Yes, I have had to think about a lot of "trauma" patterns and how my childhood day to day exposure to witnessing my older brother facing constant bullying and abuse and how that impacted my own identity affected me in ways I had not realized. When we sit and watch a sad movie, when we see someone hurt so badly it deeply moves us and makes us cry? That is what I experienced every single day in my childhood and I prayed constantly for someone to help my older brother and I remember feeling so helpless when it came to doing something to stop it from happening.

I am 62 years old and when I was a child going to school they did not know anything about learning disabilities and the truth is my older brother was constantly punished and abused for having a learning disability he could not help. I had to endure witnessing him picked on and bullied so badly every day on the bus, no one would sit with him and I would see him staring out the window trying so hard to hold back the tears. He was so stressed that he struggled to sleep, he wet his bed constantly and his bed had to be made with shower curtains, he sucked his thumb every night and I could hear it in my room and that resulted in his lips always being swollen and often covered with blisters which gave all the other children another thing to pick on him about where they called him "big lips". It's even worse looking back on all those years with what is known now about learning disabilities and abuse and neglect and the red flags that mean a child is being abused and traumatized.

What made it even worse is that he stayed back two years and I also stayed back a year so that made this horror go on longer. For me, that made it hard for me to be able to focus on learning and achieving because of how stressful every day was for me. Learning about trauma and looking back on all those years I can now see how hard it really was for me to deal with this every day and where I often got to a point where I was exhausted and I did get sick because the stress I experienced weakened my immune system. I even remember hearing "Oh, that's just OE, SHE'S ALWAYS SICK". I actually often was "very sick" too, and it's been hard to look back on this with the actual explanation for it that I had not realized before.

I recently read some symptoms of complex ptsd and one of the symptoms comes from being "trapped" in a toxic situation for a prolonged period of time, that definitely describes the years I was trapped in a scenario that was really toxic and definitely affected me in more ways than I realized.

The other thing I had to contend with is how my older sister really hated my older brother and also how controlling she always was too. I later learned from my older brother that it was my older sister that encouraged the other children to bully and pick on my older brother. I believe that because that is what she wanted me to do with him too and to this day I do not like it when people ask me to be mean to someone simply because they don't like that person. One thing I NEVER wanted to participate in was "hurting" someone like I witnessed happen to my older brother. I could NEVER understand how making another person feel bad and hurt like that could make ANYONE feel good.

Actually, I just watched a special on HBO about how a teacher back in the late 70's I think it was, was a pedophile and how he abused so many young boys and how so many chose to ignore it. That actually reminded me of how it was when it came to all the abuse my older brother suffered, the teachers that bullied him and were mean to him, the bus driver that NEVER once stopped the bus and stopped those children from picking on him. I remember how that made me feel where I grew up thinking ADULTS don't care and they won't help or stop bad things from happening and even how IF they are inconvenienced by being expected to stop it THEY PUNISH the abused child even more because that is what I witnessed. My older brother ran away a lot, looking back with what I know now, it was only his way of getting away from all that ABUSE.

I saw that my older brother had no friends, had NO ONE and was so alone and it made me so sad and angry too, that I became his only friend. The biggest challenge with that was that I also ended up being the one he often took his pent up anger out on too. I have too much of that in my history where I was nice and kind and often had things taken out on me, had to come to a place in myself where I somehow had to understand that dynamic and not blame the other person.

Sometimes a person can grow up in a dysfunctional environment where they are sent messages that "abuse is normal". I have come to realize that I had to learn how to thrive despite NEVER REALLY FEELING SAFE. I think I have also learned to thrive despite having some ptsd symptoms too.