The most traumatizing thing you've seen?

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I saw part of my roof blow off in a horrible wind storm when I was only four years old.
I am still afraid of storms to this day.

At school I used to see the wall very often after my entire body was slammed into it.
I witnessed a kid cut the skin on my hands with scissors at the age of 6.

I witnessed my mother fall down and break her arm.

It's a toss up between:

Seeing a vagina
or
Seeing the remains of a shattered skull from a .357 Magnum revolver at a shooting range (suicide)

Probably the former, as the latter only bothered me for a short time.

I don't think I should say sense this isn't in the Adult section

I can't say I've ever seen really anything all too disturbing

Not yet at least, something to look forward to I suppose.

I don't get traumatized by seeing violence or anything. Usually I'm only traumatized by having something horrible happen to me or those I love.

That being said, I suppose the worst thing I've ever seen, including suicides online, Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg (?) being beheaded in the Middle East, is "two girls one cup"

I had forgotten about it until I saw this thread.

Gross.

I think the violence I saw online doesn't bother me because to me, it's like tv. My mind doesn't see it as real. If it were happening in front of me, where my mind processed it as real, that would probably be different.

But still. "Two girls one cup" is horrible.

_________________
I'm giving it another shot. We will see.
My forum is still there and everyone is welcome to come join as well. There is a private women only subforum there if anyone is interested. Also, there is no CAPTCHA.

The link to the forum is http://www.rightplanet.proboards.com

A short video of 2 guys stabbing a kidnapped victim deep in his throat for fun, making a giant hole letting all the blood splash out of it.

I will never forget the ugly sound he made when that knife entered his throat.

The video got deleted very very soon after I watched it and never got uploaded again I think.

Screw humanity!

i am not traumatized by things i see. i have seen a few things that i found unsavory, but i was not traumatized by them. i was sick in my chest once though when i saw something happen. i do not know what to say first.... i will say the unsavory thing first and then i will say the one that made my chest felt like it had a bowling ball in it.


1. when i was about 10, my mother and father and me were returning to sydney from a weekend at our property. i always sat between my mother and father in the front of the car, and i sat on the center armrest so i was propped up to their height so i could see clearly over the dashboard.

we were in a line of traffic that was proceeding slowly (about 50mph) and my father was overtaking when he could. another car overtook us at a stupid point of time because there were oncoming cars that he narrowly avoided colliding with as he pulled in in front of us. my parents both commented on how stupid the driver was and i agreed.

i thought "when we have overtaken this convoy of cars, my dad will catch you and overtake you too you idiot!" (my father drove very fast (about 90-100mph when it was safe to do so)).

in the next minute, the car pulled out again to overtake, but there were no gaps between cars on our side of the road for him to pull back into, and so he floored it and passed about 6 cars as he tried to reach a point where he could pull back in to our lane, and he did not make it.

he crashed head on with another car, and he was quite a distance in front of us, so i did not hear the bang, but i saw a cloud of dust seem to erupt from the 2 cars, and his car span around in a mangled condition.

everyone came to a shuddering halt and we had to wait for ages then. no one was going anywhere, and my father switched off the car, and i got out and walked toward the accident, and as i was approaching it i became scared. there were no signs of life coming from either car, and other people in their cars remained in their cars for some reason at that time. my mother did not want me to go, but i did what i wanted when i was a child.

as i approached the vehicles, i suddenly smelled a smell that was intolerable to me. it was a smell of poo and gastric juices and vomit and blood all mixed in together, and i ran back to our car and spat on the ground to get the taste out of my mouth. that was exceptionally unpleasant.

we had to wait for 2 hours for the scene to be cleared up, and all people in both cars were killed. i did not think about it much again, so it did not traumatize me.
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2. this is the only time i felt very bad about what i experienced.
when i was about 8, i was walking to school with a girl who i loosely thought of as a friend.
there is a set of traffic lights outside the school where we pressed the button and waited for the walk sign.

i saw there was a gap in the traffic, so i walked across before the walk sign was green, and i did not think about her because i thought she would wait because she was a girl, and she seemed careful.
actually i gave no thought to her at all.

when i got to the other side i heard a loud thumping bang behind me, and i swiveled around to see her sliding along the road and her school bag was spinning and sliding as it had left her grip. she was completely dead as she slid along the road for about 25 metres (75 feet).

i felt like i had swallowed something too big to go down my esophagus and it was stuck in my chest region.

that was the worst experience i ever had. i do not want to talk about it any further because even now the memory is very painful. i do not feel guilt, but in that case i felt something very close to it.

When I was thirteen years old: My parents were at work and I just got home from school, so I let the dogs out to do their business in the back yard. My english springer spaniel wedged the fence gate open and ran out into traffic. I heard tires squeal so I ran out the front door to see what happened just as the driver was getting out of his car. He told me the dog ran around the house and into the back yard, so I followed after her. Withholding gory details -- I just sat with her until she died. I have not been able to get emotionally attached to a dog since that happened.

1] Human remains in various locations.

eg. buttocks hanging from a railway trackside tree, while the other remains were scattered all around.

2] A figure or creature which I believe was extraterrestrial.

[edit:don't worry these were unrelated incidents]

^ I confirm the locations were opposite ends of the country and many years apart.

This happened when I was 15, and is probably remarkable for NOT being traumatizing.
Let me explain.
I was in a car on a highway in Illinois (or possibly Wisconsin), when traffic slowed down and we were obviously stopped because of a crash.
The driver of the car I was in was a registered nurse, and pushed forward to offer assistance.
When we came to the scene, we all stormes out to help.
I joined another guy to pull a girl out of a badly smashed up 70s car.
I climbed in the broken rear window, and lifted and pushed a girl out. The doors didn't work.
It was summer. She was wearing cut-off jeans and a bikini top, like her two friends.
Their car had hit the shoulder going way too fast, swerved into meeting traffic, and flipped over many times. It was a mess.
What has never ceased to amaze me is that the passenger seat was completely crushed. I mean the ceiling of the car was crushed down onto the passenger seat and obviously the girl who was sitting there was crushed, so this must have been a horrific sight.
But I have no recollection of this. When I try to remember the scene, there's a blurred gray where I know I saw a young woman crushed to death.
The brain filters stuff, I guess.

30 minutes of CPR did not reanimate the girl I pulled out either.
Three 18-year-old girls on their way to Six Flags died.

Thanks to my brain I wasn't traumatised.

Mangled dead body in the road as we drove past, the leg looked to be at quite an odd angle. I was about 30 when I saw that, I'd never seen a dead body before, so that played on my mind for a while. I. Saw. An. Actual. Dead. Body.

I worked as a journalist in Beijing, and there had been a protest in Tian'anmen Square where some Falun Gong supporters had set themselves alight. I saw some horrible footage at work that wasn't broadcast because it was too disturbing. Some adults had set themselves alight, along with a student who was only just an adult, she was a 19-year-old student, she'd been a promising musician, and although she survived, I think her burns injuries were such that she wouldn't have played the violin again, which was so sad. There was also a 13-year-old girl who'd been there with her mother, and maybe father also, I can't remember now. I think that child survived and lived in agony for a few weeks in hospital but eventually succumbed to her injuries and died. (This is why when naive Western people go on about how big bad China is so oppressive against an innocent religion, it makes me a bit cross, because they don't see footage of people who've set themselves on fire, or hear about people who've died because they've been prevented from seeking medical attention for curable illnesses.)

When I was at journalism school, we had discussions about censorship, broadcasting standards, decency, the 'watershed' i.e. cut off point say 9pm after which more graphic content could be shown in the news, etc. One issue around that time was Ken Bigley, a British contractor who had been taken hostage in Iraq and then killed, beheaded. There was a video on the internet, and we'd had discussions in class about censorship and whether it would be appropriate or justifiable to broadcast any or all of it - these were just hypothetical debates, as we weren't in a position to make an editorial decision. One of my classmates who had a part-time job with a news agency had seen the footage, I can't remember if anyone else had. But what my mind kept coming back to as we were debating was that I hadn't seen the video, so how could I have a valid opinion as to whether it should be censored and whether other people should be prevented from seeing it?

So after about three weeks of ongoing discussions about censorship and graphic content in news, and me thinking, If I watch this, there's no going back, I will have seen it... and I don't think it's something I want to see... but in order to have an informed opinion... well, I eventually watched it. The visual quality of the footage wasn't as clear, it was a bit fuzzy, as I vaguely recall. What I actually found most traumatic and most disturbing and what haunted me for a long time afterwards wasn't what I saw, but what I heard. As they were slitting his throat and beheading him, it was like the sound of a pig squealing in an abattoir or something. Blood-curdling sound. Horrific.

Broadcast journalists often see graphic footage that gets censored, because viewers don't want to see body parts and blood while eating their dinner and watching the evening news. I'm lucky, though, in that I haven't yet worked in the field, in a conflict zone, I've just seen some raw footage. I've heard from colleagues that something that gets to them isn't just what they see and hear but also the smell.

Most of my traumatic things I've seen have been viewed through a lens. Except the dead body in the road. And also I witnessed a shooting in the street outside my apartment block about 8-9 years ago and I almost ended up in the witness protection programme, except it didn't go to court. Some kind of drug gang dispute from neighbouring districts spilled over into my area, and I saw a shoot-out. I heard from the police later that some guy who'd got shot in the leg turned up at hospital, but they didn't catch who did it or couldn't make a case against them.

When I was a child, there used to be a lot of stray cats and kittens that came to our house. We often fed and eventually adopted them. One of them was a 6-month old tortoiseshell whom I called Janie. I don't remember much about her, except the way that she died.

One day, I was petting Janie in the front yard, when one of our other cats came and she got spooked. She ran across the street at the exact same time as a car came. The tire collided with her head and her body violently convulsed in the street for a few minutes until she lay still. Mom and dad said that Janie was probably dead on impact, and the convulsions were just a bodily response to the impact.

I was pretty upset - I remember screaming when I saw it happen - but my parents didn't comfort me because they were busy trying to get my grandmother to calm down, because she had seen it happen too. I forced myself to try to forget about what happened, but I can still remember the accident clearly. The tire colliding with Janie's head, the convulsions, everything. I better stop talking about it, because it's making me pretty sad.

When I was about 5 years old in the front yard of my home by my self while my mom briefly went inside to get something a guy with unleashed dogs was walking by... both dogs ran agressively and attacked a baby kitten that we had just got a couple of weeks earlier just feet away from me...

I had a phobia of dogs until I was nearly in my teens.

That was probably the most traumatizing... although it was so long ago now that I cant remember the feelings and things...

However, I had jury duty last year on a case where a couple of monsters robbed a family by gunpoint tieing up 2 men, the wife, and 2 children... They shot the guy in the face with revolver and showed lots of pictures of the evidence and stuff. Those pictures along with being in the court room with everyone involved was pretty traumatizing... Took me a couple of months to get over... That feeling is one that I can vividly remember.