'Stay Classy' claims another victim #FreeFletcher

Here's something you might consider as well. You seem to be looking at this only from your own perspective, rather than branching out and seeing how other people might feel. You say you've not gotten to the point where you can use jokes as a coping mechanism. I suggest you try it; it may actually make you feel better and get over whatever's happened to you.

This is not something out of thin air that I'm making up because it sounds good. It's how I deal with life. It's how I avoid going crazy. Because although I've never had to deal with rape... I've had to deal with some horrible shit. You see, I grew up in a horribly dysfunctional family. And it's not "we sometimes didn't get along" dysfunctional. I mean full stop, this is not a family, it's a bunch of people that hate each other. I've had to stop one of my sisters from beating my other sister to death with an iron. And in another incident, threaten to beat her with a board if she didn't stay at home and wait for the police after she broke the other sister's nose again. I lived with a bunch of people that were constantly screaming, crying, and fighting and with no real way to escape from it for years. There were no friends, there was very rarely any sort of solo entertainment I could do aside from trying to read books through it all, because any sort of attempt to do anything else usually ended up escalating to some rather unpleasant things. And that's only really the tip of the iceberg; I really don't feel like trying to dredge up memories of back then. All I can really say is I still have nightmares about this shit. I'm still very angry about it and can pretty much say that the relationship with my parents is poor at best, and I really don't talk to them anymore.

But I still make jokes about stuff like that. I can watch Family Guy and laugh even when they get in to fights (which should be exacerbated because my real name is Chris and one of my Sisters is named Megan, or Meg for short). And I don't feel a particular need to jump all over people who talk about family or whatnot as a "trigger" even if sometimes I do have to excuse myself from certain conversations because they bring up bad memories. It's not their fault some bad shit happened to me, and if I can't handle talking to them about a related subject, I just don't. But I won't pretend that they should respect how I feel on it because nothing they were saying was meant to hurt me, so why should I take it personally? And really, when I can laugh about this shit? It helps. At first it just simply made it hurt less; nowadays I'll often just not think about it at all. It still comes up every now and then, don't get me wrong - but trying to find humor in it has put me in a far better place now than I was in years ago. Trying to bend the rest of the world in to whatever you're trying to run from isn't going to help you. But trying to find humor in it? Something funny can't possibly hurt you, so trying to make it funny can sometimes be all the difference. I don't pretend that it's just some switch you can flip between "traumatizing" and "funny" - I'm still not entirely over what happened during my childhood - and it's a long trip, but you have to start eventually, otherwise you'll never reach the end.

/r/Eve Thread Link - i.imgur.com