing anyone has to experience.
My fourth grandchild was born too early and only lived 2 hours and I didn’t get to meet her.
My mom abandoned me. When I was barely 6. I’m 17 now, and it still haunts me. I got to therapy for it. My family bears the brunt of my ptsd. It sucks.
I was playing with fireworks when I met this kid insistently wanting to play with my fireworks like the usual annoying kid. He just kept on playing with my fireworks but I let him. My relatives told me that he’s the annoying kid that keeps on wanting to play more and more fireworks; if you keep on allowing him, he’ll never stop. And so I stopped him. Later did I find out that kid died. That kid had been abused from the day he was born. We’re talking about beating, dad putting cigarettes out on him. Never had a mother. Only had a poor violent father. Died young in a road accident. Never got to experience true joy. If only I had let him play with the fireworks a little more.
Nice try, Skynet, but those memories are going to stay buried where they belong.
Too much raspberry vodka in college. Can’t have anything with fake raspberry flavoring after that. I graduated ~15 years ago.
My dad literally went to the store and didn’t come back until 4 years later. I was 9 years old and by myself and my dad said he would be back. I sat by the window for hours waiting for his car to come back and it didn’t. My mom was at work and I called her and she said he’s just running behind, but he wasn’t. He just left us behind. My mom ended up working 2 jobs, all while finding out she had cancer. 4 years later, he shows back up. To this day, if my husband is gone too long at the gym, I sit by the window panicking.
My childhood was pretty fucked up. Trigger warning: sexual assault/rape
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tl;dr: mom married a pedo that molested my sister when at a very young age She stayed with him so she didn’t have to work. As my sister hit early teens, stepdad started sleeping with her. I was a little too young to understand what was going on. Turns out, mom knew.
Mom refused to leave him, because she hadn’t had a job in 15+ years, what would she do, work? Finally divorced him when my sister was 17, I was 14. She immediately got pregnant from some guy from her highschool, fell to drugs, lost custody of her kid after a few years because she couldn’t keep clean.
Uhm. Yeah so. AMA I guess. I’m sure this comment will get reported or deleted as I have no idea what the rules are about posting triggering content like this.
Grief is overwhelming
Two weeks ago I witnessed first hand a vehicular manslaughter. It was a 19 year old nursing student who was crossing the street and an oncoming car (driver is suspected DUI) hit him going around 50 mph.
It all happened right in front of me as I was in the oncoming lane. The kid was dead on impact and as I came to a stop, his body laid right next to my car with pieces of his skull and brain matter scattered on the road with the body mangled.
That’s not even the worst part, I stuck around to give my information to the cops as a witness and hearing the screams of the hysterical father, mother, and siblings crying and asking God “why” will haunt me for the rest of my life.
Seeing a team surrounding my husband while they try to bring him back to life & failing. I suffer with PTSD as a result
r/askreddit is that you?
I was on a lunch break and walking back to my office. While I was waiting for the light to change I saw a man swerving on his bicycle and drop to the ground. It’s an areas known for a lot of substance abuse so I assumed he was high. I yelled “sir, sir, are you okay”? The light changed and I ran over. He was still, drooling and his eyes were open wide just starting at the sky. Two women jumped out of their car and started CPR. There was no pulse. I had 911 on the phone talking them through what to do. The ambulance arrived and he was dead. I think he was dead the second he hit the ground. Knowing I watched a stranger death really got to me. He was going home with some groceries on the back of his bike. After giving my statement to the police, I walked back to work. I must have been in shock because co-workers came up to me immediately asking if I was okay. I blurted out “I just watched a man die”. I was sent home and balled my eyes out.
When I was 18 I lived with my boyfriend. He was getting more aggressive over time, even choking me at times. One day I thought he was really going to kill me. He kept pinning me to the ground and beating my head against the floor. He’d like get up and pace around before coming at me. We lived in the middle of nowhere and didn’t have cell phones yet, so I really didn’t know what to do. So I grabbed a steak knife, thinking he would stop or something. He didn’t. He came at me, and I popped him right in the lung. I did manage to stop the bleeding and get him to the hospital. I had to go to court because at the time, you weren’t allowed to use weapons unless the person beating you had one too. Eventually, the charges were dropped though because it was pretty clear he was trying to kill me. He still messages me trying to get back with me every few years. Absolute nutter. I’m doing well without him, though!
I drove home on lunch break in college. It was a summer school class and I needed a lab report that I forgot. At the light turning left. An 18 wheeler tboned me and drove me into a gas station. I survived, but it caused years of ptsd and phobias of driving.
When I was kid there was a senior who was good friend of mine as our family were close but at one point he started to kind of i don’t know what to say this, he started to kind of molesting me he said me touch his private part and do more things, i don’t want to go in deep in this matter. And i was kid that time i done what ever he said as i don’t know was right or wrong that time.
So this is one thing cause because of this lot of things change in my life.
Molested by mother and sister until I was 7 or so years old. Did some really heinous stuff to me that haunts me everyday and suffer exhausting night terrors most nights
when I was in school I was attacked by a girl in between the canteen and the school building. she came running up behind me and drapped me to the ground by my hair and hit my head off a concrete step which knocked me unconscious and while I was out she continued to beat my head off the step while ontop of me and I do remember hearing her screaming “why wont you fucking die” and my body shut down during it which also caused me to lose control of my bladder and piss myself which is what everyone remembers cause atleast 30 people seen it happen. I was told in the hospital that I nearly died and my brain was bleeding and I was left with memory loss, a bad concussion and ptsd. all because a psycho bitch tried to kill me over some lies her friends had told her. I don’t know exactly why it happened but the rumors that go round about it said that I either rolled up her sleeves to laugh at her scars (which doesn’t make sense cause if I did that she would attack me on the spot and obvi i wouldnt do that), I was racist against her which how tf she’s white too or I was homophobic which isn’t true cause I wasn’t but I barely knew this girl and she was just crazy ig. but it’s completely ruined my life even tho it’s been 4 years now I still think about it and I still can’t be in a trapped space, I can’t be in public without being really anxious, and I’m automatically scared and uncomfortable around other girls now so I struggle to make friends. and there was absolutely nothing done about it because it happened on school property and my parents didn’t want it being a big deal which I only realized after is so fucked up. but they basically just said that if it happened again the police would be involved.
In 2018, I joined the railways to follow in my family’s footsteps. I just wish someone had warned me what I was walking into.
During my first year on the job, a 46-year-old father of two jumped in front of my train. When I went down to check on him, he was still alive. I immediately began CPR, but he started bleeding heavily from the head and passed away not long after. I then had to evacuate 350 passengers from the train—still covered in his blood.
Eight months later, while taking a train back to the depot, we struck a woman who had run away from the hospital. There was nothing left of her.
Just four months after that, while operating the last train of the night, the train came to a sudden, violent stop. A man had been lying on the tracks and sat up at the moment we hit him. When I got out to check, I found his head attached to the front of the train, and his mangled body underneath. He had been decapitated.
Not long after that, I left the railways. I haven’t been the same since.
Sleepless nights, recurring nightmares, panic attacks, and severe mental health struggles have become my new normal.
When I was 7 years old, my family, in the chaos of taking my mother to rehab for the 6th time in a year (yeah it never stuck) pulled away from the house in NC to drive her to the facility in GA and just never came back to get me. I tried calling them but, in the days before caller id was everywhere, one set of grandparents thought I was prank calling from the other ones house. SOMEHOW no one noticed that the child was both invisible and silent for 3 months. I lived alone for most of it, then when I ran out of food, I told the neighbor who ALSO tried calling my grandparents and got ignored. So I spent meals at her house. I wound up going back to our apartment after two nights with her kids (she had 8) all sleeping in one giant cali king bed and doing things like faking seizures to scare me.
It took my mother, finally sober, coming out and going “where is my child?” for anyone to realize that no one had seen me in months.
I also lost my best friend to a child serial killer/r-worder and then faced him down with a broomstick on a playground, but that’s another story.
I was about 9 years old, I was shooting off a cap gun in my backyard when I started one of my mums horses. It jumped the fence over one of the fence posts and sliced its belly open and its intestines spilled out
Told my wife of 15 years that if we didn’t drastically change our lifestyle, we would be financially insolvent and probably end up divorced.
Five days later she tried to have me arrested for being abusive but there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest me.
She got a divorce lawyer the following day and changed her story to say I had been raping her our entire relationship.
I was arrested, lost everything I owned, and my children still want nothing to do with me.
Spent 18 days in jail because rape was a presumptive charge in my state at the time and had to wear a GPS ankle tracker for a year before sitting through a two day trial in which I presented no witnesses and no real evidence beyond my testimony while projecting nine years worth of text message conversations and FB posts from my ex.
My attorneys put me on the stand and just asked me questions about my life. They refused to cross examine plaintiff and her witnesses because they said there is no way a jury is ever going to believe this story.
They didn’t.
The jury deliberated for about twenty minutes before I was unanimously found innocent. Two of the jurors, the bailiff, the court stenographer and the two court appointed forensic psychiatrists all said this was the worst case of false accusations they had ever witnessed—a disturbing lack of convergence and at the very least grossly exaggerated claims by plaintiff, were the specific things to which they testified. They were plaintiff’s witnesses and that was the moment the prosecutor realized they had made a mistake but by then it was waaaaay too late.
During my 18 days in jail I saw a man beaten unconscious because he had a toothache and they wouldn’t give him any pain meds and he couldn’t stop screaming. Don’t know what happened to him. He never returned to the cell.
Day three of my incarceration a man tried unsuccessfully to hang himself by jumping off a 2nd tier balcony tearing the sheet-noose he had fashioned for himself causing him to just jerk abruptly but ultimately plummet to the concrete floor below. He didn’t die but he also never returned.
My cell mate was a convicted murder but we connected because I found a Maya Angelou book and read it to him and some of the other cell mates during my incarceration.
To this day, movies like Richard Jewell and anything involving wrongful prosecution are triggering to the point I shake uncontrollably and get nauseous watching them.
I can’t be followed by a police officer without having to pull my car over and let them pass.
I can’t watch people get arrested in TV without a visceral panic attack.
I can’t walk in public if police are present.
I fully support victims rights and believe that spousal rape is a valid claim, so I don’t protest publicly, but my life ended because a woman was allowed to weaponize rape charges to gain favor in a divorce and the psychological impact of having my freedoms stripped without warning and being incarcerated in a DC jail for almost three weeks gave me night terrors for years.
This country needs massive reform in the legal system and unfortunately that will come from MAGA supporters and will over correct to the days we didn’t recognize any rights beyond those of white men in this country. I fear for this country knowing how corrupt and broken things truly are and knowing the only people having any real impact on changing them are motivated by the wrong priorities, but my trauma is real and part of me silently knows that if I had been black or unable to afford six digit legal costs I would have spent a couple decades in jail for a crime I didn’t commit.
Being 10 years old, playing in the park at the back of when I lived with neighbours. Just messing around etc. I didn’t understand mental health 26 years ago. A paranoid schizophrenic, tried to take my (left) hand, I struggle but he bent my wedding finger and middle finger back to my wrist. The metropolitan police (London) let him go because he had “an alibi”. I know who it was & she didn’t care about me & I am the same age as her son.
I had to switch schools sophomore year of high-school because as a freshman an older boy had raped me and then a few days later he was mad I didn’t want to be his friend anymore I guess? He proceeded to set my hair and face on fire in the back of our high school with a can of axe and a lighter while the whole school was outside waiting to get on our busses… everyone, of course, saw.
I still have severe agoraphobia and anxiety about being alone in public places (no one “on my side,” watching my back). I have been assaulted a few more times since then but that was the worst one for sure.
It’s ok, he’s dead now 💜 and that fact makes me a little happier every time I remember what happened all those years ago.
My mum was driving my then boyfriend to work, and I came along for the ride. We rounded a bend in the road, and just ahead of us was a man engulfed in flames from the waist up. As it was summer, we had no jackets with us, but my dads hivis jacket was in the boot of the car. We put the bloke out by covering him with the jacket and rolling him in someone’s garden. I stayed with him, talking to him to get some information and to keep him conscious. I couldn’t sleep for two days and still get flashbacks if I see a film with people on fire, and I never forgot the smell of burning flesh to this day. I was 16 years old, luckily, I had red Cross training. I’m 59 years old now but I can still remember the chats finger tips on the gatepost of the garden we had used to put him out in, which had melted off as he had held onto it as he had gone through.
TLDR; I broke my neck when I was 6 and my parents lied about it and didn’t seek treatment
When I was 6 I fell from the top deck of a house boat. “Dad” and his mates were smoking glass pipes (meth) up top and I managed to climb my way up. They yelled and scared me and I fell back from the top deck to the bottom, not directly on my head, but on an angle where my head hit the deck before my legs. Instead of taking me to hospital, I was given Panadol and my brother game boy. Then I got in trouble for using his game boy. 3 weeks later they took me to the general doctors and said I just fell in the ground so the doctor said I’ll be fine.
25 years later, I have some imaging on my neck and spine due to a work accident. Doctor asked “were you dropped as a baby?!” As a joke because the top 2 vertebrae had been broken and did not heal correctly. I told him the story. Basically, he’s saying I broke my neck when I was 6. No scans, just gave me Panadol
I was left in a hot car when I was 7 out the front of my “dads” workplace so my “dad” could get tanked on beers. I screamed and screamed and no one ever came until his boss found me when he was shutting up the shed. “Dad” went home in a taxi
I also took a long time learning to swim (I still avoid it. I can float and survive but there no way in hell I can swim in a race or anything). My “dad” put a life jacket on me and just threw me off the deck and told me to swim to his friends boat. I can’t go in open water, only shallow pools.
In my parents home, there was this very old, paint and oil splattered wooden chair. Horrible shape. Had been there long as I could remember. I was chopping wood for kindling and I figured hey, I’ll save my dad some time and chop it up, assuming it was scrap wood he hadn’t gotten around to.
Chopped it into bits, Dad came home and nearly fainted when he saw the chair. He asked me why and I said I assumed it was scrap. He then told me the story of his parents home burning down, leaving nothing behind other than that wooden chair since it was on the porch and it was the last to burn. The last piece of his childhood home, only remaining piece from his grandparents and I literally chopped it into bits. I still don’t think he’s forgiven me.
The day my husband grabbed me tightly by the arms in anger, and said that he would kill me, cut my body into pieces and spread me in three countries (with his three passports ), so no one would find me, the day he dangled his 18 month old son by one arm and beat him severely as I watched his little body swing back and forth, the day he threw his daughter through a door in the bedroom and she hit the wall and slid to the floor . There is a link on my profile , this is a true account of my life . Something’s you can’t unsee or unhear.
my ex boyfriend killed my cat last year n just the lead up to how it happened will forever traumatize me. it all started off that morning when my cat had knocked over a stack of papers (most were my ex’s) that were resting on a small stool. my ex was in a light sleep so when he heard it he began to get overly upset n woke me up by saying I needed to get my cat. I told him that it wasn’t a big deal for him to get so upset about because the papers were already messy n my cat didn’t ruin anything he just knocked them over. he then proceeded to get even more mad n told me that if i didn’t pick the papers up n he had to that my cat would get it n that made me upset because i didnt understand where this anger came from n why it was being directed at my cat. i didn’t end up picking up the papers because i was upset n just snapped back so when he got up to pick the papers up he grabbed my cat by his skull instead of his scruff making his way to our back door with the plan to throw him outside. i began to scream at him asking what was wrong with him n telling him he was overreacting all while stepping in front of him n grabbing my cat back.
after that i left to my moms house with a bad feeling n sour taste in my mouth fully convinced i was going to tell him we were breaking up because truthfully i was scared at how angry he got so fast. fast forward after explaining the situation to my moms house she asked me if i thought my ex would ever kill my cat n i said no because truthfully i didn’t believe my ex was capable of something like that no matter the anger issues (how naive). i had work that day so i asked my mom babysit but she said she had plans n no one else would be home. not wanting to go back n see my ex (he’s been texting me trying to plead since i left) i just decided that i would call out n stay at my moms house until i decided what i wanted to do. my mom argued that i shouldn’t do that n that i should just go back home n go to work since my ex said he was sorry.
fast forward that’s what i ended up doing n my ex asked me to use my car so he could go pick up a couch with my brother. i said yes so he dropped me off, about 2 n a half hours into my shift my ex messaged me saying that he’s done something bad n he’s sorry n that he’s gonna tell me the truth so i can decide whether i wanna be with him or not. my stomach drops n i ask him what happened n he tells me he killed my cat (he tried to say “our son” as if he was both of ours). i immediately tell my coworkers i have an emergency n have to run to the bathroom. i call him n told him to not play like that n he says that he wouldn’t play like that. i then ask why would he do that n he claims that my cat had urinated on him so he snapped n threw him at the wall then slammed him on the floor.
i told him he had to come get me now n when he finally did he tried to cry to me as if he was sorry. when we got home i asked where my cat was n he said he threw him in the dumpster !!! claiming he didn’t want me to see him like that i said but why the dumpster ? he wasn’t just some random cat he was my animal, my best friend. i had to search for the dumpster he threw him in cause he walked away like a drama queen n wouldn’t tell me n when i did i grabbed a black bag. i opened the bag to check but also because i felt like i just had to know how bad he hurt him, i saw the image of my sweet boy cat with his limbs n neck broke, eyeball popping out of its socket just laying limp. i couldn’t help but scream. this happened last year n i cant help but think about that day n how many emotions i felt going thorough that. i don’t think ill ever forget that day.
I used to live a bad lifestyle. Was an addict, but a functioning one. Held down a job place etc but didn’t surround myself with the best people. One night I was drugged and raped and it was filmed and I didn’t find out about it till a few years later.
How I was ever that person makes me sick. I try really hard to give back and be a good person. I got sober on my own because I wanted to, and maybe I’m a little hard on addicts today, but no one will save you but you.
Learning about the upcoming societal collapse
Once I was in a college auditorium of approximately 500 people for a history class. The professor asked a question and I confidently yelled out the wrong answer. There were crickets for a moment until he said”No…. That’s completely wrong. The correct answer is:”
And I’ll never forget that
Covid ICU nurse
When we got the call that Dad had passed away. Hearing Mum say/cry “No! This isn’t real!!!”
Sad. That will break you. I was grown too.
A past abusive relationship with a drug addict who would steal my car while I was asleep. Even 20 years later I feel very nervous when my husband uses my car. If he’s 5 minutes late I’m in full panic mode.
I was a first time mom and my first baby had just been born. When she was five days old she stopped responding and was floppy (floppy infant syndrome). We rushed to the ER and they had to do all sorts of medical interventions. I just stood there and watched in horror as my five day old baby screamed in pain and there was nothing I could do. She had to get a lumbar puncture and I couldn’t handle being in the room during it. I went with my husband to a different room that the social worker brought me to and I just wailed and wailed. I’m sure the entire ER heard me. My tiny little baby was on the verge of death and there was nothing I could do. It was horrific. She made it through but I’ll never forget.
When I was really young before I could swim I was at the lake with my siblings, parents and grandma. My grandma would stand on the dock and throw my siblings into the water (it was a game and they were having fun). I ran down to tell them it was time to eat. Grandma thought I was my sister and threw me into the lake. I couldn’t swim and panicked. I almost drowned. Thankfully my dad saw and jumped in and saved me. I still don’t like lakes and oceans to this day. 20 years since.
My grandma had undiagnosed dementia at the time, and didn’t do it on purpose. She just couldn’t remember who was who of her grandchildren and forgot I couldn’t swim
I witnessed a car crash that killed someone before anyone knew what happened.
It was like 3seconds post crash. Orange sububru classic bone on the way to the high school. Just a turn after this intersection.
Sister of a student died and she was told her sister died in front of about 100 students from two classes. The silence was terrifying.
I actually still am fucked to this day over it. Because the week before we learned why not saving people can save your life. People don’t want to be recusitated. DNR. That was fucked teaching us that.
So I just drove on by. Thinking I’d be in way less trouble with math homework and English than saving a life from a fresh car wreck.
It was so snowy. So silent. And yet. Calm.
God i really wished I saved that kid instead of believing high school was worse than that.
2017-2018
When my 21 year old daughter called me, screaming, to tell me my 20 year old daughter was dead. She had just found her little sister hanging from a tree. That is some “fuck you up forever” trauma.
My mom used to work so much that I barely saw her. Her company used her voice for the phone answering machine, so whenever I missed her as a kid, I’d call the company just to hear her say: “Welcome to [company name]… Press 1 for…, Press 2 for…”
My cousin was killed beside me by a drunk driver, as we walked home from cubs, I was nine, my mother dies of lukemia when i was ten, a half brother dies as a infant while i was in the next room, My father killed him self and I found him when I was 17, Other things to but that was the worse sort of
During Hurricane Katrina, I nearly drowned in my in-laws’ house. We lost everything we owned since we had just moved to the coast 2 wks prior. My husband lost his mind and my 6 y.o. daughter was traumatized. Therapy didn’t help. He died from drug addiction, and she isnt the same either. Fuck hurricanes.
I got into an accident almost 30 years ago when my oldest was an infant.
It was a broadside.
He was in his car seat diagonally from me, the driver, in the back seat. Normally he’d be behind the driver’s seat so that my wife could attend to him while driving. The only reason he was there was because I was driving him to my parent’s that weekend and my wife was traveling with her parents. The idea being is that I could at least see him over my shoulder, hand him things, etc.
Had he been in his normal spot – he would have been killed. There wasn’t much left his “normal” seat, 99% was caved in and occupied by the rear door panel.
Still have the occasional nightmare about it. He doesn’t remember a thing about it…
Too many things starting with seeing my little sister drown in our pool when I was 6 and she was 18 months leaving her in a coma for 18 years before she passed away. Five months later my mother died. I spent the next 30 years blaming myself because I might have been the one who left the door to the pool open. 10 months after that my father remarried satan who was physically and mentally abusive to me and my older sister while giving my new stepbrother and stepsister preferential treatment. I suddenly found myself having to share a room with my new stepbrother who was literally the annoying person in my class. I developed type 1 diabetes when I was 10 which sucks for a kid – my first birthday after being diagnosed included blowing out the candles on my birthday cake, being given an apple because “diabetics can’t eat sugar” and watching everyone else eat my birthday cake. As an adult, my father went to prison for a white collar crime which was frustrating because technically it was linked to paying for my little sister’s medical care who I was still blaming myself for (as well as my mother’s death) so now I was adding to that to my internal guilt. Then my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes during Covid when they were talking about how diabetics were more likely to die if they caught Covid. Around the same time I learned that my mother’s death wasn’t natural but due to suicide. At this point, my wife and I hit a rough spot and were both talking about divorce. This probably put me into a state of mental breakdown and I almost got fired from my job of more than 20 years which I ended up quitting before they could fire me. Despite all this I still believe that I have a pretty good life because I’m still married to a wonderful woman and have two great sons.
Standing there watching my dad pass away and telling him to hold on just a little while longer until my mom and sister could make it..then the doctor telling me not to say that because it was a stupid thing to say..I just didn’t know what to say in that moment..I did tell him I loved him and that he was the best dad ever to me.
I woke up from a nap in the evening after my ex husband kept me up all night and day fighting. I had said I wanted a divorce a few days prior. The night before I said I was going to go visit my friend a few states away for a while because things were so tense. I woke up in near pitch darkness to my husband sitting across from me and telling me he shut the phone and data off to my phone and that I was not allowed to leave his house unless it was to go stay with my dad. He had cameras all around the inside and outside of the house including my bedroom. He was paranoid and “sure” that I was cheating on him with someone online (I wasn’t) that I would leave to cheat on him and was lying about going to visit my friend.
I showed him my phone. Showed him texts with my friend offering for me to stay with her. He didn’t care. It took me 6 hours straight of talking my way into getting him to turn the phone and data back on. A few days later I caught him trying to sneak a usb recording device out of my room in an attempt to catch me cheating. He did it again the next week. Said he didn’t care that it was a crime in our state and literally told me I was his property.
I stopped moving. For 3 years I sat in a recliner. That’s all I did. I was too terrified to move. I didn’t eat, and I didn’t bathe. I didn’t want the cameras to notify him. My brain decided the way to stay safe was to be a ghost. I didn’t so much as move from the chair to a bed to sleep. I slept in that chair. Since i knew i wouldn’t ever be allowed to leave in normal circumstances i spent 3 years slowly manipulating him into being okay to let me visit my friend. It was easier not to move because moving around the house and pretending like i lived there as if i wasnt being held captive was too hard for me to handle mentally. By the end of the third year he let me leave twice. I told him the last time that i would visit a friend for 6 months and had some believable excuse why. He believed I’d come back and was paranoid I wouldn’t. I took 70-80% of my belongings, as much as I could, and left and never went back. Everyone is pretty sure he’d have killed me if I went back and tried to leave a third time.
Part of my job is to investigate infant deaths. It wasn’t my first time seeing a deadly body. But the way the deceased infant lay there, black and blue, shook me to my core. The examiner during their initial review was so calculated and cold.The body just flopping around. That was years ago, and I still see that baby, naked, unalive.
When I was 15, I was the first person to arrive at an experimental airplane crash in a farm field. The pilot had built the plane in a neighbors garage. He was dead and burning strapped into the plane. The second person to arrive was his wife. Her screams of despair as she stepped out of her truck echo in mind.
My first wife woke up on a Tuesday in 2003 . She was 44 years old and healthy . Exercise regularly. She had been a nurse for 15 years. Worked at the same hospital her whole career.
7am on a Tuesday. She looked at me and said. I can’t go to work today. I do not remember how to get there.
By the time they figured out what was wrong She passed away from brain cancer. It was 7 days later.
I have never been quite right after that experience to this day.
Being dropped off with my sexually abusive aunt nearly every day for a couple of years.
One day when I was about 4, my mother dropped me off like any other day, but as soon as she left I was told to strip down naked which wasnt all that uncommon. I did so but I realized she hadn’t locked the door yet so I made a bee-line for the front door and ran down the road as far as I could without a single thread on my body. One of the neighbors who lived at the end of the road saw me and picked me up. He then called the cops and when they figured out where I came from, they returned me, only for the abuse to start all over again. I never told my mom about it as I had a particularly bad speech delay and couldn’t articulate sentences until I started primary school, which I’m sure made me an easy target. This must be genetic because my 5yo son has the same problem and is in speech therapy as a result. So I have a lot of anxiety from that because I don’t ever want to put him in the same position I was put in as a child, with no means of protecting himself or speaking out.
I’ll never forget that feeling of being returned and having no choice. To this day I’m a control freak, as a result. I don’t like being on other people’s schedules or riding with anyone. I want to be able to leave and change my setting the very moment I’m ready. And I do not trust ANYONE around my kid. Even family. Ever.
my mom and dad used to beat the hell out of me and my brother; but one time my mom hit my little brother so bad that he peed his pants (i was like 10, he was 6) and i remember him crying and screaming “mommy please stop”, and me crying because i couldn’t protect him as i was too scared of my mom at the time
im 20 now and had gone to therapy but that particular situation still haunts me and sometimes i have nightmares about it
So I’ve been put through the wringer my whole life, feel free to look up my comment and post history. But honestly? The worst thing to happen to me was when I was 3 months postpartum with my oldest kid. I was very sleep deprived, not recovering well from my c section, and a stressed out over my mom in law and teen brother in law moving in with us. My kid had head butted me and cracked my tooth. I messed up, badly, and took 3 doses of Tylenol within a few hours period one night. I was so sleepy I kept misreading the time on my phone. Yeah, I ended up in ICU due to Tylenol overdose. I ended up having stomach ulcers from where the Tylenol burned my stomach lining. I went into liver failure. For nearly a week I was in ICU fighting for my life. I even got the anointment of the sick from a local priest- we thought I wasn’t going to make it. When I was finally discharged a week later I came home to a house that was DESTROYED. A pile of dirty dishes sky high, a litter box that hasn’t been cleaned in nearly a week, laundry all over the house, mail scattered everywhere. It was looking just like my mom in laws old apartment, she’s a hoarder and brought even more of her stuff in while I was literally dying. My husband is too used to it so he didn’t care as he was more concerned with my health and our baby. I just… something in me snapped. Before this I kept my home, and yes even my mom in laws apartment, very tidy and clean. Knowing I was dying and none of them could be bothered to clean up after themselves after I agreed to let them move in was, and is, heartbreaking. It’s been 5 years, they’ve since moved out and I had another kid (woohoo!). But since then I’ve been having a really hard time with the housekeeping. The house is still cluttered and it’s to a point where I know a professional needs to come in to help me with the clutter. Out of all my traumas in my life, this is the one that’s been the most hurtful and hard to move past. I love my MIL, and I love my husband. But they really let me down and I don’t know how to move past it despite therapy.
I used to believe my dad was the best of the best and a really good man. In fact, I was made to believe he was one of the best out there and he sure played up to it. So in my mind, there really is none better than him and I’ve been single this whole time because of that but turns out he’s a closet nymphomaniac who has sexually abused me (when I was a child). And now I’m single because, if my dad was supposedly the best, that means all other men are worse and hiding something too. Or at least that’s where my brain is going w this because he’s still an alright dude just with things he’s hiding but yes it eviscerated me when I found out. So yup pretty traumatised for the rest of my life. Tell me, are there really good vanilla men out there, who are emotionally safe, don’t hide things and say what they mean and mean what they say? I’d love to know
Had a very violent and intense emergency surgery. Found out I’m one of those people who don’t have a meaningful reaction to normal doses of opioids. When it was high enough to almost manage the pain, I stopped breathing. Lower than that I was just begging for someone to kill me and fainting again and again and again for the first 36 hours after the surgery. Doctor accused me of abusing drugs and dismissed me.
When I was 15 I downloaded a video on limewire that ended up being a snuff film. I had already been pretty hardened by gore sights like ogrish but this one was different. It was obviously a woman that had been kidnapped, taken out to the desert, stripped, and the video started right as someone started beheading her with a hunting knife. It was high quality, it was close up, I still remember the sounds she made. I felt sick for like a week.
My father has been violent, dismissive, and mostly absent from my life. He has never supported me, never been really present in any way.
The only memories I have with him are the times he hit me and tried to strangle me because of his unhealed shit.
Despite therapy and distance, some things will just follow you forever.
Myself, my partner, my 3 year old daughter, and 2 of my partners nieces all watched my partners dog get run over my a truck. She was a chihuahua/dachshund mix so her little body being crushed by the vehicle caused her eyes to bulge and so much blood to come out of her mouth. The blood curdling screams of my girlfriend were absolutely heartbreaking. And I had this moment of get the kids inside before I could even comfort her. Of course they were sobbing hysterically so I ushered them into the house before rushing back out to the street to comfort my partner. That was her baby and she went everywhere with my partner. Like, there was not a single thing we could go do that wouldn’t include that dog. The lady that ran over her was petting her and shushing my partner, telling her not to scream while she was still here. (At that point the dog was gasping and slowly dying) I had to tell the lady to fuck off before my girlfriend could strangle her. We ended up finding someone to cremate her that day and my girlfriend wears the necklace with her ashes every single day. But those screams still give me nightmares.
I fell head over heels with a bad boy. Eventually, I got pregnant, and we married. He had always said he didn’t want kids, but there we were.
Flash forward, and my labor was exhausting and full of worry. My husband was a paramedic, so when I had an emergency c section 16 hours later to save our baby, the anesthesiologist put my husband in charge of sectioning my airway. Being strapped down in a T pose, feeling your insides literally leave your body, and the baby they remove from you never cry is traumatizing enough, but at some point, I started feeling sick. I threw up, and I literally couldn’t turn my head far enough to prevent me eventually breathing it in. I started choking, and no one was even looking at me. And that anesthesiologist? He forgot to open the line for the IV, so no fluids were being replaced as I started bleeding out on the table. I had an out of body experience that could only be described as what death must feel like. I was literally helpless as I sat there aspirating and struggling to make sense of what was happening. It wasn’t until my own heart rate unexpectedly dipped dangerously low that anyone even thought there might be something wrong. My husband nearly killed me because he couldn’t do one simple task. He treated the whole thing like it was just another social hour, and this was his chance to network with new people.
7 hours later, i finally met our child. I remember thinking something was wrong with her, but medicated and struggling myself, i couldn’t really pinpoint the issue. It wasn’t until my husband left me in the hospital that he could go home to shower and sleep that i asked a nurse to bring her to the nursery. I thought she was cold she looked so blue. Within the hour I had a doctor telling me that they had just performed a spinal tap on my 9 hour old baby because she hadnt been breathing and was completely unresponsive. I tried calling my husband, but he wouldn’t answer his phone. And when he did call back he seemed more upset that he couldn’t get 8 hours of sleep in his own bed than the fact that there was something wrong.
Our baby ended up staying in the NICU for almost 3 weeks after that. They didn’t know what was wrong with our daughter, just that she randomly stopped breathing, and her heart rate kept dipping. They thought it might be meningitis, but they never could explain what happened. Being discharged myself, I had little choice but to visit her as often as I could during all of this. The first few days, my husband agreed to go with me, but he always wanted to go home almost immediately after we arrived and was glued to his phone the entire time we were there. So I stopped taking the painkillers from my own surgery so I could drive myself to the hospital so I could hold her a bit longer. Eventually, she had so many tubes and cords that felt like an impossible task, so I’d just talk to her. The day she went home was the best and worst day of my life.
I was suffering from postpartum depression. I couldn’t stop crying, and apparently, the baby we brought home couldn’t either. She cried and screamed up to 16 hours a day for the first 4 months of her life. It was the exact opposite of what we had seen in the hospital. I was told how pathetic my mental health was and ordered to get my sh*t together, or my husband would leave me. No doctor knew why our daughter wouldn’t stop crying or offered any sort of help. But I had to go back to work. I’d work Graves, get criticism for how often I had to pump while at work, then go home to a pissed off man and a crying baby, and I never could get any sleep. Anyone who tried to help would not return after a few hours in that home. I felt helpless.
Maybe a month after she came home, the phone calls started while I was working. My husband couldn’t handle the crying. The conversation would always be the same. Something along the lines of “if you don’t come home right now, I’m going to k*ll her” or “I now know why shaking baby syndrome is a thing.” So I would drive home in a panic to prevent the unthinkable from happening, my husband would leave, and I would be left to pick up the pieces.
Eventually, things got better as far as the crying went. And I did eventually end up divorcing the a**hole but only after dealing with so much more trauma from him. But I will never ever want to experience pregnancy or a birth again. And babies crying gives me PTSD. The real kicker was that as soon as I asked for a divorce, he suddenly wanted (and was granted by the courts) 50/50 custody to prevent having to pay child support. Currently, he is seeking full custody of that child he hated so much.
Its been 9 years and I still worry every time she goes to his house. I feel like this whole experience just shattered me into an anxiety ridden mess of a person and made me stop trusting in humanity.
I lied to my mom sneaked out and got raped by 3 “friends” I was only 14
When I got pregnant by my ex at 24, he poisoned my dogs, (I didn’t know till after) while I was morning their death the same day, he tried to poison me by giving me tampered coffee. I drank only a bit, it tasted off and the same smell that came from my diseased dogs came from my coffee. When my mouth started to violently water I just knew, went to ER and confirmed poison, and now my daughter has issues with a dead kidney.
After my divorce I went out to celebrate, and some rando guy that knew me from facebook threw me in his van took me home and raped me. I got away.
Got married again to a lovely man, and when I got pregnant with his first, me and my mom was held at gun point in a shop. Nothing stolen from us. Was scary.
More happened throughout but it doesn’t even matter anymore.
Now I don’t leave my house, at all. I don’t trust no man, and don’t talk to people. I am safe now. And keep my daughters safe. My eldest know not to trust any man. Even family.
My father hanging himself but survived because 2 other people along with myself saved him also being choked out with my own arm in front of his first daughter which I was still pregnant .. only two witnesses! His entire family know nothing about it! I survived on of the worst relationships no man would have ever thought to put hands on me but my child’s father.. fast forward to today her dad not in the picture! I live with my mother and father where I am safe! My daughter is the smartest in her class and is about to end the school year in a 4th grade level! She will be in third grade! Oh he totaled my jeep my insurance covered the other persons bill and ambulance,er, and damages … I now have another jeep and he enjoys making fun of me on Meta/Facebook also
Carries a gun .. robbed a bank stole money from a bar (was accused) held a woman at gun point for her own purse I changed my child’s name to my name I gave him time! While he was in prison.
Same sing song story with his first daughter from first marriage! So I don’t fall in love and be with a man nor women! I take care of my family and daughter 💯
During my first year as a cop I had to attend a sudden death call of a guy who had died in the bath. It was pretty grim after 3 days in the water and immediately reminded me of my cousin who had an epileptic fit in the bath and died also. Upon needing to remove the body the removal guys needed help so I volunteered. His skin was so water logged it began to slip off in our hands. Then when we went to the morgue I had to take his fingerprints (normal part of the process). While doing the ring finger the entire outside skin slipped off in my hand. As I hadn’t finished taking the print, I had to roll the skin back onto the finger like a condom. My collegue had to leave after that bit. Eventually finished but it was pretty grim experience overall.
My drunken mom threw a scorpion at me when I was 9 years old. She was intoxicated and at a friend house and she was telling about her horoscope (she’s a scorpio). I’ve run for my life, traumatized.
My best friend from childhood developed a severe eating disorder while at boarding school. As her parents were abroad my mom and I went to pick her up, and the image of my darling friend so skeletal and sick as we pulled up to collect her from school (we were both about 12 years old at the time) is something I’ll never forget.
She was so weak and her hair was all dull and broken and she had no energy and kept her eyes closed the whole drive home. She slept in my bed with me that night and I couldn’t sleep, I was so anxious, I just sat watching her the whole night and kept feeling for her heartbeat because I was so scared she was going to die. The next morning she was taken to the emergency room because of how dire her condition was. My dad had to carry her out of the house while she screamed that she wasn’t going to go and that they couldn’t force her. After she had gone my mom, myself and my friend’s grandfather who had come to help all sat in shock in the entrance way of the house, stared at each other and all started to cry.
She eventually recovered, though the doctors said that if she hadn’t been brought in she probably would have been dead within a day or two. She stopped talking to me after that- I haven’t spoken to her in years though our parents are still close. I don’t know why she cut contact, and even now over a decade later my heart still feels so broken because of what happened.
I was standing at a four way intersection heading home after school. A car had stopped and then proceeded. A motorcycle came over the hill and plowed right into the side of car and the rider went flying over the car and landed on the other side. It was surreal. The dude survived.
And just the other night I was coming home from work late. A motorcyclist passed me going wayyyy too fast. I said to myself that dude is crazy to be going that fast at night. ( I’m guessing 100 mph ish ) A little way down the road he went right into the driver side of a work van that had pulled onto the road. DOA. I think the van was most likely done for as well.
My sister and I fought a lot. Usual sibling rivalry stuff. At the age of 14, she was 16, my mother heard us gighting downstairs. Walked down halfway and calmly announced “Your father and I have decided one of you is moving to live with him! Decide between yourselves. I can’t take it anymore!” Then turned around and walked back upstairs. My sister was abput to start her Junior year. I was just about to be a Freshman. I moved a month later.
TLDR: My mother effectively kicked me out to live with my Dad at age 14.
My kids hearing my scream when the knock on the door came to tell me my husband and their dad was killed in an accident. I still hear my scream in my head and I hste that they heard it but the conversation they had inside was the worst.
One of my children said I think I heard mommy say daddy was killed, my other child said no, he probley just cheated on mommy again.
The whole thing was traumatic and effed up.
My lovely daughter was assisting a vehicle roll over when a box truck driver operating illegally struck her at 58 mph. Then he left. Cops caught him and let him go. Zero charges. I spent two years and over 4000 hours building a case to take to the DA. (The feds refused to prosecute and waited the statute of limitations out.)
DA finally took the case. The cops, doubled down on their failure, threw the case in court. Driver ended up with a reckless driving ticket. All other charges not guilty.
Oddly enough, according to law, reckless driving and a deceased person equals vehicular homicide. Still found him NG. Afterwards the jury said they did not understand the charges.
I will never understand how the guy who murdered my daughter walked free. There is no justice.
No parent should have to do their daughter’s accident/death investigation. I will never be right again.
I worked at an animal shelter. All of the cats got sick and were put down. I watched 12 cats I loved and looked after die. I will never be the same.
I had a bad SH problem one summer. My parents knew but nothing was done and they wouldn’t get me a therapist. One night I cut my hip so badly I couldn’t stand up again and I was gushing blood. I panicked, screamed for help. Bio mother came upstairs after a few minutes, saw what happened,and helped me downstairs. She put me on the living room floor and called my sister who came over, and bio mother didn’t want me to go to the hospital (she didn’t want anyone to know what happened) so they patched me up there. My sister was insistent that I needed stitches but bio mother refused. She didn’t want to miss the flight we had the next day. I spent two weeks in Florida in a wheelchair recovering because I couldn’t walk.
When I was 4, I saw my mom get hit by a car (drunk driver). I remember every detail of the day except for the moment of impact – one moment we’re walking, the next she’s covered in blood and unconscious in a ditch and I’m asking her to wake up.
She survived and told me that when she came to in the hospital, she asked after me because she thought I was dead.
I was a paramedic in a southwest metropolitan city 20 plus years ago. Death was a constant. You learn to shut it off. You have to. But it was the kids. The kids haunt me the most. In my dreams. You never fully recover from them. Not sure if I really wanted to share this. But getting it out even years later helps. Please. Bear with me.
It was actually a relatively calm night. Nothing major. Some routine calls. So I was helping out in the ER. A call came in. Single vehicle accident. Vehicle versus concrete retaining wall. Driver unresponsive according to the caller. We arrived on scene. An suv hit an open manhole cover. At a considerable rate of speed. Lost a tire and swerved directly into the retaining wall. Generally it’s not up to us to announce someone dead on the scene. But her skull was crushed. No seat belt.
As if that wasn’t bad enough. There was an empty forward facing car seat in the front passenger seat. Which was empty. I noticed blood on the floor and dripping from up underneath the dash.
I’ll save you the details of the recovery of the little one. What happened was the baby wasn’t restrained in the car seat. The air bag deployed and forced her down on the floor and up underneath the dash. Cops estimated mom’s speed at 60 mph when she hit the wall.
Fucking job. Some parts just tear your shit up still. You’ll never unsee some shit.
I pet my dogs and tell my spouse I love him every time I leave a room.
I was a teenager, just came home and met my (not biological) dad pretty much in the door. He had been working on something and was carrying planks into another room, told him I’d join him in a little bit, just wanted to leave the bag upstairs. He jokingly said I shouldn’t spend all my money on our pets, and went into the other room as I went upstairs. I was just up the stairs when I heard the thud of him dropping the planks, went to my room, put the bag on my bed and turned to go downstairs again. I called out to him, something about a recent math test, we’d get the results the next day, but I was pretty sure I had passed. I figured he hadn’t heard me, I always struggled with math and we had worked hard on it, and the lack of response wasn’t like him.
I repeated myself as I walked down the stairs, louder and with an added (joking) “you’re not proud?” just as I entered the room.
The planks were leaned against a chair, not dropped, putting them down wouldn’t have made the sound.
It was the first thing I noticed, and it took me what felt like an eternity to process what I was seeing. When I did, I realized that the way he was laying on the floor he’d be at risk of hitting his head in the planks when he sat up. His leg was bent all wrong, I should move the planks, I should move his leg, I had to get help.
I was in that room with him for over 40min until they got to us, our dog barking ballistic from where she was locked in. I wanted to get her as soon as they arrived, but they told me not to, that she might be stressed and react aggressively. So I went outside instead, a soft-spoken woman followed, asking questions about my name, who else had been there or lived with us. I told her about the planks, about his leg, that the dog is friendly, I think she’s locked in the bedroom but I’m not sure, and she said I had done good.
I was looking at the small blue flowers in the garden when I asked how long he’d need to heal, and when I could get the dog. She didn’t answer, but asked how old I was.
I left with social service workers that evening, he had died on the floor, and our dog, who he had loved so very much, was put down the following days. His son said nobody wanted her.
I didn’t get to say goodbye to either of them.
When my dad kidnapped me I think I was about 3/4. I probably think about it every other day and I’m almost 40.
I was kicked out 23 days ago because I’m gay. I’m autistic they took away ny routines, my security. I have Noone luve outside and am really scared.
I found my Mom’s body. She had O’D and been dead for a week in a hot house in the summer. She was all bloated and I was legitimately afraid her stomach was going to burst while we were there, the skin looked like it was ripping. Her face and hands were black but her teeth were white and she had coughed blood onto the wall behind her head. That image still flashes in my brain on occasion, but the smell was the worst part. It was in the house the whole time I was cleaning it out and even when I went home and showered it was still in my nose.
My father was a police officer and later a court officer, he shared 2 stories that i have never been able to shake:
Called out to a domestic dispute between a woman and a man (not sure which was the parent) they were beating on each other because they had gotten tired of beating their 6 year old. When my dad asked the child to show him their room (to get them away from the wastes of space that should have been caring for them) he was taken to a closet in the front hall. pile of dirty clothes on the floor, garbage and some old food. I didn’t always understand or get along with my father, but seeing the tears in his eyes as he explained this to me broke me in a way I still don’t really understand.
As a court officer, a family was brought in (Husband, Wife, 2 Sons and 1 Daughter) the daughter had been sexually abused by both brothers and the father, when asked to explain why they had done this, very matter-of- factly the father replied “do you want her to learn from a stranger do you?” They knew what they were doing, the mother knew. I know my dad liked a drink but he drank a lot that night.
I was in stop and go traffic that was barely moving. Often, people riding motorcycles will zoom down the lane line or weave in between cars. A guy on a motorcycle weaved in front of the car directly behind me and they weren’t paying attention (i assume) and began to accelerate as we all moved forward and directly hit him as he zipped in front of them, and it happened right as I glanced in the rearview mirror. He rolled onto their windshield, shattering it, and the car proceeded to run him over. He was trapped under the front wheels of the car when they stopped, trapping him. Thankfully a van full of military guys (we were right next to a base) was a couple lanes over and they all hopped out and proceeded to lift the car up and pull him out. Traffic had begun to move at this point, hence why the car accelerated enough to cause this much damage, and I was in front of them so I kept driving where I called 911 to report what I saw. I saw the entire thing and it felt like it was happening in slow motion but maybe occurred over a couple minutes. The worst part is I was on my way to work, a night shift at a club, and this was all about 10 minutes before clocking in and then dealing with customers until 3 am. I don’t know if the man who was hit ended up being okay but I still feel a pit in my stomach when I see a motorcycle or I am on that same stretch of highway in traffic.
Idk, if I’d say traumatize but I’ll always have the image of that young skateboarder in the parking garage having a seizure from the brain damage of a fall as his two friends sat beside him. I parked after confirming they called 911 and saw the ambulance take him away. I don’t know what happened to him but he’s probably fucked and it is definitely odd to think how I saw some young man just like me have his entire life possibly destroyed in that moment.
I’m going for a less bad one because I’ve had plenty of people DM me about my worse stories getting off to them or assuming I’m attention seeking and playing the victim. Sooo:
I was 9-10 years old and preparing for a school play. I was cast as a rebellious teen (the character was 11 now that I think about it). My scene was meant to be a comparison with a group of younger children. The teacher are getting them to do silly movements in gym class and they all love it and participate, then the next scene was a group of older kids refusing to do them and being grumpy.
I was getting changed for the dress rehearsal, wearing what would actually become my secondary school uniform (we borrowed ties and skirts from a secondary school in my town which I’d later attend). A random teaching assistant walks up to me and decides that, to fit my character, my skirt needed to be shorter. She grabs hold of my skirt and starts rolling it up at the top to make it shorter. I’m protesting but I was a shy little kid who was terrified of getting yelled at, so I was saying things like “my mum wouldn’t like this” instead of “I don’t like this.” She tells me it’s a part in a play, it doesn’t matter what my mum wants, I’m playing a character. I remember holding onto her shoulders because she was being so rough that I was losing my balance. Two girls in the year above me (so only 10-11) speak up and say that she’s rolled it up so high that she’s exposed my underwear to everyone else in the changing room, and I’m in tears at this point. She huffs, yanks my skirt down to full length and storms out, muttering to herself.
I brought this up to my mum recently and she said I never told her about it… It dawned on me that that was the school year that she was in hospital. I only visited her when my dad was with me and I didn’t want to talk about it in front of him. By the time she was better, it was about a year later. I was a “sensitive” kid (undiagnosed neurodivergent and had mental health issues) so me crying wasn’t enough to stop her, apparently.
I was also sexually assaulted by other students (running up behind me and groping me as a dare, getting aggressively pinned down during kiss-chase, my “puppy love” boyfriend groping me even when I told him no) and every so often, I remember the abuse started much younger than I thought.
Edit: I just feel like sharing how cool my mum was as a kid lmao. I was a huge pushover and still am, I really struggle setting boundaries and standing up for myself and I was unfortunately taken advantage of a lot growing up. My school had a no retaliation policy, if a kid hit you and you hit them back, you’re both in trouble. They said if a kid is being mean, you have to say “please stop it, I don’t like it!” I told my mum that and she said something along the lines of “If someone hits you, you damn well hit them back, and I will sit in the headmaster’s office and stick up for you if you do.” I never did fight back, but it was nice to know she’d back me up if I did lol.
Was babysitting 2 children in a dysfunctional home. Their uncle and some of his friends were there. Suddenly, there was a home invasion and 2 people came in firing guns. 3 people were shot, 2 died. I tried doing cpr on one until I turned him to his side and saw most of his head was gone.
Detective said I wasn’t shot because one of them had hung out there and “liked” me. I had literally thrown the children in a closet when it all started happening. The children were OK physically.
There’s LOTS more to this story but that’s the bare bones
I was 9 and my “father” got into a rage because I wouldn’t take my asthma medication (because I wasn’t having an attack and didn’t need it. He’s too stupid to realize this) grabbed me by the hair on my head and threw me out of our hotel room and wouldn’t let me in. A stranger walked by and asked what was wrong. I told her, by then her husband was there, so they knocked on the door and demanded he let me in.
I’ve never forgiven that bastard.
I was 14. I traded seats in the car with the girl who died a few minutes later. I wanted to sit in the backseat. Her sister insisted I sit in the front seat with her. Her sister took my seat in the back seat. I lived. She died. This happened in 1992. Not a day goes by that I dont think of her.
Watching my daughter getting a rape kit when she was 2. She kept screaming what are they going to do next as they pulled out pieces of her hair. She’s 18 now and that night is etched in my brain. I’m so thankful that she doesn’t remember & has no idea what happened to her.
When I was 9 or 10, my Mom was losing a battle with breast cancer. One night I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of intense screaming. Shortly thereafter an ambulance came, and the EMT’s couldn’t get the gurney into her bedroom without opening my bedroom door. So they opened it and I could see the look of sadness on the EMT’s faces when they discovered me there. I heard them talk to my Mom and get her onto the gurney, and then they wheeled it back into the hallway. As they passed by my room I could see her, she was contorted in this horrible position that no human should be in. She was on her side and sobbing, yelling over and over again about my sister and I. “My babies! Where are my babies! Don’t let my babies see me like this!” She didn’t know my bedroom door was open. Then the ambulance left. After they left, I got up and walked around our dark house to look for my step father, or really any adult. There was no one there, they just left my sister and I alone in the house. A few hours later, one of Mom’s friends came to get us ready for school. And we went, because there was no one to look after us during the day.
Later, we found out the cancer spread to her bones, and a piece of her spine broke off during the night. Hence the screaming. Amazingly, she lived another 1.5 years and even taught herself to walk again even though she had a hunched back for the rest of her days. To this day, I can still hear the screaming sometimes and just typing this out brought tears to my eyes. RIP Mom, you were so strong.
I hid under a crib while my uncle murdered his wife in the next room over.
My abusive mom almost killed me several times. She beat us often. It would start as a normal spanking or beating. Then I would try to get away or push her off of me. She would take that as me fighting back and she would escalate. She would pin me down and sit on me to beat me. I would scream as I’m being beaten, but because there was a whole ass grown human sitting on me, I couldn’t catch my breath. So I would struggle to get air, and that would piss my mom off even more because that was considered fighting back, so she’d beat me harder, and I’d scream harder, and I’d lose even more air, then I’d have to fight to catch my breath, and she would beat me harder again. There were several times where I was fighting to stay conscious. It happened several times. I was young, maybe between 8 and 11 years old.
I try to think of myself at that age and the third person, and celebrate and honor that young kid for fighting to stay alive. I would have missed a lot of joy in my life if he hadn’t fought back. That was his mother, who’s supposed to love and protect him, and here she is almost murdering him.
I now have chronic anxiety issues and diagnosed PTSD. I honestly think I have as much trauma from watching her beat up my brothers as I do from taking her bearings. I’m a functional man, with a wife and kids. My brothers are totally dysfunctional from the things that happened to them. I guess I was able to manage that trauma better than they were. I have crushing guilt from knowing that their lives were ruined and somehow I was able to manage my trauma.
I was driving my dog to the dog park & came across some cars waiting for what I thought was the school bus that was dropping kids off. Then I saw the dog in the middle of the road. This young woman had hit him with her truck. I watched her as she got out & saw what she had done. She was hysterical. The dog was a black lab. Just like mine. It’s tail was wagging. The woman got back in the truck I think to move it but she accidentally backed over the dog. It’s tail stopped. I saw it all happen. There were all this kids getting off a bus. Every single time I drove down that road I would think of it. It’s been 10 years & that memory is stuck in my head.
I feel kinda stupid for always saying this on reddit…my daughter was born with a bad heart and all her Dr’s are out of state so my mother sold her house to move in with me to help with my son while I was away with daughter…years later my mother got cancer and now I am both their caretakers on my own…one day getting back from appointment with my daughter we found my mother dead on my front porch i did cpr until ems got here they did shock her back but only lived two days after but never woke up..
When we got home my living room was covered in blood walls ceiling and carpet…it traumatized me and my daughter so badly my daughters heart gave out and she died I buried my mother and daughter in same casket I will never be ok therapy is not working medicine don’t help..my heart will always be shattered..my poor sweet baby and mom 💔
I was 9 years old, my dad was pissed off that my mom hid his percs, so he threw a coffee mug at her, dragged her around the kitchen, almost set her on fire, and eventually semi-successfully stabbed her in her arm. She had a golf ball on her wrist after that. I watched it all. All I could do was watch. It just hit me 11 years later that the officer who was asking me about cartoons, was distracting me from my dad getting arrested. I got new glasses that day so I saw everything quite clearly.
Luckily my father is clean now. I have a kid now too. I will never make him feel that way. My husband is an amazing father and the cycle stops here
I worked as a Parile Officer for the state I lived in for 7 years. 4 of those years my main job duty was to write Pre Sentence Investigation reports about felony sex offenses committed by adults. I was tasked with summarizing the official version of the crime(s) committed and then interviewing survivors to understand how their lives changed as a result of being sexually assaulted. I also spoke with the perpetrators and learned about their lives prior to the commission of the crimes. I was then tasked with making a recommendation to the court about sentence lengths and release conditions. People told me things that will probably haunt me until I die. I’ve spent a lot of time in court attending sentencing hearings and listened to numerous victim/survivor impact statements. The lack of remorse shown by the majority of offenders is absolutely staggering. Before I left, I was tasked with searching a smartphone that belonged to a sex offender living in the community because we suspected they violated his conditions of parole. They were actively trading and sharing child sexual exploitation material (child porn) with other people via a messaging app. I’d read countless descriptions of it because I’d written numerous reports about people guilty of possession but I was not prepared to actually see it. People are depraved. They do and say the most hideous things to each other but are unwilling to take any accountability, even when multiple people come forward saying the same thing. The American justice system is not built to help or benefit people harmed by crime.