trauma
At its core, trauma can be thought of as the psychological wounds that persist, even when the physical ones are long gone.
Psychology of Fight or Flight. Content Warning.
I was getting ready to record a paranormal podcast. Upon speaking with my spirit friends, I found this and decided to re-write and edit this prose story. We spoke about the bullies in DC and everywhere. We agreed this should be re-written, created, and published. 2025, a year of bullies, hate, greed, craziness, destruction, and genocide. Other than that, I am eating lollipops and singing in the rain in Southern California.
By Vicki Lawana Trusselli about a year ago in Psyche
The Last Dreamcatcher
In a dim-lit room cluttered with dream journals and incense, Dr. Kael Mora prepared his mind for another descent into someone else’s hell. “Next,” he called, voice flat but practiced. His assistant ushered in a trembling teenager with hollowed eyes and a sketchpad clutched to her chest. Her name was Miri, and for the last three weeks, she hadn’t slept longer than an hour. Her nightmares weren't just vivid; they were aggressive. Monsters with her father’s voice. Floods with her mother’s face. Unrelenting guilt in symbolic, surreal terror. Kael gestured to the dreambed. “You understand the rules?” Miri nodded silently. Her mother, waiting by the door, pleaded with her eyes. Everyone who came to Kael’s dream practice had tried everything else: meds, meditations, shamans, science. All had failed. Kael was their final gamble, their last dreamcatcher. Once she was settled in, Kael attached the neural web to her temples and slipped on his own. Inhaling the minty-vinegar scent of lucid root—a substance banned in most countries—he activated the DreamSync. The world around him evaporated. --- He landed in Miri’s nightmare like stepping into a storm mid-howl. The walls bled ink. The sky burned paper. She was already there, age-shifted to a child, cornered by a giant marionette version of her father. “You never said sorry!” the puppet boomed, arms flailing. “You let it happen! You watched her die!” Kael whispered a command. A shield materialized in his hand—a relic from his own trauma, forged over years of nightmare-trading. He ran between Miri and the puppet. “I’m taking this,” he said, pushing her behind him. “You don’t need it anymore.” The marionette shrieked as Kael absorbed its essence through the neural link, storing it inside a mental vault built brick by agonizing brick from other people’s pain. As the puppet crumbled to dust, Miri's dreamscape softened. The ink turned to rain. The flames gave way to dawn. She opened her mouth to thank him, but the dream evaporated before she could. --- Back in the waking world, Miri sobbed into her mother’s arms, and Kael stumbled to his chair, ashen and sweating. His assistant offered water. He waved it away. “How much longer can you keep doing this?” she asked. Kael stared at the ceiling. “As long as they need me.” What he didn’t say: each nightmare he stole became a whisper in his own mind. Some, he could lock away. Others... not so much. --- Kael lived alone in a fourth-story apartment above an abandoned bookstore. His walls were lined with dreamcatchers—not traditional ones, but digital memory drives designed to trap synthetic dream code. Each one hummed faintly, like bees in glass jars. That night, one of them burst. Kael bolted upright in bed, drenched in sweat, lungs clawing for air. The room spun. He heard Miri’s father’s voice again—louder, angrier, inside his head now. You think you’re saving them? You’re just borrowing their demons. Kael hurled the broken drive against the wall. It shattered. The room fell silent. But inside, the noise grew. --- The next day, a woman came in clutching a worn photo of her son. “He hanged himself after three weeks of night terrors,” she said. “I’ve been having his dreams ever since. Please. Take them.” Kael agreed. Her dream was a mosaic of unbearable sorrow. The boy’s silhouette leaped from a thousand cliffs. In one loop, he tried to climb out of a coffin. In another, he simply dissolved into ash. Kael couldn’t even find the source—just echoes, metaphors, recursive loops. After an hour inside, he surfaced weeping. “You didn’t just lose your son,” he whispered. “He lost himself.” The mother sobbed with gratitude. Kael added another nightmare to his collection. Another voice in his head. Another crack in the dam. --- A week later, Kael collapsed mid-session. He awoke in a hospital bed, the nurse calling him a miracle. “You flatlined,” she said. “But your brain never stopped... dreaming.” He didn’t respond. He could still hear them—every voice, every monster, every tear-soaked scream. His mind had become a museum of horrors. A psychiatrist visited later, suggesting a break. Maybe even retirement. Kael asked, “And when the next Miri walks in? What happens to her?” “You’re not God, Dr. Mora.” Kael smiled sadly. “Tell that to the parents.” --- That night, Kael returned to his office, alone. He stared at the remaining dreamcatchers, half of them blinking erratically. He chose one. Then another. Then five. Plugging in, he did what he swore he never would: he entered his own vault. It was worse than he imagined. Hundreds of nightmares swirled like a psychic storm. He saw Miri again, older now, thanking him. He saw the boy who hanged himself—this time sitting by Kael’s side, whispering, You carry us so we don’t fall again. He saw a mirror—and in it, himself, eyes red, hands shaking, asking why. “I’m not your savior,” Kael said aloud. “I’m just tired.” But the ghosts inside whispered, You’re more than tired. You’re proof that empathy isn’t weakness. It’s the only power left. He stood for hours in that dreamscape, one final time, confronting every voice, naming every fear. Then he let go. --- Kael’s office never reopened. But months later, people began reporting strange dreams—dreams of a quiet man with tired eyes, walking calmly through their nightmares, touching monsters and turning them to mist. They woke lighter, freer. None of them ever met Kael. But they spoke of him like legend. The Last Dreamcatcher.
By Syed Kashif about a year ago in Psyche
Focus Isn't About Trying Harder: It's About Friction
In the age of constant notifications, open tabs, background noise, and infinite scrolling, we've come to believe that focus is a matter of willpower. If we just tried a little harder, eliminated laziness, and summoned more discipline, we could finally sit down and get things done. But what if this assumption is wrong?
By Nikesh Lagunabout a year ago in Psyche
INTP Mircea Cărtărescu's BLINDING (vol. 2): the body (translated from Romanian)
I no longer truly experience anything, even though I live with an intensity that simple sensations couldn't possibly convey. Even when I open my eyes, I still cannot see. To no avail, I linger rigid in front of my oval window, chasing echoes that slip away. As if my being extends beyond ordinary senses to myriad ways of knowing--each unique, each responsive to different stimuli: one sensitive only to my coffee cup's form, another receptive exclusively to the pattern of last night's dreaming. Another attuned to that terrifying whisper in my ears, heard distinctly a few years ago, as I was sitting, in a ragged pajama, with the soles of my feet on the radiator, in my room on Ștefan cel Mare Boulevard. I no longer register modifications of light, variations in the pitches of sound, the chemical composition of the carnation and the kitchen dishwater, but whole scenes swallowed instantly by a virtual sense, opened on the spot in the center of my mind solely for that glassy and transient scene like a wave of water, reacting with it, altering it, flattening it, invading it like an amoeba and forming together another reality, primordial and immediate, illuminated by desire and made obscure by peculiarity. It is as though it were the case that everything that happens to me, in order for it to be able to come to pass for me, surely it is something that must have happened to me already, as if all of it already exists inside me, but not fully formed or complete: rather, dormant, in shriveled little layers, rudimentary, coiled tightly within each other, somewhere in the brain's structures--but also in the glands, in the organs, in my twilight, and in my ruined houses--all waiting for confirmation and nourishment from the modulated flame of existence, which itself remains unfulfilled and embryonic. I no longer feel except what I have already felt once, I can no longer dream except dreams already dreamed. I open my eyes, although not to perceive color or contour--for light no longer refracts into corpuscles to traverse my crystalline lens and the translucent layers of my retina, no longer produces rhodopsin in my cone-shaped cells; instead, whole images manifest fully formed, sculpted directly in rhodopsin, and accompanied as if by an aura of sound's fringes and delicate strands of tastes and aromas, alternating icy cold and searing heat, of suffering and compassion, of a head turning to the right--an action simultaneously verified and questioned by my inner ear's cochlear knowledge. Entire neighborhoods materialize, each bearing their own time, their own space, and their own emotional weather, and especially their own degree of reality--because they can be actual or dreamed, or imagined, or transmitted via the ineffable filaments that connect our lives to those who came before us--lips and genitals arrive, and streetcars sliding along iron tracks during winters with filthy snow, my mother comes once in a while to bring me food, sometimes Herman comes. I wouldn't be able to understand any of this if it weren't being reconfigured, in another way, in my internal landscape (my world), if it weren't opening the ocular buds from there, unless I whispered to myself every moment: "I have experienced this before, I have already been in this place," just as you cannot perceive light if light hasn't already existed in the back of your mind's experience, cultivating the faculty for light within you. Hence, my life is but a life already lived, and my book one already written--for the past encompasses all, while the future is but a void.
By ANTICHRIST SUPERSTARabout a year ago in Psyche
The Scroll That Never Satisfies: Why Short-Form Content Leaves Us Spiritually Starving
I open the app, and within seconds, I'm swept into the current. A dog-tasting peanut butter for the first time. A podcast clip where someone's crying about heartbreak. A dad surprising his daughter at school. A pastor delivering a one-minute message on identity. A fitness influencer explaining "three reasons you're still bloated." A sped-up recipe for honey garlic chicken. A baby laughing so hard, I can't help but laugh too.
By Robert Lacyabout a year ago in Psyche
The Silence Around Childhood Trauma Awareness Month in Cincinnati Speaks Volumes
June is officially Childhood Trauma Awareness Month in the city of Cincinnati—a designation that should carry weight, urgency, and city-wide conversation. But walk through any neighborhood, flip through local news channels, or scroll social media, and you’ll hear nothing but silence. No press releases. No community forums. No rallies. No recognition of the man responsible for this proclamation: Ronald Hummons.
By Emma Wegenastabout a year ago in Psyche
Is AI Your Secret Weapon for Mental Peace? 5 Apps to Save Your Mind
Mental health isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a journey we’re all navigating, sometimes in silence. I remember a rainy evening stuck in traffic with my wife, the kind where the world feels heavy and words don’t come easy. A random memory of a road trip—us laughing over a torn map under a flickering flashlight—broke the silence and reminded us who we were. That moment was a lifeline, but what if you could have a lifeline in your pocket every day? Enter AI: not just for sci-fi movies or chatbots, but for real, tangible mental health support. These tools aren’t here to replace therapists; they’re like quiet companions, helping you process emotions, track moods, or just feel less alone.
By F. M. Rayaanabout a year ago in Psyche
10 Shocking Psychological Studies That Crossed Every Line
Introduction : Psychology is meant to heal, to help us understand the mind, and to bring light to the darkest corners of human behavior. But sometimes, it does the exact opposite. Throughout history, some psychological experiments have gone so far off the ethical rails, they became nightmares in the name of science. These studies didn’t just push boundaries — they obliterated them. Some left emotional scars, others cost lives, but all of them left one question hanging in the air: how far is too far?
By Jure Bracicabout a year ago in Psyche
