Not very far, we don't know what a real life is we just go through the motions day after day and hope to never get locked up and that is pretty much all we can achieve in this world. I don't want to be in pain just in case i get locked up so i am trying to take care of all my injuries. All we know is hell we don't know anything else. The church was and is hell on earth for us. Everything was connected to that church in some way. Some say the world needs me but i disagree the world has never needed me for 34 years it only used and abused me. Could i help the forgotten people of this world? probably if i was put in the right position. But everyone appears to be fine for the most part, next friday i predict they will be doing the same thing they are doing today like clockwork. The world waits for no one and will keep spinning without you. So, question, if you lost the will to live as a child how the hell do you get it back?

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> So, question, if you lost the will to live
> as a child how the hell do you get it back?
>

People probably don't lose the will to live... It's more likely they lose the ability to enjoy it. But I'm just guessing.

We have a criminal trial going on here in SoCal right now involving the boyfriend of a woman whose child he is accused of murdering. And the details are pretty horrific, in that it was done over a significant period of time. The kid would self-report to his teacher, who would call CPS (child protective services), who would send out a case worker, who invariably reported back that things were okay. (a number of the case workers involved were fired, but are trying to get their jobs back.)

The kid really suffered. And then he died... Did he ever lose his will to live? I don't know. Would he have reached the point where death was preferable? I don't know.

Could it be that it's a question of what a person will put up with? I don't have any real answers, cuate, but I do know that I'm happier living by my standards versus someone else's standards. Wondering what other people think of you is not a good investment of time. Your friends will tell you what they think of you, because they're your friends. And even then I don't have to listen, and they pretty much stay your friends.

Bell Shaped Curve, BadAss. Sometimes you drop into a good slot and sometimes it's a bad slot. And yes, some people get nothing but bad slots.

I don't know what would have happened if i didn't pretend to be mentally ill when i was a teen it seemed that everybody backed off and just said to themselves he is just a mentally ill person leave him alone. But its been hard as hell to snap out of that mentally ill, feel no emotions persana. But i think i really did become mentally ill and frozen in time with PTSD. Its just been a nightmare trying to figure out how to be normal again. I know i have to face what the church really is to get better and that is why i am here. I have to know it was never god's church and my situation was not my fault i did what i did to myself to survive at the time. But i think only counseling can bring me out of this if i really want to try harder or something.

When was the last time you had a good belly laugh?? Go find a good comedy you can watch. After the belly laugh, you will be more relaxed.

I real laugh? Probably decades.

You make reference to 'normal' and I get that you have some idea of what that means to you, but many of us have reached the conclusion that there is no such thing.

It's that continuum again. At one end is horrible, in the middle is normal and at the other end is fairy tale land...

Where is 'normal' on that continuum?

I don't f#cking know what normal is old dog i was raised mormon for christ's sakes where they talk about kolob like its a legit place. And a human being can become a god somehow if he practices handshakes hard enough. F#ck old dog there has got to be a more normal than that.

I was at work in NYC many years ago, waiting on a customer in the wholesale showroom in which I worked. NYC, as you know, has a huge Jewish population. I glanced down at my customer's exposed forearm in wonderment. There was a series of numbers tattooed on her arm. Concentration camp numbers. She was a Holocaust survivor. She made a protective motion in covering up her arm with her sleeve. She wanted to put her past behind her. I honored her implied request, and we went about our business.

Inside, I was screaming. I wanted to tell her to be PROUD of the fact that she beat those &*^*@!%$. To be proud of the fact that she survived that horror. That she made it. That she was healthy and well fed and well dressed. That she had what appeared to be a good life.

But is was not for me to say, was it? How does someone move on from such a major horror? I don't know. But I know that they do.

I have no idea how to create a happy life and never have. I am trying different things but i have been through horrible things that i don't talk about.

Did you ever really "get away from home?" For me, that was the answer.

Putting distance between myself and a miserable past has made all the difference.

Yeah, I agree. I needed to get far away from home as a young woman after my dad died. I need some time to grow and to find myself as an adult. I have a nice family, so eventually I came back to the east coast.

I feel like i am getting away from the past slowly.

Check out "Unbroken," a best-seller by a very readable author, Laura Hillenbrand. It is the story of Louis Zamperini, an Olympic runner who became a World War II aviator who crashed in the Pacific. He endured the longest life-raft survival in history--only to be captured by the Japanese and spend the rest of the war in a prison camp! It's an exciting read.

The man demonstrated an extraordinary capacity to adapt to hardship, endure, and survive. The book has to be in even a small local library; it was a major best seller and made into a movie. If not, most libraries will honor a request to purchase. If I may be so bold, a good, engrossing read about an extraordinary man -- completely unconnected to LDS and psychological issues -- may be just the thing you need!

I have seen that movie and remember liking it. Maybe i will see it again.

Read the book for extraordinary details the movie could not capture. It will hit you with much more power. The man had a true "will to live."

In the book, during the life raft episode, one man "gives up," which Hillenbrand portrays with an excellent balance of sensitivity to the man's memory and the tragic fact that he had lost the will to live. I don't know if that was portrayed in the movie, but that episode alone is worth investing the time to read the book. And it goes fast--it's the proverbial "page turner."

Why should a trauma victim value life, theirs or others, any less for being a victim of some kind of traumatic event?

People who suffer horrible events and survive don't all have a victim mentality, nor a death wish.

Survivors grapple with many issues; their survival is one thing they don't take for granted because they know how precious (and fragile) life is, and how easily it can be taken away.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2017 08:50PM by Amyjo.

I didn't even know i was a trauma victim until a trauma counselor told me. I knew i was bad but not as bad as she said i was, i was disassociating right before her very eyes. A year later all she can say is you have been through some serious sh#t but this is far from over. I am not really sure what will happen if i keep going, i think trauma victims can go two ways, not appreciate life at all and feel nothing or appreciate life more than everybody if they can somehow move on from the past. The victim mentallity will get you no where except six feet under that's why we have to be more aggressive than the normal person if we want to survive and come out on top.

In answer to your original question, there was a case near Yosemite National Park several years ago in which a young man who had worked part-time for a hotel and who had made copies of all the motel room keys and held onto them coaxed a mother, her daughter, and a foreign exchange student with them to unlock the deadbolt on their door so that he could repair something in the room. Once inside, he killed the mother almost immediately and killed the foreign exchanged student not much later. He kept the woman's daughter alive for a time and used her for various sex acts and acts of torture. She had lost the ability to speak through some act of torture he committed. According to the murderer, at one point near the end, she motioned by running her finger acrosa her throat that she wanted to be killed and to put an end to the torture.

If what the murderer said was true, she had clearly lost the will to live.

The murderer was a violent psychopath.

I would take anything he said to the jury or police with a grain of salt.

If what he said had any bearing at all it would have been because the poor girl had been brutally tortured and molested - after watching her mother and friend die brutally first - she knew she was next to go. Not surviving a torturer is different IMO than losing the will to live. She was half-way dead or further by the time he took the last blow.

What a vicious, sick and depraved mind of the killer - he sadistically tortured her to her last breath.

Sure there are people losing their will to live every day. It's called suicide when they give into taking their lives as a way out. Depression is more often the reason associated with that than anything else - when a person feels hopeless, helpless, and hapless is the tipping point for most suicides - because they don't see a silver lining inside the cloud of despondency & despair other than to escape it by any means.