Here with support for all the odd triggers. I don't watch enough TV to bother with cable and such. By the time I eliminate shows that trigger, just not much to watch. Calming and comforting hugs. Have fun watching the comedian.

Yeah, Swimfast, Grace and Frankie are funny but in a warm way, aren't they? They help me laugh at myself about getting old, and that kind of laughter's the best medicine for me right now. I need comedy that helps me laugh at "me" more than laugh at "them" just as relief for me and my problems, ya know?

And SimpsonsOK, speaking of comedians, Lily Tomlin, oh my goodness, is that a funny woman or what? I'm a sort of obsessive fan of comedians, and to me she's tops. Dave Attell's up there on my list, too, so I'm looking forward to seeing him big time. It'll be my second time.

That same show gets me.

Not a comedy or a tv show but I used to follow someone on youtube that I really liked. He was a single guy doing the van life thing. I felt envious of how likable he was. Meeting people and being happy comes to him with ease. He met a woman who joined him vanning it. I can't watch anymore. They are too damned happy.

I hate that I'm jealous as he seems like a great guy and I'm happy for him at the same time that I'm jealous. He's shared some of his life struggles but they are a fraction of what I had to deal with. Basically normal challenges not PTSD and dysfunctional family ones. He has a great mom that he's close to. I can't stand mine. I feel like hell if I have to talk to her for even 30 seconds.

I see people like that who had great families and lots of friends and here I am, don't speak to my family and limited contact with friends due to distance. Plus as time passed, I have a lot less of them and it's hard connecting with people.

Yeah, I don't like myself when I feel my envy monster revving up inside because I'm next to people who had great families when mine was a nightmare.

My consolation, though, is that as a hospital chaplain my job was comfort families in crisis a lot. In crisis, the mask usually drops off, and you see behind the image people project to get a look backstage behind the curtain, so to speak.

In 10 years of working at 3 different big medical centers in two major US cities I never found that "happy family" image was able to withstand the lie detector test of a hospital crisis. They all had cracks in their foundations and that "happy family" image collapsed under pressure.

I stopped feeling so alone about my own awful family experience, then, like I feel better here at DS PTSD. My family experience was bad, but I saw worse in hospital work and I see worse here every day. Solidarity seems to be the key to coping for us all, whether here in this virtual setting or whether out there in the face to face world facing adversity.

It doesn't excuse what was done to me by my mentally ill parents when I was a child. It just puts it in context. I don't feel like a freak, I don't feel so all alone like I did when I was a kid.

It was smart of me to take the next step in my own PTSD recovery that led me to dare become a hospital chaplain working in an ER in a big place like Chicago. It gave me that backstage access to see behind appearances to the sad reality that folks really have to have to face trauma every day. No family withstands it alone without the support of, of all people, a person like me.

Here's an example. It happened like clock work every time I had a terminally ill patient exercise their right to refuse any further treatment. They just wanted to have palliative care for their pain instead so they could die in peace. My pager went off calling me to that room as a hospital chaplain to go referee a family fight in the hallway outside of the patient's room every time.

It went down like this. There'd be the family nucleus that lived nearby and had kept in touch with the dying patient. They were up to speed and ready to let go.

However, every single family in Chicago, for example, had that one "black sheep" of the family who had fled to California. I'm not kidding. That
"black sheep" (with whom I quietly identified, being the designated family "black sheep" too, myself) wasn't up to speed and ready to let their dying relative go. Often they hadn't spoken to that dying relative in years.

They were the one, then, who would try to override the dying patient's wishes, demanding one more surgery or one more round of chemo. Very heroically, they would accuse the rest of the family of not caring. Then the rumble was on, and the hospital chaplain (me) was paged to see if he could umpire the dispute without having to call security.

Usually, I could, I got good at it, really. None of their rumbles scared me, having been raised in a nutty fighting family myself. As I used my own personal family conflict past to referee theirs in the present, though, every time I got validated. There is no normal happy family. Every one of them is flawed.

Just speaking for myself from my backstage experience, then, there is no perfectly happy family. That was an image I had in my head from watching The Waltons and shows like that on TV. Making negative comparisons of my family to such a standard was bogus. I can stop beating myself up about how my family didn't measure up to that standard, because that standard isn't real.

That didn't change my horrible past, but it relaxed me in the present and it gave me a break as to how to face my future with the baggage of a violent, insane upbringing. I'm not alone.

Knowing that the human species doesn't seem to be able to raise its young without trauma, now instead of thinking about false TV families like the Waltons, I fantasize beyond earth. I fantasize that on some other planet somewhere there must be an alien species that raises its young with nothing but loving care. I fantasize that I get to meet them in heaven in the afterlife. There I get to ask them, "hey, what was that like?"

Because nobody on God's green earth could ever tell me. We are not alone.

Just a PTSD-comedy update. I had a good Fall Break this weekend. I got to be part of Dave Attells comedy set from the audience at the DC Improv comedy club. He riffed on Uruguay and Paraguay for an hour after I told him my background. HA! So it's not all comedy that's a problem, I'm relieved to say. That was very restorative.

Trigger Warning

What triggers me the most...watching old TV shows that show just how messed up morality was 20-30 years ago. Watched a mother take 13 or 20 beatings with a belt from an abusive step-father, then count out the last 7 to be dished out on her son. And that was supposed to have made her a good mother? Hell no. Grab your son and live on the street if you have to.

It's wild to think what was "normal" back then, isn't it?