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Tilley
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PathStep 3 Compassion hearts12 Forum posts3 Forum upvotes2 Current upvotes2 Age GroupAdult Last activeOctober, 2025 Member sinceOctober 23, 2025
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Childhood trauma and learning to live
Trauma Support / by Tilley
Last post
 October 23rd, 2025
...See more I just want to tell this story with the main things that made me the way I am today. I’m currently a 31 year old male still dealing with the trauma from the things I went through but have never told the full story to anyone. It all started when I was 10 I had what i remember as a great family then my dad died. He is the glue that held everything together. My mother was a bipolar alcoholic who stopped taking her medication and spent 90% of her time locked in her room drinking. My oldest brother was a violent person with Asperger‘s. When my dad first died he left for a few years he must have been 14 years old and came back when he was 16. He was a big guy definitely on steroids amongst all the pain kills and other drugs. My dad died in December so holidays were especially crazy in my house hold. My mother used to by me cheap Christmas gifts like cds just so she could snatch them after an hr or two and break everything I got for Christmas and make me clean it all up. She never kept food in the house other than some crackers here and there. This made me have to find ways to either make money as a very young child which there is no good way to do so or I’d go hangout with someone from the neighborhood in hopes there family would invite me for dinner. School lunches where all the food I had most days that cold baloney sandwich they would hand out for free to the kids that couldn’t afford lunch. After having to deal with my mother for 2 years when he came back he would hit me almost every day to the point i wasnt able to hide it. So I would start picking fights to hide the bruises because nobody want to admit it’s from family. He would always repeat “I have to teach you to be a man now” as he would hit me. I remember one day when my mom was actually sober she locked him out of the house and he broke through the door and strangled her on the kitchen floor until I came running over and he stormed out. That was the last day i remember my mother being sober as a kid. i didn’t know what to do with all this pain. I started doing and dealing drugs when i was 13-14 years old. I have months I don’t remember because of abusing Xanax. It wasn’t till I was 16 and one my best friend took some and ended up shooting himself in the head that I turned away from those. From there I turned to stimulates and got hooked on coke. Still 16-17 I was so coked out in an apartment with a bunch of much older ex cons. I didn’t know what was going on until they all left but one. This is a part nobody knows about but he I can’t even type it but I was molested. After that I turned to alcohol and meth HEAVY. Ran away from everything and didn’t speak to anyone in my passed life for 10 years. Im now sober but still have these emotional flashbacks, panic attacks, suicidal thoughts, issues making any really connection or maintaining a connection when I find one. Im on medication now to help deal with the cptsd and the depression. I still have my very bad days that make it all feel pointless but im learning to manage and see when something triggers me so i can step back instead of blowing up friendships or relationships. Life isn’t great but it’s livable except when it’s not.
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