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Not a safety tip, but also (to me) one more interesting lesson from the experience (which happened in my early 20s): * Trauma is a real thing. Your body can re
by gregw2 4y ago
Not a safety tip, but also (to me) one more interesting lesson from the experience (which happened in my early 20s):
* Trauma is a real thing. Your body can react to deadly threats afterwards in ways you cannot control. The next day after being held up, I literally could not enter a new room without my head moving/turning to scan entrances/exits for threats. I tried to stop my head moving repeatedly and could not! I literally could not control my body.
After a little while of experiencing this, I found myself asking myself "Well, do I need to embrace this new behavior as a needed lifestyle adjustment? Or do I work to go back to my old ways?".
I chose to work to go back to my old ways as this was a bit of a one-off situation (and in hindsight it was), but it took about a week of continual effort to regain control of my mind+body behaviors. I can easily see someone in different circumstances facing different tradeoffs remaining traumatized.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoI mean, you literally got robbed, but in my experience you can get a trauma response / anxiety from even smaller things. My friend had a kind-of-bully (we were 18+ at the time iirc) and met him in the street at new year's, the bully was a bit drunk and headbutted my friend. Nothing happened to me personally, it was just a bump on the head and the guy scampered when my friend's dad and friends came over, but I couldn't stop thinking about it to date (nearly twenty years later), imagining all kinds of alternative scenarios and all that. People underestimate serious confrontations.