As a counterpart to your Leia post, Luke’s response to his trauma? Hope you’re doing great!
link to the post about Leia’s trauma response here (please heed the tws at the beginning of that post, tho)
I’ll be honest, I haven’t thought about Luke as much as I’ve thought about Leia. But here are my thoughts.
Luke hides it pretty well, but he’s a depressed bean. It’s more lurking and crawling than bone-crushing, though - is insidious and gnawing. He still smiles, still laughs, still jokes, and actually feels happiness - but beneath it is always, always, always a kernel of sadness. His natural state is not smiling, though to most people it might seem that way.
Luke throws himself into making sure No One Ever Has To Suffer Like I Did, to an almost obsessive degree. This includes “losing people” (e.g. his aunt and uncle) as well as “murdering thousands of people all at once” (i.e. destroying the Death Star). This is partly what fuels his (less commonly known) reputation for coldness and objectivity - because he’d rather be the one to deliver the killing blow than make someone else do it. This also feeds into a (again, a lesser known) trait of being willing to kill and make the Hard Choices - because ultimately, Luke will do what is right for the greater good, or for the greater number of people, or to protect a child or someone more innocent than him. Even if that means making a hard or objectively terrible choice that will put blood or pain on his own conscience.
Luke has a tendency to isolate, with the exception of Leia and, to a lesser degree, Han - though when he’s particularly depressed (e.g. after Bespin) he’ll even isolate from them.
Luke doesn’t actually...feel...negative emotions very well. Or any emotion, actually. He’s good at presenting a particular persona (i.e. one of joy, of light, of happiness), but underneath it all he’s...really pretty numb. It takes a lot for him to Feel Things. This does lead him to doing Stupid Things sometimes, just so he’ll actually feel things. Which leads me to...
Luke will do incredibly stupid and daring things just to incite an adrenaline rush, or to feel the fear of death, or to feel guilt or excitement or...anything, really. This includes anything from taking on an incredibly risky mission to deciding he’s gonna see if he can survive a jump off a 100 ft. cliff by using the Force.
Luke was already an incredibly empathetic person, but Luke responded to his trauma by growing...more empathetic. This is a short bullet point, because I don’t really know what else to say here, but...yes. Luke is incredibly empathetic, and part of that is because of his trauma.
Luke, because he’s a depressed bean and is surrounded by depressed beans, made it his goal to cheer people up. He was already a natural ray of sunshine before shit hit the fan, but afterwards he made the choice to not let himself harden and be angry and bitter and righteously wrathful with the world. Instead, he wanted to bring happiness and joy to those around him - especially since they all lived such a (relatively) bleak and miserable existence at the time. This seems at odds with his (again, lesser known) qualities as a “sometimes merciless and objective soldier/warrior/Jedi” but...they’re actually compatible, because Luke will do whatever he deems necessary to bring the most good into the world, even if that includes killing one or two (or a few thousand) people.
Most of Luke’s flashbacks are emotional flashbacks - i.e. he experiences the emotions he felt at the time of his trauma, rather than reliving the events themselves. He actually has a lot of these, though he doesn’t actually realize them for what they are for a long time.
Luke hates it when people talk about him destroying the Death Star, or if they know about his Aunt and Uncle and bring it up, and to a lesser degree Obi-Wan (though he likes talking about Obi-Wan usually - just not about his death). He will aggressively change the topic if any of those things are brought up, and trains his brain to instinctively think of something else whenever he thinks about one of those things.
Luke doesn’t actually dream about the events of his trauma hardly at all, if ever. But he does have nightmares that follow certain themes: losing people he loves, being forced to watch people he loves be hurt or killed, being forced to make impossible decisions that hurt people, etc.
Yep, Luke has this in spades. Especially as the years in the Rebellion go by, and the number of friends he’s buried mounts - though it absolutely started with his aunt and uncle, and was compounded by everyone but Wedge dying in the Death Star run.
tl;dr Luke has PTSD too guys! He’s just one of the ones who made an active, conscious choice to take all of his pain and use it to make a better world! A world where others don’t have to face the same kinds of things he did, and a world where he can bring light and joy and happiness!! Which is just as valid as the people who break and get angry and bitter and closed off to protect themselves! That also doesn’t mean he’s not traumatized, though!!!
