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Case Studies - VIDEO

In the following video, a client of Healing Hurt People talks about being shot, his long road to recovery, and his struggles to cope with his own trauma and the murder of his younger brother. He speaks candidly about the issue of retaliation, his post-trauma symptoms, and his hopes for the future.

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The following transcript excerpts are the words of a 20-year-old man who was shot. His cousin was also shot during the same incident and died of his wounds. Here, the young man describes the flashbacks and numbness he experiences after this trauma.

Flashbacks

"It’s like when I go to sleep now?
He’s just in a lot of my dreams.
When I dream, he’s in ‘em.

I don’t be dreaming most of the time...
sometimes I don’t dream,
but when I dream,
he’s in ‘em.

I don’t think nobody can actually feel what I went through?
Can’t nobody really understand it?

In the hospital I was thinking “I’m still here.”
I wanted to know why I was still here,
because the way that incident was,
I shouldn’t have even been here, either.

For some reason, I was here.
I wound up surviving it.

I wasn’t supposed to.
I didn’t feel for a minute that I was supposed to.

Like, when it happened,
I was like... I wanted to know,
Like religion?
I wanted to know WHY I wound up stayin’?

And then I just started havin’ all these dreams and everything.
It just started messin’ me up.
And I had to get back to . . . .
I had to concentrate on somethin’ else.

So I tried to not think about it so much?
But then, like, every now and then
a memory will come back...
then I can feel it.

It’s like I can still see him bein’ alive.
And then, as soon as I still see him bein’ alive,
I get hit with the reality -- he’s dead.
It’s like right then and there.

As soon as I think about, having flashback of him sayin’ somethin’
or doing something?
It’s like, boom, right back.
He’s dead.
Tense.

And sometimes... since me and him was so close to each other,
I can actually see the grave.
I be up there, like, “Damn! I can see this.”
It’s like I’m inside his head.
I can feel this.
I can feel how it is to be in a grave.

And I didn’t like that.
I don’t like that feeling.
Every now and then, it comes.
It really... it comes.

I be like, “Damn!
I can feel this!”

Numbness

"So, a lot of things that made me scared,
or made me nervous,
they don’t scare me no more.
They don’t affect me.

Like, if a whole bunch of dudes kept on lookin’ at me,
I used to feel nervous.
And, if someone kept on like giving me mean looks?
I used to get nervous.

Don’t happen no more.
It just don’t happen.
It’s like some of the feeling’s just gone.

If they look at me mean now,
I look at ‘em right back.
Like, “What??”

Like, they just took like some...
some emotions I that I used to have,
that nervous feeling,
that scared...

it’s gone.
It’s not even wit’ me anymore.
I don’t even know what it is,
but it’s not.

I think that’s a bad thing.
I think I lost emotions.
Over this whole thing,
I lost emotions.”