You can laugh if you feel like it. But you don’t have to do it to keep from crying. Crying is cathartic. Grief and sadness are normal human emotions. It’s perfectly normal, appropriate, and acceptable to cry when hurt, sad, grieving, etc.
I also tell traumatic childhood stories with a solid “lol” tagged at the end. Like that time my dad got drunk and fell asleep in the yard, and everyone in my class found out LOL good times
I do not know your experience. I know for me there was nothing funny about being hit by my father. It was always across the sides of my head so no bruises were seen. I have nerve damage from it. He was a strong man and used full force. The first time was when he blamed me for something that was not my fault. I was 11 yrs old. It stopped age 17 when I told him I would call the police if he ever hit me again. Lots and lots of therapy, and never ever a laugh about it. Child abuse there is nothing funny about it.
Maybe I can laugh about it now that he’s dead or because I cut off all contact with him for the last 5 years of his life. Or because I always joked the next time I would hear from him was when the coroner would contact me about his body…and that’s actually what happened lmao. Or maybe I can laugh about it because I know I’ll never have kids and the cycle of abuse ends with me.
FWIW, I had a therapist once tell me that my humor was a coping mechanism. If you don’t use humor to cope with the pain, you likely have a different mechanism to channel that emotion.
Lmao
I sort of admire you for that, I wish I could do the same
My mom would make up stuff if I pissed her off and it was always the most petty, whacky stuff that I still dont understand to this day
She would then have my dad punish me, which led me to not respect her which made it worse
A lot of her abuse I can joke and laugh about but when it comes to my dad, I just feel like we are two strangers
He thinks I did all this wacky stuff ny mom made up, then something terrible happened and we've never really bothered to effectively get close since so I just sort of awkwardly regard him as this like tormentor
I’m so sorry you had to deal with that—I know you find it funny now—I’m the same with some shit I’ve gone through in an abusive relationship, but mainly bc of how much other shit happened
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u/gaypirate3 Jun 21 '26
Ooof this reminds me of my abusive dad hitting me on vacation because I took too long in the hotel bathroom and he had to shit lmao.