Humour around cptsd

Started by Rainagain, November 11, 2017, 08:07:18 AM

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Rainagain

I wondered if there might be a place for people to post funny stuff that has happened to them because of cptsd and associated issues.

I seem to often laugh about stuff, it helps to cope.

I'm not saying everyone feels like this but maybe if you are having a bad day reading about other people finding life ridiculous could help.

I have always used (sometimes) dark humour to help me cope.

It contains a sort of optimism and helps make the desperate bearable.

Sceal

I do too. Sometimes its all you can do to ease the burden

ah

Would extremely dark humor be okay too?
Shiny happy humor is for me an instant trigger, but dark humor can be a huge relief. It can be like medicine sometimes when there's nothing else left. But at its best it may be very morbid  :whistling:

Rainagain

Darker the better I'd say.

Here is a mild example

I was going upstairs to fetch something, I stopped halfway on the stairs as I'd forgotten what I was fetching. After a while I gave up trying to remember, then I couldn't remember if I had been going up the stairs or down the stairs before I had stopped in the middle.

Or today's visit to psych. I used to work in enforcement and my partner was explaining that I have nightmares where I thrash about and shout out. The psych asked what sort of things I come out with, she replied 'come here,you!'. And 'have it!'
He laughed, it was a moment.....

Maybe we could have a place called 'trigger warning corner' where we can post the stupid stuff with swearing encouraged? I often can't take myself seriously and am not even all that embarrassed by my nuttiness anymore.

Blueberry

Sometimes I also have a dark humourous side about the nonsense FOO comes up with. I don't want to trigger anybody though.

One thing FOO said a few decades ago: "Some bad things might have happened, but that'll strengthen you for later."  :rofl: I feel so strong. I managed to be full-time employed for about 3 years before I collapsed completely. I'm sure the country I'm living in is so happy that this strength allows me to contribute in such a meaningful way to e.g. income tax.  :rofl:
(I know it's sad too in its way, but this quote cracks me up.)

On my early days on this forum, either I, or somebody else and I, came up with "FOO ping pong". That's basically these useless discussions that I only engage in in my head or in Unsent Letters now, where you maybe accuse somebody in FOO of abuse, or you say "I'm not going to be the family SG anymore" and they answer: "You never were, you were imagining that." and then you say "No I wasn't...." FOO ping pong. The designation makes me laugh, not the activity obviously.

AphoticAtramentous

This is a cute idea. I tend to laugh at a lot of things, including my own pain. I hit my knee against my desk the other day and it hurt a bunch but I was laughing because it was so ridiculous that out of all the places I could move my leg, it just so happened to move to where my desk was. I laugh at my CPTSD issues too though, the bad memory, conflicting thoughts, the random mood swings, and just being sensitive to a lot of strangely specific things. Also I take pleasure in telling people all the creepy nightmares I have as a result of my CPTSD and their cringing is hilarious to me.  :whistling:

woodsgnome

#6
What comes to mind for me are those side-by-side or 2-faced theatrical masks depicting either laughter or crying. Indeed, they often can merge on the emotional level; especially when the sadness has no further territory left, as it's all so absurd and totally senseless.

I feel that the inner dark absurd humour type played a huge role in surviving lots of abuse, especially when I reached school age and began to decipher the hypocrisy behind the abusers better. How monsters could morph into fools or the like, for instance. They were still awful, but inside  at least I could turn them into buffoons.

Unfortunately, the reality meant there was not a shred of humour in the events themselves; only in the aftermath, the dark humour was obviously an important survival tactic. It literally was the only thing that kept me going at times.

Nowadays, I sometimes incorporate dark humour into how I think of the past. A favourite metaphor of mine is to describe my life as 2 movies--the old and new. In a purely habitual painful way, I view the old flick as pure tragedy.

But when I add the dark humour, I end up with more of a tragicomedy. Until, finally, I realize the only thing I can effect is the new movie for which I'm currently writing the script. But the background involves the dark humour which is still playing itself out, I guess.

Kat

On a couple of occasions where I had a phone conversation with my T, I ended it by saying, "Well, all right then.  Thanks. I've got to go put the kids in their cages.  They've been out for a whole hour now."  Fortunately, my T has a very dark sense of humor and just laughs at me.  Sometimes she'll play back pretending to be in court trying to explain herself, "Well, yes, I see that it sounds bad, but I really thought she was joking..." 

Now that I think of it, my relationship with my own kids is where a lot of the dark humor comes about.  I was telling my T about my daughter's fish dying.  I said she asked why they died and that I said, "Because you were bad."  Of course, I didn't say that, but it made us both laugh.  Wow.  Having written this, it sounds really bad in writing. 

Three Roses

Dark humor can be very cathartic. (I kind of chuckled at your fish story.)

Rainagain

Every time I see the thread 'just having a difficult day ' I think....

'Just having a difficult life' more like.

Makes me smile anyway.

caroline

So glad I found this thread!  Have any of you played Cards against Humanity?  I think everyone was shocked by what i thought was funny!

Contessa

Caroline yes.
Just played it with a friend's family. Although we've always had a similar sense of humour, I did notice that my responses were particularly darker... so I didn't own up to all of them, ha :)

Mussymel

Kat I have a similar dark sense of humour with my kids, and laughed at your fish story. I think sarcasm keeps parents relatively sane sometimes!
The current funniest thing to do in this house is scare mommy. Due to my hyper vigilance I give a great reaction to being scared. I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea the other night and my 6 year old suddenly appeared behind me. I jumped and screamed. She laughed her head off! I have joked with my DH (who also loves to sneak up on me) that some day I'll have a sharp knife in my hands and won't be responsible for my actions due to my mental illness. I told my T this and he thought it was funny. I often say if I don't laugh I'll cry, so better to laugh.

Kat

Mussy, you mentioned your startle response.  My daughter who is ten is a night owl.  When we're on break, she tends to stay up past everyone else in the house.  Unfortunately, that means she comes to wake me to put her to bed.  I've warned both my kids about scaring me.  Poor girl went to wake me up so I could put her in bed and got a slap across the face.  It wasn't a hard slap, but it scared us both.  Nothing funny about this.  Your post just happened to remind me.

I don't recall if I've mentioned this anywhere else on the boards, so if you've already read about this, I'm sorry.  We owned two guinea pigs.  They went through multiple names as the kids were growing up.  Finally, I just took to calling them The Girls.  One of them died, so I've continued calling the one we have The Girl.  I had put her outside to graze and sort of forgot about it.  My daughter came in while I was on the phone and said, "Can I put The Girl back in her cage now?" I wondered what the person on the other end was thinking.

Mussymel

Oh Kat I'd say that wasn't nice for either of you.
That is hilarious about the guinea pig.