Script Trauma Survivors

You managed to catch me... bored at home with minor chlorine poisoning so have an answer.

Absolutely! And it could definitely be just as severe as someone who remembers what happened exactly.

Now, what they might additionally experience is confusion as to why they're being triggered. In fact, they might not recognize it as being triggered. They're just suddenly really irritable and uncomfortable and want to leave and- why is this happening? Why do they feel so bad, they were feeling fine just a few minutes ago.

So that’s complicated!

Let’s chat about what ‘symptoms getting worse’ can mean before we dive into character conversation.

Symptoms getting worse can mean

a) ‘a person goes from short term survival state, to shock to having symptoms’

Given the ‘short term’ there, I do mean for single (or ‘short term’) traumas versus say, someone in an abusive home. People can go through natural disasters/car accidents and seem fine for a period afterward only to have symptom issues later once what has happened has ‘sunk in’ so to speak. 

b) ‘a person goes from a long term survival state in an unsafe place to being in a safe place with maladaptive coping’

This one isn’t so much about ‘getting worse’ though it can appear that way on the outside. When someone is in an abusive situation there’s things they do to try and control the damage, both consciously and unconsciously- or to try and reclaim ground- both consciously and unconsciously.

Sneaking around the house at night to get food is a coping skill for a kid who is being neglected. Their hypervigilance of whether or not other people can hear them or see them is needed for their safety.

Sneaking around the house at night to get food as an adult in a non abusive household- maladaptive. Freaking out at their partner who got up to check on them? Maladaptive. It’s the left over fear response from when someone hearing them eat was Dangerous.

c) ‘survival state to break down’

Way back when I was in college- I was a multi-trauma survivor who had just left an unhealthy situation who was the retraumatized. As someone who had a life time of trauma experience, it didn’t stop me immediately.

But the body can only exist in a survival state for so long. I went from ‘here is a small handful of symptoms that really, aren’t obvious that they’re symptoms’ to full body break down. I know from the inside and looking back at that time that to me it /felt/ like I went from 0-100 in 60 seconds but the truth is it had been a slow simmering issue that suddenly hit an exponential curve. ‘Having issues sleeping’ escalated into ‘skipping nights’ went to ‘being awake for 70 hours straight’ (and do not argue with me about that not being possible- I fully accept that micro sleeps happened- that’s half the story. I would blink and fall over on a bus, I would blink and be in a plate of food. But that’s not *really* sleeping in a healthy sense, now is it?)

I went from food being a little bit hard to people asking when was the last time I ate and me telling them ‘but I ate lunch with you?’ only to find out that had been the day prior. 

And then I broke. Pink eye. Something that looked like mono. Double ear infection. And an infection that had made it’s way to my blood that almost was found too late. You can’t survive without sleeping and eating without wrecking your immune system.

d) Symptoms changed

Symptomology is complicated. And they don’t always stay the same. Nightmares come and go out of people’s lives. Flashbacks experience different phases of intensity- or change forms all together. Dissociation can range from ‘I feel a bit odd and spacey in my body’ to straight up ‘I attended the wrong class and didn’t notice, I only know a few days later because the notes are about a different subject entirely.’

If someone who is used to say- having a bit of a rough time falling asleep, being depressed and having trouble experiencing joy, and having nightmares-

ends up going through a shifting period where maybe they start getting 2-4 hours of sleep a night tops but no nightmares, and food issues they didn’t realize were a problem end up triggered, and they can feel joy but it’s super unstable and their emotions are on 10 all the time-

that can be seen as getting worse. 

And vice versa.

It isn’t that one set of symptoms is actually worse than the other- it’s that to the person experiencing them, the set they have more coping skills for is probably going to feel more stable. Or seem more stable to their friends and family.  After all, a lot of symptoms and coping skills aren’t seen as symptomology- they’re seen as ‘just the way that person is.’

Which is all to say-

I can’t tell you what symptoms your character wouldn’t have in an abusive situaton.

Some survivors of childhood abuse don’t experience flashbacks to abuse until they’re out of the abusive situation, but others are actively dealing with flashbacks while still in the traumatic place. 

Some survivors of childhood abuse have maladaptive experiences related to the kind of abuse they experienced. Someone who had food withheld might binge, someone who wasn’t allowed to sleep as much as they needed might start sleeping all day. Someone who wasn’t allowed to show emotions in the household may struggle with managing emotions outside of it- and seem to have ‘too many’ all the time.

And other simply follow the patterns that were already being bult- continuing to starve because eating feels wrong. Struggling to sleep or viewing sleep as for the weak, refusing to feel emotions.

It isn’t as simple as ‘here are the symptoms that can exist while trauma is still occuring and here are the ones that exist later.’

But I do think you’re right to have the change reflected in your writing. Your character is going to have to shift their coping mechanisms from one abusive situation to another. There are going to be ‘misfires’ and maladaptive moments (and possibly patterns.) There are going to be complicated emotional feelings about ‘why do I still feel like this- I’m not experiencing _______’ anymore and possibly guilt or feeling like they’re making a big deal out of nothing. Or maybe the opposite- where instead it’s ‘I’d rather get hit than this.’

Both happen in real life.

So it isn’t offensive to write one over the other. You just have to decide what you’re going to portray.

Hope that helps a bit!

I would say so.

With a dash of ‘especially if the dream starts out mundane and suddenly there’s Large Consequences’ because that’s how mine usually go. PTSD dreams rarely look like straight trauma for me. It’s as if my brain wants to do the normal thing of processing a mismatch of information in the dream scape and then suddenly accidentally brushes against a trauma trigger and so it becomes something else entirely.

You can also consider ‘what should be pleasant dreams of the sibling but the PC wakes up feeling sick’ as a variety of PTSD nightmare. Honestly, I hate those the most because you can never quite explain to anyone why it was upsetting. Especially because there’s often the feeling even inside the dream that things are wrong- it isn’t like ‘oh I remembered someone I lost and now I feel sad’, it’s ‘I’m having a dream of children playing but feel like I’m in a horror movie.’

Hopefully that helps a bit,

If you want them to ever be close, it’s going to take time.

And healing.

And probably not while they’re both exposed to each other.

Half a month of torture isn’t something your character is going to get over easily. And especially if that character was there a lot of time...

even if she was secretly on the character’s side, you’re going to have anger. Why didn’t you save me? Why did you *let* this happen? 

People in that traumatized of a state are unlikely to see the broader picture of say- maybe ‘acting in secret to free the character without the torturer knowing also means the character not knowing. acting more publicly would have just gotten them both killed.’

And even if they can- there’s still going to be the underlying gut feelings. That woman is going to be intensely triggering.

‘Seeing you causes my pain and I hate myself for that since you ultimately helped save me’ is also a valid trauma feeling that could be happening. 

Do I think that character must always associate this woman with being tortured? No.

Do I think there’s an easy way for that association to end? Absolutely not. 

Personally I would think a possibly tactful option would be ‘small early exposures’ where the character is allowed to have their feelings and their trauma, where they’re allowed to be messy and hurt- and then a whole lot of time where they’re not together. Maybe where the character is occasionally exposed to her name/what she’s doing (assuming that for instance, there’s an organization involved or even just ‘the same town.’) With space for the character to slowly build the new connections, and room for back slide. For instance, being perfectly fine after a while hearing about and talking about what the woman is up to- maybe even being in the same room with her briefly- but having an unexpected break down when left alone with her or having to interact more intensely with the woman. 

And then, after a while in that space- you have room for ‘we can interact okay together.’

Though I’m not sure being close would ever feel like a true option to me. Not without a whole lot of story magic. Which isn’t to say it can’t be done. Just that there’d need to be a lot of it. 

Hopefully that helps a bit,

<3 Thank you!

I’m mostly in retirement just because these days my life is full! During this pandemic alone I’ve traveled across a closed border to move in with my wife, gotten PR, started PT to finally address some long-term physical health issues I’ve had, and gotten a new full time job. While all of those things are wonderful things- it also takes a lot of time/ settling. Especially considering the state of the world. 

I do miss the blog and helping people. I’m going to stick my toes into answering questions again I think-

with a little *

I recognize I’m a writing blog, however I am a content writing blog. Grammar was never particularly something I was 100% at- but I suffered a pretty nasty concussion much earlier this year. So apologies for any spelling/grammar mistakes but they’re a bit inevitable for now. 

(2) Also just wanted to say when I said - self set boundaries for having romantic relationships because she finds non platonic show of affection a trigger I’m not implying that sexual abuse is in any way romantic at all or that it’s a way of showing affection at all - its abuse. I wanted to just make that clear Bc I just didn’t know how to word it and I didn’t want what I said to come across if it came across like that but if it did I’m sorry

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No need to apologize! I understood exactly what you meant.

It is absolutely okay that this character might not want to be in romantic relationships. It is perfectly okay that they find non platonic shows of affection triggering. (Though, I would also say, there’s something to explore there. What defines platonic here? Is it a certain set of behaviors? Is it coming from certain people? Are there ever moments where a previous safe behavior or person sudden does become triggering?)

Avoiding walking on her own at dark would be acceptable as a coping behavior (the trigger would be walking home alone in the dark- thus avoiding it is a coping one.) Does this cause any problems for her? Is it just ‘on her own’ or ‘at all’? Does she actually understand that this is why she avoids it or does she just do it instinctively?

I mean.. yes?

Though also the answer is a lot more complicated than that. Especially if the character you’re talking about is now an adult. 

What triggers the compliance?

Is it less ‘triggered compliance’ and more ‘extreme people pleasing’?

Does the ‘people pleasing’ extend to everyone? Or is it certain people? What makes those people different? Is it their relationship to the character? (Family/friends/lovers) Is it how much the person reminds them of the abuser?

Is it less ‘general people pleasing’ where it happens *most* of the time around certain people/certain situations and is more about the internal state the character has?

For instance, I’m not a extreme people pleaser in general, I don’t think.... unless I get extremely stressed. And in moments of extreme stress I can get like ‘will make myself sick’ levels of extra stressed because my brain just goes ‘CAN’T PLEASE EVERYONE’

It’s not a fun look.

If you’re going the ‘adult who has childhood trauma has compliance as a symptom’ route- you’re also going to want to look into like,

How do they cope with that? Because I can promise you, if they’ve reached adulthood, they have some sort of coping mechanism related to it. 

Not necessarily a good one, of course. It might be reaching out with friends to double check on perspective since they don’t trust their own- that’s a decent one. It might be avoiding making any action on the subject at all because inaction is a freeze response and they avoid actually having to actively displease. That’s less healthy.

It’s also less likely that they’re super compliant all the time to everyone. Thus the question about triggers and talking about specific kinds of relationships.  

Are there things that they’re compliant to without realizing it because of the trauma? During the pandemic I had a conversation with someone who had a sudden realization that she never uses salt/pepper because she was shamed over being a terrible, inconsiderate child if she tried to reach for it as a kid. She’s not a kid anymore- she doesn’t think other adults who use salt/pepper are rude people-

and yet decades later she’s *just* realizing that this is a thing she’s still abiding by. She didn’t even really remember the inciting incident all that well until I accidentally asked the right/wrong question.

Also, if compliance is a symptom- what does it look like when they can’t be compliant? (aka, like me feeling physically sick from the stress of it.) What behaviors pop up then? What does it feel like internally for them? Does it look different?

I have a friend who has known me for a long time- they knew me throughout the years that I did trauma resources. They call me out when my brain slips into that state. My words sound different, I use different turns of phrase, my tone is different. I had to step away from that life because it was turning me into a whole different person, one I couldn’t sustain long term. A mental state that both interacted with trauma regularly and held an odd distance to protect itself. 

For someone who compliance is a trauma response, it’s probably going to be similar. Compliance is not something that is just going to happen by itself, there’s going to be things that go with it.

Hope that helps!

I’ve been staring at this for approximately.... a month? I think this was sent.

And I can’t believe I’m basically coming out of ‘retirement’ to say this-

but screw that.

I remember reading the most recent ask at the time about the thing- and it does seem like there’s something... weird happening on howtofightwrite’s end. They believe the asks are all coming from the same person. They believe they have further context.

Maybe they do.

But the idea that if you want to show trauma symptoms in villians/torturers that you’re *woobifying* them is...

In altered carbon, there’s a villian/torturer who has body jumped so many times that he’s fracturing.

That’s a trauma symptom. He sure as hell wasn’t a Sympathetic character.

Quite frankly I think the constant escalation and unhingedness of many villians could be pointed out as a potential trauma symptom (whether or not it was intended to be seen as such.).  No one would argue that those things are woobifying them. 

Also, we’ve been showing trauma symptoms in bad guys for years- that’s where the whole running thing of ‘this is an explanation, not a justification’ comes from. It’s every serial killer/cop show that chooses to have a rape victim become a serial killer. It’s doofenshmirtz explaining his latest machine and why he needed it. It’s Voldemort’s orphan past. It’s every villian giving his passionate speech becuase he *needs* the hero to understand where he’s coming from, why he came to *this* point.

I would argue we’ve been showing the same small set of trauma symptoms and behaviors in bad guys though.

And that’s dangerous.

It’s dangerous for people who have those symptoms. 

For years I was convinced that I was one bad day from being a serial killer because so often the characters I saw my pain in were bad people. I had zero desire to kill people but recently I looked back at my teenage writing and that fear is so obvious. Fear. That I was going to hurt people because at the time my brain was struggling with being actively traumatized. I was going to destroy the world, not out of anger but grief and pain and it was going to be an accident. Something I had no control over stopping. 

It’s dangerous for people who have those symptoms because it also means that the only media representation for how to handle those symptoms (and let’s be real, a lot of how the public deals with things *is* influenced by the media) is seen in dangerous people.

It’s easy to label someone a monster, damaged, likely to explode if 90% of the time you’re exposed to something shows that trait in someone who is the bad guy.

So that’s where I stand.

Maybe there’s a specific set of context that justifies the way that blog is coming at it- a series of asks I haven’t seen. Maybe that writer wants to show the torturer getting milk and cookies and all the care in the world.

But I don’t agree with what has come out public facing.

Show your heros and their trauma.

Show  your villians too. 

So this does fall under the land of ‘you break it, you buy it’ because that isn’t a type of amnesia that exists in the present world.

That being said, vivid dreams sounds like a good start to me. You could also go the route of anxieties that he doesn’t know how to place or longings. It could even be... not understanding why he finds a certain thing calming. When it really relates to something from before.

Hopefully that helps a bit,

I don’t keep up with all the Script guys but isn’t that right up ScriptShrinks alley?

!

Unfortunately I do not. 

Both work, and both can actually be present at once.

For the first one, you often have people who suffer from hypervigilance and exaggerated startle responses. Sometimes they aren’t even necessarily more ‘afraid’ than most people- just that... little things can cause them to be jumpier.

You can also have a character who is genuinely more afraid of things- and that will often tie into a control issue. They’re trying their hardest to control everything they can and make sure everything is going to go the way that will make things go the most smooth/the safest- because they know better than most that what they can’t control? they can’t control.

On the flip side, sometimes trauma survivors are able to appear calm/unaffected by something that most people find scary because they’re so used to trauma/it doesn’t occur to them as off. Sometimes because of dissociation. Sometimes because of the way that trauma affects the internal nervous system.

You can also get people who seek out ‘scary’ situations, because they’re trying to... well, they’re trying to game the system so to speak- when it comes to their nervous system. Adrenaline junkies and some types of shoplifters can fall into this category. Let’s say that the nervous system goes to 1-10. Sometimes people have issues lowering themselves in smaller amounts. So when they get up to say a 7 and have been hanging out there for a bit, they’ll seek out things to push themselves up to a 10. The nervous system can only exist at a 10 for so long before becoming exhausted and flagging for the ‘calm down’ hormones/processes to start. 

So from the outside, you have people/characters that well, other characters might not understand how they could want to do those things. Or how they’re so straight faced doing it.

Hopefully that helps a bit,

Do they have other people/things that they can turn to?

If their partner can’t help in a certain way (even just in that moment vs long term) what happens? Do they guilt trip the person? Does the other person feel Super Guilty horrible? Do they run themselves into the ground rather than not give everything they can?

My partner and I are both hotmesses with a host of personal baggage- but we’re also comfortable setting boundaries with each other. For instance, lately I’ve been job searching/working on resumes. A resume triggers something in me that... honestly the kind of mindset that I haven’t had to deal with since I was an addict. I love the work I do, but get me writing a resume and I am a host of self hatred and thinking what I do and who I am is worthless.

My partner feels comfortable telling me that they can’t talk to me while I’m trying to write it. I don’t blame them. I don’t guilt them. They know and trust I will turn to other people and try to find a solution.

Or there are times where we might compromise- and like, we’ll be on voice, but not talking about The Thing.

Finding solutions for when we can’t be each others 100%, is what helps us be healthy vs codependent.

Show similar things with your characters. Show where they can turn to friends or family or (religious figure) or even self regulation. Show where they watch and notice if their partner is in an okay place to hear them word vomit. Show where they’ve made their compromises, how they’ve made their relationship work.

Show that?

And you’ll have done an excellent job.

Because there’s some things that if you told me you were putting it in a normal piece of work- I would tell you not to go that route. Either due to inaccuracy or because it’s disrespectful.

But dark fiction, that is meant to be dark- has it’s own sort of boundaries. It is not a ‘anything goes and no one will have an issue’ territory- but the people who write and read Dark fiction.....

-Torture and I have talked about that before. Especially when it comes to some of y’all who are writing well, dark erotica (whether it be fanfiction or not.) 

And I’m telling you that the trauma bit doesn’t make sense, and that it makes me extremely uncomfortable that you’re trying to go this angle of ‘someone already abused in one sense, sexually abusing their abuser.’

I cannot stop you from writing anything.

But I am not going to give you the green stamp of approval. I am not going to lie through my teeth and tell you I think it makes sense or that I think it might work if so and so.

If you are determined to follow through the path you have planned- you need to talk to someone else about it.

I vaguely feel like there might be a third category, but it is not coming to me right now-

but there were two main ones. I spent a lot of time talking about those two.

Builders and firefighters.

Firefighters are people who are really good at 3 am phone calls. At ‘I dropped everything and now I’m here.’ The ones who stay in hospitals with a person. They are pretty good at keeping their heads in immediate crisis.

They are not good at the long term. Some firefighters know exactly what they are, they’re able to set boundaries later on once things have cooled down a bit. They know how to not completely over extend themselves. Some aren’t very self aware, they have a long history of burned bridges because they offered All This Support, never put a limit on how long it would be on the table- and then got resentful of the other person for taking advantage of them.

Builders are not the immediate crisis types. Some of them struggle with listening to a person in distress at all. But what they are really good at is the long game. Builders are people who feel more comfortable giving longer term, but less intense support. You need someone to take you to therapy twice a month? That’s more their alley than picking up the phone when a person in crisis calls at 2 am. They’re also typically better at problem solving- these are the kinds of people that hear ‘I’m so stressed out because I missed work and I won’t be able to put food on the table this week’ and start suggesting or looking into food pantries. They’d rather help a person network and find several places to get their needs met, than present themselves as ‘here I am your last bastion against society.’

They often have burned bridges for that reason too. Sometimes when people are in a dark hole, if the only person they reach out to is a builder- they can get the vibe that the builder doesn’t actually care. It usually isn’t true, but the media doesn’t do a very good job of showing different ways people care- it’s a whole lot of all or nothing. Also, sometimes builders are Pushy. They think they have all the answers, and if the person in crisis would just take the advice/the resource they gave them- everything would be better.

There is not one style that is better than the other and like with anything, people can have traits from both- though they tend to lean toward one side. And more than that, I found in talking to supporters- figuring out what kind of support they were *good* at, that they were comfortable giving, helped them set boundaries around the things they weren’t good at and become healthier and less prone to resentment.