Childhood Traumas

[CrazyGirl17]

Ever had that one thing that scared you as a kid? Wether it be from a TV show or a movie or whatever?

For me, a few stand out:

*The Redeads from The Legend of Zelda: Ocorina of Time. It may have been my first exposure to zombies, and it was not pleasant.

*In that one episode of Rugrats, when Tommy was exploring the post office, at one point he almost falls into a pit of old letters and a goddamned human skeleton! What the ever-loving Hell Nickelodeon?!

*For some reason, I remember being scared by the image of a giant headless guy in a suit, though for the life of me I can?t remember where I saw it. And I know I didn?t just imagine it because a kid in my neighborhood managed to recreate it as a Halloween costume... which didn?t do me any favors...

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

Don't know if I was 4 or 5, but I had an operation that caused such deep trauma that I became a never-nude.

There was also the time I put my entire hand on the engine block of an old-timey lawnmower.
My palm blistered away and I have never looked interestingly at lawnmovers, tractors, mopeds or cars again.
Don't even have a driver's license.

The no driver's license may also be reinforced by my mother gas-lighting my upbringing, making me question my every decision and feel that I can't make it on my own..Even now.

 

[Queen Michael]

The cover alone of the Tim Curry It miniseries. Also, my attempt to read the book a few years later.

Spoiler: Here it is

See, on the cover I didn't notice his red hair at first, for some reason. So to me, the clown on the cover was a hairless, strange, wormlike human with monster hands.

 

[Bobular]

As a kid I had a weird dream where I was visiting my girlfriends house, meeting her family, and her entire family kept a jar with all their nail clippings in it. I accentually knocked the jar over and the nails went everywhere, suddenly her entire extended family were standing over me and insisting I pick each one up and put them in a new jar by hand.

From that night to this day I have had a... I wouldn't say fear, but a intense dislike for nail clippings and whenever I'm cutting mine I have to lay down layers of protective wrapping as if I was setting up a murder site from Dexter to ensure I dispose of them all.

 

[Ogoid]

Tons. I was a very weird kid, thinking back on it.

One particularly weird one was a dream I had; there was a mob of people, somewhere outdoors and at night (they might be carrying actual torches, but I don't remember that for sure), and they were pushing this classmate of mine, that one kid nobody really spoke to, onto this room-sized square, featureless block of stone, and there was a voice-over narration saying he had been condemned to "the world's worst prison" or something to that effect. Just as soon as they'd got him on top of it, a bolt of lightning struck it, and a gigantic worm burst from that very same spot, shaking to and fro against the night sky. Then, as in a movie, the camera panned back, a friend of mine turned off the TV in which we were watching that, turned to me and said "...and that's what happened".

Now it just sounds dumb, but that dream really messed me up back then - I'd burst out crying in the middle of the day just from remembering it.

Like I said, very weird kid.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

There was this movie called Runaway and it was about robots or something. Anyway. When I was about 6 or so, I saw it with my parents, and we soon got to the part with those robotic poisonous spiders. It freaked me the fuck out.

As a mature adult now who can actually think, I imagine it was their movements and their overall shape that triggered my retard autism or something. I still get a little bit creeped out to this day thinking about them though.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

I got stung by a wasp when I was a toddler, eating a Popsicle. It hurt.

Then I saw another wasp when I was 6 or 7 and kneeled down near it wondering "What's this funny yellow thing?" and let it land on my finger. ...Yeah, that didn't go so well either.

As a result, I had a full-on phobia of wasps all the way until I was in my twenties. It's only in the last 5 or 6 years that I've really made progress in not being rendered scared shitless by them.

-

I also read this picture book as a kid about Dangerous Animals. That freaked me out about sharks in huge pools (for whatever reason), and even moreso about black widow spiders. The idea of an evil spider that could (at the time I thought) instantly kill you by biting you, AND it was red and black with an hourglass icon on it? Nightmare fuel for YEARS.

I spent a good year and a half terrified that they'd "magically" spawn under my loose covers when I went to sleep and did all kinds of ridiculous stuff to find new sleeping positions that would "protect me". ...Fortunately, I eventually realized "Oh, I can un-tuck the covers from the foot of the bed, and just wrap myself in a little cocoon with no 'spawn area' for the spiders to magically appear in!" and I slept so much better after that. XD

-

And finally, for whatever weird reason that I don't remember, I had this fear of vampires as a kid. Maybe it was from a nightmare or something, but I just could not even say the WORD "vampire" because they scared me so much. Eventually I outgrew it, but this phase of my childhood still mystifies me. What originally terrified me, and how did I overcome it?

...Hilariously, even back as a kid, my dreams ran on video game logic, so I distinctly remember dreaming that I ran into a vampire on the street, opened up the skills menu from mario RPG and selected "Thundershock"...Only for the vampire to shrug it off and say in a dramatic Transylvanian accent "It's not vary affective", which was terrifying at the time, but hilarious in hindsight.

One particularly weird one was a dream I had...

Now it just sounds dumb, but that dream really messed me up back then - I'd burst out crying in the middle of the day just from remembering it.

Daaaaamn, and I thought MY nightmares were messed up as a kid. A dream like that does sound goddamn traumatizing.

>_> I know my worst nightmares messed me up for a while too. They typically involved a mind-controlling pretty-faced witch who would murder me horrendously or mind-control me and trick people into murdering/executing me.

Eventually I started getting better at Lucid Dreaming and those nightmares went away (or I hijacked them), but they still inform a great deal of why I am so opposed to the death penalty. Dreaming of being wrongfully put on trial and executed kind of makes you real sensitive to potential injustice in such a system.

 

[Ogoid]

Daaaaamn, and I thought MY nightmares were messed up as a kid. A dream like that does sound goddamn traumatizing.

>_> I know my worst nightmares messed me up for a while too. They typically involved a mind-controlling pretty-faced witch who would murder me horrendously or mind-control me and trick people into murdering/executing me.

Eventually I started getting better at Lucid Dreaming and those nightmares went away (or I hijacked them), but they still inform a great deal of why I am so opposed to the death penalty. Dreaming of being wrongfully put on trial and executed kind of makes you real sensitive to potential injustice in such a system.

Yeah, from very early on, nightmares have been something of a constant in my life. Every now and then I'll still have some really bad ones, but at this point I guess I'm just kinda used to it.

On topic, though... there was this one summer in which we went to my grandparents' beach house, as we did every year. Once we got there, though, I found that my grandmother had put up, on the living room wall, two ceramic Venetian masks - and I swear, I was so utterly terrified of the damn things, I ran from the house screaming and couldn't be persuaded to go back inside until my parents took them down and told me they'd got rid of them (in fact, they'd just hidden them).

...Did I mention I was a weird kid?

 

[09philj]

I was afraid of Darth Vader and The Wrong Trousers from Wallace and Gromit for a fairly long time.

 

[Drathnoxis]

*The Redeads from The Legend of Zelda: Ocorina of Time. It may have been my first exposure to zombies, and it was not pleasant.

Oh man! It was years before I could play that game without shutting my eyes and running straight through the acid to get the Sun Song! That crypt music still sends a shiver down my spine.

 

[twistedmic]

I saw Jurassic Park in theaters when I was around eight years old. I had convinced my mom that the dinosaurs would not scare me.
I was very much wrong on that one. The fucking T-Rex, right after she broke out of her paddock and let loose her first on screen roar, scared the ever-loving hell out of me, more so than the velociraptors (which were scary enough as it was).

 

[PointlessKnowledge]

I saw Jurassic Park in theaters when I was around eight years old. I had convinced my mom that the dinosaurs would not scare me.
I was very much wrong on that one. The fucking T-Rex, right after she broke out of her paddock and let loose her first on screen roar, scared the ever-loving hell out of me, more so than the velociraptors (which were scary enough as it was).

Same here. When the T-Rex smashes the bathroom and eats the guy I started screaming. My mother tried to calm me down by telling me not to be upset, it was only a lawyer.

 

[Rangaman]

Well here's an obvious starting point: the EVERYTHING from Teletubbies. That is quite possibly the weirdest, stupidest and most genuinely terrible kids show ever made. The fucking vacuum gave me nightmares, for Christ's sake.

The velociraptors from Jurassic Park always scared the crap out of me (funnily enough, the T-Rex never scared me that much).

My parents had VHSes of The Neverending Story and James & the Giant Peach. Cue childhood trauma. And finally, my parents (well, my mum) loved The Cure's Disintegration. Which would've been fine except for...That still makes me shudder.

 

[Voidrunner]

I remember that when you died in the original Sea Dogs it'd play one of a couple different death scenes and I always had to skip over them. Give me a game over any day, I didn't need to see Captain Sharp at the bottom of the ocean with sharks swimming around the place. It bothered enough that I wouldn't let my younger cousin watch them either. Can't recall much else, I never watched the Ring personally but it played in the next room loud enough that I had a problem with televisions at night. I'd have thought I'd be more bothered by phones but that didn't start until years later.

 

[DeliveryGodNoah_v1legacy]

I was forced to help my stepfather fix something with the A/C and heating unit in our home. We lived in a trailer at the time.

He swore that all the power in the home was off, and kept telling me to stick my hand in this part to twist something. I was reluctant because...well I saw a voltage symbol. But again, he assured me it was all turned off.

Yep, stuck my hand in, and all I remember is a rather nasty buzzing feeling in my body, my hand especially since it kept feeling that way even after I pulled away, and I jolted back and screamed.
To this day, I can't go near anything electric without feeling a bit nauseous at the thought. I couldn't tell you how much I got zapped, I have no idea. I guess it couldn't have been too bad if I'm alive and I didn't get any burns, but it was enough to render me terrified of electricity.

 

[Palindromemordnilap_v1legacy]

I read a book about sharks when I was little, which decided to illustrate a feeding frenzy with an image of two sailors in a rowboat surrounded by those signature fins and toothy maws leaping out the water around them. Nothing bloody, just the realisation that if you were in the water with these things you'd be fucked. And the way its affected me is weird, because I'm not consciously terrified of sharks. I think they're great and would quite like to go shark cage diving one day. But if I ever go into water and close my eyes then it will be seconds before my brain starts conjuring up all the images of sharks it can, and I will need to stop whatever the hell I'm doing to get my eyes open again and take stock so I can be absolutely sure a Great White hasn't been conjured up into the pool and is after my precious blood

 

[Thaluikhain]

Well here's an obvious starting point: the EVERYTHING from Teletubbies. That is quite possibly the weirdest, stupidest and most genuinely terrible kids show ever made.

You ever seen Boobah? Best appreciated at 3 in the morning when you can't sleep.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The Gmork from The Neverending Story. That fucking ************...

Also, the movie Silver Bullet.

I had a big fear of wolf creatures/monsters back when I was a kid. Not wolves on their own, but evil monsters that resembled wolves or had wolf-like features.

 

[Abomination]

I think I must be some kind of freak for not having any childhood traumas. No anxieties or phobias or anything. I had some horrible stuff happen to me when I was a kid - no wait, door hinges. I can't let my hand get near one. The place on a door that opens up wider when the door is open and closes completely when it shuts.

When I was putting my shoes on to leave a friends house I had my hand up against the doorframe to balance myself as I lifted my foot to put a shoe on while standing. My friend must have been freaked out because as he closed the door he heard my scream of complete agony. My thumb was in the door hinge while he was closing the door. I got a first hand lesson in leverage that day. I still have the thumb but the nail fell off and grew back all wonky. The bone wasn't broken because 9 year old kids are made of fucking rubber, but the thumb itself is slightly flatter now, wider and longer. Still functions perfectly fine though.

Archimedes can go fuck himself.

 

[Kyrian007]

For me it was Dragon's Lair. Not while I was watching it, I was riveted watching my brother go through half a roll of quarters playing it. But when I went to sleep that night... yikes. Somehow I conflated that in my dream with some of the games I had played in the arcade that day. Watching my family (of pac-mans) getting exterminated by guys from Joust and getting crushed in Elevators (like in Elevator Action)... and each time a Dragon's Lair death cam replay complete with rotting away to a skeleton. I still have that dream every so often.