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Comment by _throwaway12345 | Hacker News Reader

I was hazed/ragged when I joined college and it was bad. It has been nearly 15 years since I finished college but it still haunts me. Anxiety strikes at any moment, there are some days I just cannot leave the house and I lash out at people when people question me if I feel trapped. I have missed so many opportunities because of it.

It all started with that hazing and it has never gone away. It is something I would not wish on my worst enemy

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Don't know if you've done this but I would highly recommend therapy.

I was bullied severely in junior high, and I didn't start seeing a therapist (for other reasons) until I was 35. By that time I thought I was totally "over" my bullying, if anything I felt shame that something that happened so long ago that I thought was behind me could have such a strong hold on my current behavior. Therapy has helped me immensely, and while I realize that talk therapy results are highly dependent on individual therapist and patient, my biggest regret is that I didn't start sooner.

I'm still wondering when you can therapy yourself with games and the like.

Also EMDR.

Have you used this technique for bullying? Was it effective? Would you mind sharing your experiences?

This thread has made me consider getting therapy.

I'll give you my experience as someone who is literally just starting EMDR for bullying. I obviously don't have much to say about its overall efficacy yet, but I will say why I'm hopeful.

One of the initial steps in the process is to think about specific scenarios when you suffered a traumatic event (in my case, bullying) to bring up a physical, emotional response. In my case, even though this happened ~30 years ago, it's not hard for me get into the memory, to feel the same fear response and to start crying. The idea behind EMDR is to essentially "reprogram" you body's physical and neurological responses so that the memory no longer brings up the fearful/depressed automatic nervous system response.

Now, there is a lot of debate over the effectiveness of EMDR, but in my research it seemed most of the debate was really over whether you get just as much benefit doing everything except the eye movements. From my personal perspective, I honestly don't really care that much if the eye movements are the primary factor, but I will say that having to focus on something physical does feel more relaxing to me than just "normal" talk therapy about these experiences in the past. I'm really hopeful that, at least for now, it feels different, in a positive way, than what I've tried in the past.

Whatever you end up deciding, good luck!

My experience with EMDR has been that it makes you utterly feel like a child again. You are still an adult, but emotionally it feels like travelling back in time. Like being a child in an adult's body. Much more than just thinking or talking about the experiences themselves. It brought up a lot of crying. It felt a bit like catching up on it, because I never felt safe to cry as a child. And with this I couldn't even hold it back and it all just came out. I like the way Bessel van der Kolk describes it in his book [0]. It is like the trauma stops being something that still haunts you today and that you can still feel like no time has passed, and instead it turns into a memory and something that happened in the past and that doesn't affect you anymore. It almost felt like magic, because it lifted a huge burden seemingly effortlessly. And that was after ~5 years of regular psychotherapy. It doesn't fix everything, but it made parts of the trauma pretty much disappear.

And yes, I would very much recommend therapy in general. Here are some thoughts on this from a discussion a few months ago [1]. There are lots of good points in that Ask HN in general.

[0] If you like somewhat technical books I can recommend The Body Keeps The Score [0]. Very much not a self-help book but the observations of someone working with people's traumas.

https://www.besselvanderkolk.com/resources/the-body-keeps-th...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22261226

Yep-for me the worst came around in “junior high” ie when I was 10-13. I fight those demons every single moment of every day and I’ll start my fifth decade on earth in a few years. I wish people cared about this to stop it.

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