Ask Lemmy

I’ve done plenty of therapy. The weapon is not to deal with the trauma, but to deal with the real possibility that someone bigger than me might decide I deserve a beating. If I disagree with that person, the only way to stop them is the weapon.

I don’t want to be traumatized again. I’m taking steps to arm myself because I now see what my naive non-exposure to violence allowed me to ignore: that the world is a place of danger where my body can be hurt by another human who decides to hurt my body.

The guy was only slightly bigger than me, but the fight was over in less than five seconds. After the fight was over, the beating began. A beating I was powerless to stop.

I carry a weapon for the purpose of being in charge of whether that ever happens to me.

The trauma I am dealing with through things that are effective with trauma.

The weapon is not a trauma treatment. It is a rational response to the danger of being around other people, just as a seat belt is a rational response to the danger of driving.

The difference between the danger of driving and the danger of being around people is that the danger of being around other people is horrifying. Not scary, not terrifying, but horrifying. It is deeply horrible to acknowledge that the people around you can turn into monsters, that they can become as deadly as a cobra or a spider.

We don’t feel this horror when contemplating the danger of cars, because we have no evolved instincts about cars. They’re mega dangerous, but we easily ignore that danger on a visceral level because we didn’t evolve in an environment where a toyota corolla might kill you.

We easily ignore the danger of people, ie we know it in our heads but not in our guts, just like with cars, but for a different reason. With humans the reason is that it’s horrifying knowledge. It’s dark, it’s ugly. It’s not something want to look at.

But once you are forced to look at it, eg like when you experience the violence yourself, you are forced to think about it. And if you think about it, it’s just as foolish and negligent to be around strangers without being armed, as it is to drive and not wear a seatbelt.

Before the encounter with violence, I was on the fence. I could see arguments both ways. Like “well, the weapon could stop an attacker but it could also be an unhealthy attachment …”.

But it’s no longer balanced for me. I’ve realized the danger of grievous injury or death is orders of magnitude more important than the potential I might get weird about the weapon.

Like, would you recommend a person avoid seat belts in order to avoid unhealthy coping with their trauma from a car accident?

The misconception with weapons is that they enable violence. But this guy was unarmed. All he had was some shoes. Other than that it was all just his body and his decision to hurt me.