Ha! I found this post because I'm avoiding sleep and have excellent webcrawling skills :)
I didn't know that everyone in my school/community had been poisoned against me when I was a teenager, but I felt SO OPPRESSED! I avoided this terrible feeling with a willful abreaction of mindfulness, followed by a lengthy confusing malaise, topped off with a complete break by moving from the city where I felt like a cockroach to a small rural town where everyone now (figuratively, but most days literally) knows my name.
The abreaction occurred on a stint away from the big city on a road trip after graduating highschool. Having always been a writer, the change is distinct and dramatic in my journal entries. Instead of being focused on the anxiety, flashbacks, nightmares and suicidal ideation that plagued my days and nights, suddenly I was present in the moment. Lyrically describing vistas, cultural institutions, buildings. When I returned, the writing demonstrated saturation with affective flashbacks without awareness, but I had decided to put all of the traumatic experiences away and move forward (without treatment unfortunately).
After that funk with a capital F I had a calling to leave that stressful city behind and focus on things that were closer to fundamental needs. Which for me at the time were an affordable education and a cost of living that didn't put me in the high crime zone just to make ends meet. But it also ended up being such a major avoidance of all the triggers in the big trauma city. An unconscious and then conscious avoidance as trips back were ill with flashbacks and dissociation.
