Dina talks about it (even her baby daddy gets instantly and unceremoniously murdered by Abby), we see Abby's personal story about her own father dying and also being hung, tortured, gruesomely lose all her friends, lovers, etc. Literally every single other person still alive in this world has encountered equally traumatic situations and EVERYONE must have PTSD. I think the important thing to focus on is Ellie's survivor guilt from being immune and not being able to decide herself whether to potentially save humanity and NOT the trauma of any of the other horrendous things that happen to her or her family throughout the game. I came around a lot on Ellie's motivations for leaving the farmhouse over the last little bit, but she still remains villainous for me. I could tell she was mad, but she grabbed my hand and led me to bed. I couldn’t handle it and left for the woods. But then they started pushing for us to move back to Jackson. Ellie exemplifies the former in this diary entry: “Jesse’s parents came out today. Traumatized people often become overwhelmed by stress, and respond by spacing out-that is, by withdrawing or becoming numb-or by showing disproportionate anger (Van der Kolk, 2015).

Not being able to communicate what you are feeling even to people you trust can be a huge source of disconnection from others. This helps explain why survivors often can’t put feelings or sensations into words, which means that they can’t figure out cause and effect relationships, can’t “grasp the long-term effects of actions” and can’t “create coherent plans for the future” (Van der Kolk, 2015, p.

Trauma has a measurable effect on the brain: during flashbacks, the Broca’s area, our “brain’s main language center,” shuts down-as shown by fMRI studies (Levine, 2010, p.

Ellie the last of us part 2