Processing Trauma "In The Cloud", And Appropriate Outrage

Fucked Up Shit #1

Hey guys. How are you all doing? How were your New Year’s celebrations? My partner and I watched Squid Game 2 into 2025—it was great. The first episode is a hall of famer for me.

This is the first article in Fucked Up Shit, a series of sweary articles about PTSD and mental health. When I mentioned this series earlier, some people wondered why it had to be “sweary.” I know a lot of my audience is older and disapproving of this artistic liberty I’m taking, and I apologize for the language. But I write EITM for adult survivors, because if the kids are ever going to stand a chance, we, the responsible adults, need to inform ourselves. Talking about this stuff is both important and painful. It hurts to sterilize the pain I’ve been through just to make it “nice.” People who get it will understand putting these words on paper takes the same fire that originally etched them in my mind, like Sauron’s One Ring that reveals its dark language only when it is placed in fire. I’m aiming for a perfect balance of light and heavy, but I won’t sanitize it. Unprocessed grief is ugly and messy. When that grief isn’t addressed, it morphs into ugly behaviors and PTSD.

I believe some kinds of grief can’t be processed alone. After someone dies, a whole cascade of support kicks in. People witness your pain at the funeral, and that validation can help you heal. Not half-hearted “thoughts and prayers,” but genuine caring—speaking with me, making me speak, truly showing up. The “cloud” that processes survivors’ pain is other people and how they behave and react. It’s also you, reading what I write, even if I’m swearing like a 13-year-old into a gaming headset and you think, “omg, yeah this makes sense!”

It’s like someone sobbing over a loved one’s death while everyone says, “I’m so sorry! Let it all out, Karen.” Nobody calls them childish for feeling deeply. So, shouldn’t it be just as human for someone who’s been raped or abused to grieve? Don’t people realize survivors can’t control that grief any more than you can control the grief of loss? Don’t they know why child abuse carries such hefty sentences? It’s not just about immorality; it’s about the wreckage it leaves behind when survivors never get their moment to explode. The adult human is not the same as the non-traumatized ones. The victim of child abuse has been handed a life sentence. Death sentence even. Just like Gisele Pelicot, they deserve their day in the light. There needs to pomp and fanfare. That’s why biker gangs come to court hearings for victims of child abuse to pledge support and membership to them. This is not drama. This is justice.

Another example: ever get mad at someone and your friend tries to shush you, which only makes you angrier? Like, “Bitch, you’re supposed to be on my side!” You can’t control an emotion in the moment; it just happens. You can manage your behavior, maybe, but not the feeling itself. People bury these emotions out of fear, and that’s how many -phobes are made. They’re not emotionless; they’re filled with despair so intense it can justify any kind of behaviour.

That’s how I plan to feed the child in me the validation it needs. For Elephant In The Mirror to do its job, I have to show you my 13-year-old mind, then contrast it with the adult experimenter. Treatment for my DID allows my rational parts and chaotic parts to communicate. DID is something only people who have it truly understand. It can feel like everyone else sees you as entirely different people—like a “mercurial force of nature.” Before I knew I had DID, I thought I was cursed, or in hell, or a simulation. When I first noticed the “glitch in the matrix,” I thought I’d gone crazy. My therapist had to convince me I wasn’t schizophrenic.

Sometimes I’d slip into a child alter around certain people and be treated one way, then show up somewhere else as an adult alter and be treated totally differently. If the “wrong” me appeared at the “wrong” time, there was chaos. I had no consistent identity or control over my strengths and weaknesses, so I was simultaneously paralyzed and ballistic.

All this meant the “real me” never got to exist. A DID system is specialized at surviving in its specific environment—they’re survival specialists in their specific habitat. When they finally achieve safety, the machine can start to fall apart, because it’s being used in a way it was never intended. Incidentally, that can also mean it’s run into a new present-day trigger. From my career to my clothes, everything felt forced on me by a world that contradicted itself over and over. Aun is just compliance with an environment that keeps shifting. The real Aun is only forming now, through therapy and imposing my will on the world. A unified self and identity. Like everyone with DID, I’ve been shaped by an external cage of social pressure. Deep inside, there’s a 13-year-old pounding on that cage, pushing boundaries with words instead of fists.

As I reshape my container into something that fits who I am, I’m essentially processing all the grief that never had a “funeral,” harnessing this peer-to-peer “cloud.” My loved ones, my friends, my readers—we’re all part of the process. I’m not telling everyone to post their trauma on Facebook. I’ve done the work to reach this point. I just don’t want to enjoy the view alone; I want to carve a path for others. And I’ll do that by getting you fired up, because we heal together. Even the very act of healing our physical bodies requires, platelets, red blood cells, white blood cells, and various cells in far off places from the wound working together to make the chemicals and structures that a blood clot is composed of.

People need therapy because they need someone to hear the Fucked Up Shit they can’t say elsewhere. The magic isn’t in the therapist themselves—God bless them—but in the act of speaking that Fucked Up Shit out loud in a safe, comfortable flow. The therapist is a mirror, letting you speak to yourself. They’re not supposed to tell you how to live; they’re just there to ensure you live authentically. I’m swearing not just because I’m pissed, but because I want to talk to you like a friend, casually but meaningfully, showing outrage where it belongs and rooting for you at your pity party.

The therapist is a super powerful tool to teach you to find other people like you, people who will love you where others didn’t. This doesn’t mean I’m going to kiss you; it means I’m going to be honest and open with you. To carry a joke, I need to loosen my tongue, knock back a shot, or hit a bubbler. The kind of help I lend to people with PTSD is best delivered around a campfire. My friends often have a “bro” they want me to talk to because he’s losing his shit, and they drop it on me at a party or in a KFC. I never know what’s coming or when because everyone knows I had mental health side quests to complete. Because I went to med school, people just lift their shirts and ask me to look at their zits all the time. You’d be surprised how rich and successful someone can be—how many therapists they can have—and yet never feel seen until they talk to someone who’s really been through what they have. People often shaking their heads and tell me that it’s me that’s got the magic. Na-uh. If you’re fucked up, you need to find another person as fucked up as you are just so you can experience not having to contort yourself out of shape. Two domestic violence victims, neither of them has ever told anyone of their situations in their life. Should call the call the cops. But that’s not how the world works, and we all know that. When they find each other and get to chill out and be themselves for once, it’s a different kind of magic.

To show outrage without letting it turn into destructive behavior, we have a powerful tool: humor. That’s what Fucked Up Shit is supposed to be. I’ve literally been the ground zero of my environment, visibly “crazy,” without control. I was born at rock bottom and had no hope except my own rabid optimism. The first time a therapist asked if I was suicidal, I laughed—I thought it was a joke. I stuck around out of curiosity. I’m already living my rebirth. I died long ago. I’m not hiding for the rest of my days. I’m trying to turn my hell into heaven. People who really know me, who know my life, ask: “How do you do it?”

To explain that we have to learn some basics first. Mental health isn’t as straightforward as math or science, but there are some thick books and big ideas behind what goes on in our heads. So, before I teach you calculus, I’ve got to show you how to add. When people ask how I do it, they usually mean “Why aren’t you dead? Why haven’t you jumped off a bridge yet?” I’m not a magician; I just know some things others don’t. I’m saving myself some ink by telling anyone who wants to listen everything I’ve learned over here in this newsletter. I realize many people need different kinds of help: positivity, softness, harshness. Elephant In The Mirror is here to make your heart race a bit, triggering your biggest issues so we can talk them out, and reminding you you’re not crazy for feeling how you feel. It’s called Elephant In The Mirror because the biggest elephant in the room is often ourselves, staring right back. In my experience, being terrified of finding out who we are is what keeps us from looking within.

I’m not saying abuse made us beautiful so we should rejoice. It’s a sad kind of beautiful. Or a raging beautiful. And it makes the bright spots vibrant, sometimes blindingly so in the darkness. If you’ve already suffered the trauma, I recommend you take everything you can from it.

The number one goal is to help you trust yourself. Not me. You can’t trust yourself if your energy comes from outside. That’s why you need your own fire, the one that gets attacked by people who try to flex on you. Trauma can make you a “bitch”—I’ve been that bitch, but one with a bite nobody messes with. That’s what got me gold medals in martial arts. That’s why I’m still alive. My mom, who was abused by my dad, saw him in me sometimes, yet she still paid for martial arts lessons. So, when bullying continued, I whooped some ass, told people to fuck off, and earned respect. I did it all while crying because I was hemorrhaging friends. That’s the cost of boundaries—you learn some people never really wanted to be close. But none of it happens without anger, outrage, and justice. Bad people can’t afford to set the precedent that sheep fight back.

We must therefore recognize that two things must happen simultaneously. You must accept that you should be outraged. But you’re not. As an adult, you are showing a smidgeon of a reaction compared to what you went through allows you. And to feel better, you must trust that outrage enough to not take your secrets to the grave, and if need be, immediately ask for help. Once you ask for help from the correct people, which could be the police, a family doctor, a mental health professional, a close confidant, trusted friends, support group. See the alternative is to die of your problems. The problems aren’t going anywhere, and most adults know that there are problems that aren’t meant to be solved alone. Some tasks are meant to be completed in a group. When the group provides genuine reflection, and validation, and warmth, when instead of you having a 10/10 outrage reaction, they all chip in and show 2-4/10 genuine outrage with you (more on how to be supportive in future articles), your 10/10 outrage will turn into a 2/10 simmer of raw, genuine, you power. It will be a hundred times stronger than outrage because it will now be anger. It will be acknowledged and certified, processed and refined, long term energy.

This is natural and normal for everyday insults.

“Oh my god this guy just brake checked me on the highway, and he doesn’t even know how close he was to killing me.”

“Oh my god what an asshole, did you give him the finger?”

“Hell yeah. I even yelled loser at him out the window.”

“Good, he deserves it!”

“So anyways, what are we having for dinner tonight?”

Being seen and heard is the fuel that drives us to live and move on.