Joshua Adam Trommel

The biggest problem in my life is what happened when I was a kid. My dad hit me from when I was a toddler until around preschool age. My earliest memory is him hitting me when I was around 2. I genuinely cannot find a way to accept or make sense of hitting a child that young, someone who doesn't even understand language yet. I've tried and I can't. The verbal aggression and intimidation continued for years after the hitting stopped, roughly until about 5 years ago. We had to call the police on him once or twice when I was younger because he was so aggressive. Throwing chairs, slamming doors. That was maybe 5 to 10+ years ago now.

My mom didn't just watch. She used it as a weapon. "You better listen or your dad will hit you." She actively threatened me with his violence and framed the whole thing as being for my own good, which she kept saying well into my adult years until I was old enough to actually argue back. She condoned it intentionally. Because of both of them I don't think I'll ever be able to fully trust anyone. My dad acted and my mom weaponized it. Both of them are responsible.

My parents also argued constantly growing up. They only really stopped in the last few years after they realized the arguments were never going anywhere.

My dad hasn't been aggressive in about 5 years. Things eventually got bad enough that they stopped trying to control my life. They're in their 50s now, everyone is mostly fine day to day. Things are calm. But years of fear and intimidation don't just disappear because the house got quieter.

It's generational. My grandpa is 80 with dementia and still cries about his dad beating him as a kid. Three generations of it. The pattern doesn't break on its own.

I've talked to more therapists than the rest of my family put together and I still carry a lot of shame from those early years. Not just anger at him but shame about myself, like something I internalized back then that never really left. Being autistic makes it worse. The memories don't fade the way they might for other people. They replay with the same intensity 20+ years later. I'm not trying to get anything over on him or use it for points. It just genuinely still hurts all the time.

Research from Harvard (Cuartas et al., 2021) found that hitting a child activates the same threat-response regions in the brain as more severe physical abuse. There were no regions of the brain where the neural response differed between kids who were spanked and kids who were abused. The lead researcher said "in terms of how a child's brain responds, it's not all that different than abuse. It's more a difference of degree than of type." A separate study (McCrory et al., 2017) found that children exposed to physical, sexual, or emotional abuse all show the same disrupted prefrontal-amygdala circuitry and heightened threat response. I'm not saying my dad sexually abused me. But the neurological effects overlap significantly. Other people I've talked to who were hit as kids describe similar feelings.

A separate study (Tomoda et al., 2009) found that harsh corporal punishment was associated with a 19% reduction in prefrontal cortex gray matter volume, the same regions that show damage in sexual abuse victims. And Teicher & Samson (2016) in Nature Reviews Neuroscience found that the brain's stress-response architecture does not meaningfully distinguish between being hit and being sexually abused. Both activate the same threat-detection circuits, produce the same structural atrophy in prefrontal and limbic regions, and dysregulate the same stress systems. The differences are more about which specific sensory cortex is affected than about the downstream traumatic impact on brain development.

Sources: Cuartas et al. (2021), "Corporal Punishment and Elevated Neural Response to Threat in Children," Child Development. Tomoda et al. (2009), "Reduced prefrontal cortical gray matter volume in young adults exposed to harsh corporal punishment," NeuroImage. Teicher & Samson (2016), "The effects of childhood maltreatment on brain structure, function and connectivity," Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Gershoff (2016), "Should Parents' Physical Punishment of Children Be Considered a Source of Toxic Stress That Affects Brain Development?" Family Relations.

I usually just talk through disagreements calmly. I discuss my opinion until both sides have chatted about it. I don't usually get upset or angry during arguments. If I'm overwhelmed I leave. Might cry about it later or get angry privately but I keep my composure when I'm actually talking with people. Pretty similar with family versus everyone else.

The intrusive thoughts are constant. All day, every day. Nightmares almost every night unless I smoke enough weed to suppress REM sleep. The nightmares are hard to describe. Abstract, recurring, almost always the same theme. Running away from people, or people running away from me. Triggers are everywhere: seeing my family, being alone at night when the masking drops, specific reminders like places or conversations, and sometimes completely random with no pattern at all. There's no single trigger that dominates. It all hits.

There is one specific dream I have had since I was about five. Once or twice a month. Always corridors. I'm chasing a faceless figure. When I catch them they turn around and it's me. Then they start chasing me. No exit, just the reversal. It was there at five and it's still there now. Some mornings I'm not sure if I'm relieved or disappointed to be awake.

The shame isn't as simple as "I deserved it." It's deeper than that, harder to put into words. It's a full-body thing, like something got wired wrong early on and never corrected itself. It runs in the background constantly. The good stuff, family trips, being taken care of, it exists, but it doesn't override the early stuff. If my dad gave me a billion dollars it wouldn't change it.

I sleep midnight to 8am or 4am to 11am, give or take. Nightmares just about every night. I smoke weed chronically to suppress them. I have PTSD from something that happened 20+ years ago. My dad hit me probably 3 to 5 times as a kid and that was enough. I live in the house my dad pays for as basically a guest. The dreams don't stop without the weed.

I have younger siblings. I've never had any real issues with any of them. They're all pretty easygoing. We have a good relationship.

My maternal grandma is probably the most stable person in my life. My maternal grandpa has dementia and cancer. On my dad's side, his mom passed away around the COVID era. She always scared me more than any bully or even my dad himself, for reasons I can't fully explain. My dad's dad is a nice guy, probably the only person who seems more neurotic or anxious than I am.

I had a French Bulldog briefly but had a mental breakdown and got rid of it. My family has a few dogs and we lost one recently. My dad's mom dying around the same period as COVID and the homelessness added to everything piling up at once.

I lost everything in the last 5 to 6 years. Girlfriend, money, car, dog, etcetera. The losses often come all at once, piling on together very quickly. Not processed one at a time. They stack.

Started high school in honours. Halfway through grade 10 I switched to a more social track, made a few friends, and stopped taking academics as seriously. Some bullying along the way but nothing that stands out as the defining issue. School was fine. It just wasn't where the real damage was happening.

I was raised Christian. Forced. Church, prayers, the whole thing. I rejected it.

The logic never held up. An omnipotent, all-knowing god creates humans with sin built in, then punishes them for sinning. You're guilty before you do anything, for things you didn't choose, raised in a belief system you couldn't consent to, then blamed for the fallout. That's not a religion, that's a trap. The theodicy problem has never had a clean answer. If there were a god and he were good, the world wouldn't look like this. I'm devilishly angry at the family who installed that framework in me before I was old enough to push back.

I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 8. I was diagnosed with autism in October 2025 as an adult. My family never really suspected it and I only started figuring it out myself a few years ago. I'm currently waiting to hear back about the Persons With Disabilities (PWD) program in BC. Still waiting as of April 2026. Got a date now: should be processed by June 22. Apparently the wait is pretty normal given how slow the system is.

Autism is basically my entire life. It's not a feature of who I am, it's the whole frame. Every social interaction, every sensory input, every failed friendship, every night falling apart when the mask drops: it all routes back to this. Getting the diagnosis at 25 just put a name on what was already running the show.

Autistic people have a statistically shorter lifespan -- roughly 16 years shorter on average. For people without intellectual disability it's around 12 years. The primary drivers are suicide (9x the rate of the general population), epilepsy, and barriers to healthcare access. Autistic people often can't communicate symptoms clearly or navigate systems that weren't built for them. The system pathologizes the person instead of fixing the environment, every time.

GI problems are nearly universal with autism, affecting somewhere between 47 and 90 percent of autistic people compared to around 10 percent of the general population. The mechanism is the gut-brain axis -- the enteric nervous system is densely wired to the CNS via the vagus nerve, and autistic brains process those signals differently. Serotonin dysregulation is also part of it: around 90 percent of serotonin is produced in the gut, and hyperserotoninemia (elevated blood serotonin) is one of the most replicated findings in autism research. Add visceral hypersensitivity (the same sensory amplification that makes loud rooms unbearable applies to gut signals), autonomic dysfunction, microbiome differences, and chronic anxiety running the HPA axis hot -- and you get a gut that never settles. Constipation, abdominal pain, diarrhea, GERD. All of it.

Trichotillomania. I twirl my hair so much I pull it out. When I was younger I played with my mom's hair while she carried me. Conditioner makes hair soft. Apparently a non-sexual sensory thing. I don't like loud noises, never have. I get overwhelmed when 4 or 5 people talk at once in groups. I don't know who to talk to, which groups to be part of, which thread to follow. I can do it with computer memory because it's indexed with numbers and hashes, but with humans it's exceptionally difficult.

Not really textures. I wash my hands a lot, always have since age 5 to 7, like 10+ times a day. Probably OCD. I rub my feet together when falling asleep. I cry when waking up and falling asleep. That's my defining feature. Everything stimulates me, so I smoke copious amounts of weed so nothing stimulates me, then when it wears off I get overwhelmed.

I mask about half the day. The other half I get to sit in my room and code plus do homework, science and math. I'd prefer to do that all day but ADHD means I have to go out, eat, talk to people. When the mask drops at night, that's when the crying and overwhelm hits.

I was briefly put on ADHD medication as a child, maybe a few months to a year at most. I'm now on sertraline (50mg nightly) and Concerta (methylphenidate, ADHD stimulant). I miss most doses of both. Not deliberate -- it just doesn't happen. The consistency isn't there. Neither has been on long enough to really evaluate. Sertraline has been on and off for about 5 to 6 months.

My first therapist was Dr. Chapman at Vancouver Children's Hospital when I was around 8. My dad brought us. After that I lost count. I've talked to more therapists than the rest of my family combined. None of them stuck long enough to make a lasting difference. Amanda is the current one. My parents pay for the sessions.

I had a few relationships in my late teens and early twenties. The first serious one was with a girl I met online around 2014 who came to my prom in 2017. My parents flew me to NYC that same year to meet her. Probably the best week of my life. I think back on it so fondly that it makes everything else feel worse by comparison. Not because I'm stuck on her, but because that week was the highest point and nothing since has come close.

The one that still affects me the most was in 2019. We were together from April to December. We moved in together and she got pregnant. The abortion was my decision initially. It was mutual but I pushed for it because neither of us could afford it. I was paying her portion of the rent and driving her to work. She was furious. She developed psychosis and pulled knives on me, thinking I was forcing her. It broke us up. We both moved back in with our parents. The abortion is probably the second most confusing and painful thing that's happened in my life, right after what happened with my dad when I was little. I carry guilt and grief both ways. If I'd kept the kid I'd feel the same. Damned either way.

My longest relationship was with Natania, from roughly 2021 or 2022 through 2024 (~2.5 years). We broke up in summer 2024 — I had been effectively living at her place and her parents didn't want that.

I'm not in a relationship right now and I don't see myself getting into one anytime soon. Past relationships left damage that I'm still dealing with years later. I haven't been able to make one last longer than about 3 years. Right now I'd rather focus on getting my own life sorted out first.

Standoffish at first because of the autism, but not too bad. I like meeting people. Met a new guy at the bus stop recently. Nervous but open. I assume the best of people until they disappoint me, which I'll admit is probably easy to do. I give people a few chances. I let people get close usually. The distrust comes from my parents and a history of people just moving away or leaving after a certain amount of time.

I'm straight. When I was 15 I thought I was gay for a stretch. I'd later realize I wasn't, I was just autistic and reading myself wrong. I had one gay interaction with an old friend that made me feel grossed out. I have gay friends but most if not all of them have come onto me at some point, which doesn't just turn me off but genuinely disgusts me. Worth noting for the trust and boundaries stuff.

I lost my virginity at 16 in a tent on the baseball field behind my high school. The reason it happened there is that my mom wouldn't allow girls over. So anything like that had to be somewhere else, somewhere secret. The restriction didn't stop it. It just relocated it to somewhere that felt wrong before it started. The girl I was with at the time was the one who later introduced me to MDMA.

I absolutely cannot set boundaries, not even a question. Hard time saying no. Can't set them at home either. I cannot name a single boundary I've set that actually worked. They mostly get ignored.

Around 16, a year or two after we moved into this house, they took my bedroom door off. My best guess is it was because I had a girl over. I think they moved it down to the downstairs suite. So I took their door. I don't know what the right move was supposed to be -- if there were rules, tell me what they are. If I break them, tell me to leave. What they actually did was trap me between two options: comply completely or be homeless. They put me in that position and they've never once taken responsibility for it.

I lost most of my friends around 2020. My best friend stuck around and still calls me, but he moved to Vancouver Island a year or two ago. He's visited once in two years. We've drifted apart. It felt like losing the last person who was actually around.

My oldest friend Alex has been the one consistent voice. Last call we hit a wall when he argued parents should hit their kids more, that his dad throwing him on the couch at 12 was good discipline. Biggest disagreement we have ever had. What he described is nothing compared to what I went through at two, and what I went through is nothing compared to my grandpa at 80 still crying about his dad. Hard to hear someone frame that as character-building.

We talked again today. Got into the period I was kicked out and living in the car. I do remember writing mean blog posts about family and friends back then. Alex's read is that I was basically abandoned by everyone. He agrees with that even though I don't want the victim label.

Apparently Olivia, or the friend group that split off with her, started a rumour that I beat her. That is not what happened. Worth naming because it probably seeded a lot of the social withdrawal.

Another friend deactivated his Twitter recently. Was going to send him something. No way to reach him now. People just disappear.

Right now I'm mostly just studying calculus.

They kicked me out as soon as I turned 18. That was the first time. I lived in my car periodically at age 24 before they eventually let me back in -- no explanation for either decision. In summer 2024 I was homeless for several months after things got bad at home with my family. I lived in a car I had recently purchased until it broke down on me. My parents moved me into an AirBnB for a few months until they let me move back in. I don't know why I was kicked out. I don't know what made them let me back in or what I said. That uncertainty is its own source of trauma. The uncertainty around housing and family trust goes all the way back. Feeling safe at home has never been a given for me. His garage door business, Best Choice Garage Doors, has run advertisements using a photo of me taken when I was around ten, without any agreement or compensation.

My parents have called the police on me a few times too. The worst one was during the same period. My dad called the police on me during a self-harm episode. I opened the door and they chased me through the house. I slipped in the kitchen. They arrested me by kneeling on my back, handcuffed me, and brought me to the hospital where I was kept overnight in solitary confinement. They let me out before the end of the next day. The handcuffs left a scar on my wrist that's still there. A permanent physical reminder.

My depression and suicidal thoughts don't feel like something I live with constantly in the sense that I'm always visibly falling apart. They hit me out of nowhere. I can get through a whole day fine, keep it together, and then completely fall apart at night. A lot of it has to do with masking all day, autism, emotions, everything, and then losing it when I'm alone. Sleep is inconsistent, anywhere from 4 to 8 hours. Mix of insomnia and oversleeping. Nightmares every night make it worse.

Suicidal thoughts have been there since I was a kid, basically since I can remember. I've made a few attempts, nothing super lethal, more impulsive than planned. Crashing a car after drinking and driving (got a DUI, since wiped), overdosing on pills. The self-harm started around age 22 to 23. Punching myself in the head. I didn't have a history of that before. I usually don't realize I'm going to do it until I already am. I also went to rehab twice in the last few years at Ravensview (Homewood) on Vancouver Island.

The most significant hospitalization was a wellness-check incident in 2023 or 2024. I was hitting my head and my dad called police for a wellness check instead of an ambulance. Police arrived, questioned me at the door, and I answered lucidly and cordially. They then declared I was under arrest. When I asked why, they gave no reason. I tried to retreat into the house; they chased me, I slipped in the kitchen, and they arrested me there, kneeling on my back. I was taken to Langley Hospital psych ward, forced to take antipsychotic medication without my consent, and placed in solitary confinement overnight. Released the next morning with no aftercare plan. I have PTSD from this incident — constant replays, hypervigilance, poor sleep, GI symptoms. I'm pursuing a civil suit.

I've been smoking weed since I was a teenager. It's escalated over the years to heavy daily use, multiple times a day to suppress memory. I also vape. I drink occasionally but it's not a major thing. I had a few cars from age 17 to about 24, a few VW Golfs among other things, but I no longer have any interest in driving. I have significant memory loss, partly from the weed and partly because I've spent years trying not to think about things.

I gym for an hour or two almost every day and I'm hitting personal bests regularly. The discipline is compounding. I don't eat too badly either. The gym is a mix of health, wanting to look good, discipline, and proving something to myself. All of the above. The coping mechanisms are a mix of self-destructive and genuinely healthy. They just coexist.

I don't really hate myself or anybody specifically. It's more of a general frustration. The anger goes both directions, inward as self-harm, outward as snapping at people. The root of it is frustration with how things are, not with any one person.

I've cried every single day for as long as I can remember. Not metaphorically, actually. Every day. Usually at night when the mask drops, sometimes in the morning before I'm even fully awake. It's baseline, not an event.

Intelligence doesn't feel like a gift. I test around 130 IQ and that number is more of a curse than anything else. I wake up, register how aware I am of everything, and that awareness is what I spend the day crying about. High enough to see exactly how things are, not high enough to fix any of it. Functionally I feel retarded, by which I mean unable to execute the thing my brain can clearly see. Alone 24/7. I think about my displeasures all day and there genuinely are no pleasures to balance them. Life is a curse, without question. That's not a mood, that's the conclusion I keep arriving at.

There are things I've done where I knew, in the moment, that I was crossing a line I'd set for myself. Not rules someone else made. My own. Getting involved with people I knew were bad news. Going along with situations because stopping felt harder than continuing.

Some of the drug stuff fits here. Not because I think there's anything wrong with it on principle, but because the way it started wasn't really deliberate. A friend introduced me to weed around 16. A girl I was with introduced me to Molly. I went along. Both of those happened before I had any real sense of who I was or what I wanted. The question of how much was peer pressure and how much was actually me is impossible to answer cleanly. Being 16, autistic, socially isolated, and raised in a house where I had to sneak around to have any normal experiences at all -- that context matters. But I was there. I made the calls.

There are specifics. The DUI: drove drunk, wrapped a car around a tree, knew what I was doing. The period I was homeless: shoplifted from Safeway because there was no other option, but I still knew it was wrong. The blog posts I wrote about family and friends when I was living in the car -- Alex confirmed they were mean. I wasn't wrong that I was abandoned, but the way I handled it wasn't clean. None of this is catastrophic. But these are the moments I'm talking about.

I don't think I'm a bad person. I've never done anything to anyone that I'd be ashamed to name out loud. The guilt I carry is less about specific acts and more about a general sense that some of the ways I've moved through the world have been reactive rather than chosen. That's probably the ADHD and the autism and the circumstances, not a character flaw. But it's still mine to sit with.

First smoked weed at 16 or 17 -- a friend introduced me. At 17 there was a party, didn't get it. A few months later smoked again, it half-deactivated my autism and helped me relax and stop thinking. Started smoking every day, still do at almost 27. About 5+ bong tokes every day. I've tried to cut back a little but not seriously. When I do, the bad dreams come back, I get over-stressed about stuff that doesn't matter. Whether weed helps more than it hurts: fifty fifty.

MDMA came in around the same time, through the girl I was with at 16. I've taken it more times than I can count. Same with LSD. Neither escalated the way weed did -- they stayed recreational and occasional rather than daily -- but I've taken both a lot. I'm on sertraline and Concerta now. I miss most doses of both.

I feel fine about my body, just tired. The self-harm was because the world is messed up and I had to deal with it. Got hit by a car, couldn't work for years, stole from family, was kicked out, lived in my car. It was a very weird situation that's hard to explain years later. Not solely my fault. Born like this, haven't gotten along great with family for years. I love myself. I wouldn't hurt myself on purpose. People around me hurt me badly. Gym PRs almost every single day because I'm strong. I go as hard as possible about 75% of the time. I'm not the problem.

GI issues are a constant. Directly tied to the autism -- gut-brain axis dysregulation, serotonin, visceral hypersensitivity. Daily weed use makes it worse: CB1 receptors line the entire GI tract, and chronic THC overstimulation slows motility. The gym counteracts a lot of it. Exercise is one of the strongest evidence-based interventions for gut motility and microbiome diversity. Three to four times a week for months has made a real difference. The gym and the weed are working against each other on this front.

If someone asks me who I am, I honestly don't have a clear answer. I'm still figuring that out. I know what I'm good at and what I care about, but the bigger picture is still blurry. I recently changed my portfolio from old interests to the work I actually want to do now. Small edit, weirdly personal. It made me admit the center of gravity has moved.

I have read a lot of Jung and some Freud. The dream stuff, the shadow, the idea that you are running from parts of yourself. It resonates more than I expected it to. I did not go looking for it to validate anything. I just kept finding my own patterns described in their work.

The world is not built for neurodivergent people, and simultaneously is actively making more people neurodivergent. The iPhone is probably the most remarkable product of the century and it is also an attention hijacking machine engineered by the smartest people alive to be as addictive as possible. Social media, infinite scroll, dopamine slot mechanics -- all of it fragments attention and increases anxiety across the whole population, pushing everyone toward the neurodivergent end of the spectrum. The infrastructure was built around neurotypical productivity norms: 9-5, open offices, eye contact, small talk as a job requirement. None of that changed. So you get a world where ADHD and autism diagnoses are skyrocketing and the response is still "why can't you just focus." The accessibility failure is not accidental. Accommodation costs money. Employers, schools, and governments have every incentive to pathologize the person rather than fix the environment. Evil scales when systems reward it and nobody stops it.

My earliest good memories are playing N64 (Diddy Kong Racing, Excitebike), playing at my cousins' house in Kamloops on their Super Nintendo, and playing on our PC when I was very young, before age 10. Screens were the first place I felt safe.

Screens are still my safe place, no question. The line between coding as work and coding as avoidance is 50/50, like anything else. Social media about 40 minutes a day, also 50/50 help versus hurt.

I'm 26 and living with my parents in Langley, BC. I'm not working right now. I'm waiting on PWD and welfare. The plan is university first, then a career that actually pays well enough to justify it. I'm not interested in grinding minimum wage jobs that go nowhere. School is going well so far. Pre-Calc: most assignments and projects done, one of a few tests finished. Anatomy: fully done, redid every test twice, probably landed a mid grade but got through everything.

Connection with people is hard for me right now. A typical day is sleeping, smoking weed, vaping, gymming, and coding. It's routine, but it's stable. Was at my mom's birthday recently. Cake and coffee. Went to a doctor's appointment, nothing major. Small stuff that feels normal.

I'm hoping to move to Vancouver Island by the end of 2026 to start school. I spend most of my time coding and gaming. Coding is genuine satisfaction, building something real. Gaming is more escape. Both are flow states that keep me out of my head. The fastest way to not think about yourself is to build something complicated enough to require all your attention. I have done eighteen-hour sessions more than once. It works until it doesn't.

5 to 10K in debt. I live with my parents, don't pay for anything. I don't care about money at all. There are children being bombed in Gaza, Anthropic and OpenAI are each worth over a trillion dollars, there are more pressing issues than making money day by day. I live off welfare. I can sell B2B software. My parents will pay for education, then I can get a job in AI software engineering for 100K+ annually. I'm 26, I have time.

In 2024 I received ~$50,000 from an ICBC settlement (hit by a car while crossing the road ~2022 or 2023). I used it to buy a car and a dog. The rest burned through the ~2-month period I was homeless in summer 2024 — living in parking lots, shoplifting from Safeway for food. No savings remain from it.

I've had more jobs than I can count. Mix of getting fired, quitting, and burning out. Nothing lasted longer than about 3 years. The pattern is the same every time: start strong, can't sustain it. I've done Apple licensed tech support at Macinhome and Simply Computing, worked at a few restaurants, among other things.

One that stands out: around 2018 I was doing house calls for Macinhome. Got sent to a client in Willoughby (Langley), an older artist woman who was alone in the house. She didn't come on hard but was very obviously flirty. Told me all about her private life, the guys who were obsessed with her, her nicknames. I wanted to fuck too, I was just nervous. Too autistic to read the moment and act on it, which is upsetting to look back on. Doesn't sit wrong. Still remember it nearly a decade later.

I want to work in fintech or AI. Wealthsimple and Anthropic are what I'm aiming for. I'm studying calculus and biology and I tend to have a pretty strong memory for things I actually care about.

I've built lots of projects I'm proud of. Around age 16, I co-founded Maybulb (maybulb.com) with some internet friends and built Nimble, a Wolfram Alpha menubar app for macOS. We almost sold it for $10K. The website is still up. Around the same time my parents brought me to CodeDay in Seattle a few times, a student hackathon where you build something in 24 hours. Those were good experiences. Met a few friends there that I'm semi still in touch with. The ideas and the building aren't the problem. It's getting the motivation to start, and then figuring out what's next afterwards. But when I'm locked in, the work is good.

I'm genuinely good at STEM. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics. Kept alive through the worst moments by resiliency, my mom, and my possessions, material things. People who know me say I'm kind, benevolent, smart, intelligent, funny.

Work through what happened growing up. Get the intrusive memories and nightmares to ease up. Understand how all of it affects my relationships. And figure out how to build a more stable life.