(December 15, 2024 at 11:15 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: [...] and we had to watch footage of real emergencies. The one I remember most was of a man that blew his face off with a shotgun. That was a very traumatic thing for me to watch at the time.
I'm pretty sure I had to watch that same footage in my EMT classes. His face was split open from the jawline up, as if the shotgun tilted forward just a moment and so his brain survived, he was trying to talk gurgling through the miasma of blood, and you could see his throat trying to work.
There's also another aspect of violence you haven't touched upon in this thread, that of violence inflicted by the world, or circumstances, that catches us up all the same. We think of PTSD as "oh, that's something soldiers come back with", but I'd be willing to bet that by far the large majority of PTSD cases (diagnosed or not) come from people simply seeing things we aren't built for, like seeing someone turned inside-out in a car-crash, or a hand poking out of the rubble of an earthquake.
Not all violence is intentional, nor is all violence a result of human action, intentional or not. I've been exposed to this as a first responder, maybe you have as well, but that violence is blind and aimless. What, though, does it mean?
