Quotes about trauma

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

The addict's reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice. The dullness is itself a consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making the internal shutdown of vulnerability. Vulnerability is our susceptibility to be wounded. This fragility is part of our nature and cannot be escaped. The best the brain can do is to shut down conscious awareness of it when pain becomes so vast or unbearable that it threatens our ability to function. The automatic repressio

Shut up and do not think. All the theorists agree: shut up and keep the words from being said. And all of the scars will remain invisible and all of the scars will remain under the skin. Where they belong.

Trauma ruptures and hollows. Compassion mends and fills love heals.

The ruling classes use broken and smashed up childhoods as weaponised instruments of domination around the world. This is why the government has no incentive to end child abuse because the government needs abuse victims as enforcers.

Community is about sharing my life about allowing the chaos of another’s circumstances to infringe on mine about permitting myself to be known without constraint about resigning myself to needing others.

The power we discover inside ourselves as we survive a life-threatening experience can be utilized equally well outside of crisis, too. I am, in every moment, capable of mustering the strength to survive again—or of tapping that strength in other good, productive, healthy ways.

Get acquainted with your shadow, or find yourself surprised when a crisis emerges.

no-one would want to go through a traumatic experience but when you’ve survived something life-shattering and risen above it, you achieve a kind of serenity.

I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest,Children dying in the road,Crawling things hooked and baited,Rapists bound and then castrated,Villains singed in public square.Yet none these sights did make me cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.

And I didn't think even eternity would be long enough to fix me.

the tears finally got the best of him and he pressed his palms to his eyes as his shoulders started to shake. He cried silently, in so much pain that there was no sound to equal it

The surgical resident interested in learning trauma will bypass a residency at a quiet community hospital for a residency at a fast-paced Level 1 trauma center treating a high volume of trauma patients. A Level 1 trauma center residency is far more rigorous—and not particularly glamorous—but the intensive culture of a dedicated trauma center will cultivate the decisive judgment and action required of a surgeon specializing in trauma. By choice or by chance, we must actively test our limits to kn

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle’s tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube.“Fib!” Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her che

I won't let that night ruin you forever." But it did, it broke me into a million pieces and blew them away in the wind, like crumbled leaves.

How was it then that I could see a monster in him as easily as I could see his dignity, his integrity, and his charm? I had learned over the years that he held everything in for as long as he could. When he reached his limit, unrelated incidents could unleash that pent-up anger to an unprecedented degree.

Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

Feelings are feelings, no matter when they happen. Our bodies don't stop being ours just because worse things happen to other people.

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)

There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain

... it is to your credit that you recognize that if he was a monster then it was other monstrous things which made him so. The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer...

I could hardly sleep and even when I did drop off, I awoke to a grim thought: I’m disgusting. I can’t play any more. I went to bed with Dudek and all his Liverpool team-mates.

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.

Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.

Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. In my house. My mouth? Chapped lips swollen and bloody? Dream dreaming wide and thunder? My mouth! My God! This is me speaking. Not mouthing. Not typing and twitching. Not writing a suicide note the length of a novel that will never be finished. I hear voices now but I know they are not the voices of fathers or lovers, or mothers or angels or demons, but the sounds of my own private wars echoing the battles of women bef

The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future

So I let my shame own me, kill me, wilt me away into a thousand dead flakes, knowing if I kept it all in, she would never have to learn the dirtiness that was forever inside me--the bad, the ugly, the twisted. She could go on living her life happy, just like she deserved.

When you study the wrongs you have committed before you study the wrongs done to you, you have no choice but to label yourself inherently evil, and be forced to dissociate emotionally to avoid the horrible pain in this lie.

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated.

Trauma is personal.

I used to move gracefully. I used to know the word grace to the center of my bones. Now I seek it every day and fall short, inevitably, every day. I lost grace.

Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared’... Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear.

The most important thing in defining child sexual abuse is the experience of the child. It takes very little for a child’s world to be devastated. A single experience can have a profound impact on a child’s life. A man sticks his hand in his daughter’s underpants, or strokes his son’s penis once, and for that child, the world is never the same again.

The observer self, a part of who we really are, is that part of us that is watching both our false self and our True Self. We might say that it even watches us when we watch. It is our Consciousness, it is the core experience of our Child Within. It thus cannot be watched—at least by anything or any being that we know of on this earth. It transcends our five senses, our co-dependent self and all other lower, though necessary parts, of us. Adult children may confuse their observer self with a kin

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life

I am both numb and oversensitive, overwhelmed by the need, the raw and desperate need of the girls I am listening to and trying to help. I'm overdosing on the trauma of others, while still barely healing from my own.I cry for hour at home and have fitful nights of little sleep. My nightmares resurface as my own pain is repeated to me, magnified a thousand times. It feels insurmountable. How can you save everyone? How can you rescue them? How do you get over your pain? How do you ever feel normal

I cannot stand the words Get over it. All of us are under such pressure to put our problems in the past tense. Slow down. Don’t allow others to hurry your healing. It is a process, one that may take years, occasionally, even a lifetime — and that’s OK.

Life is a lesson that must never be taken for granted.

I had built such a wall between my experiences and how I felt about those experiences that I was incapable of reliving both simultaneously. I could talk about my traumas, even walk through them, but I couldn’t feel them. When I tried to bring it all together, when I tried to remember how I had felt, I disappeared in my own head. My to-do list took on grave importance. The book I read the night before filled my thoughts. Yesterday’s article suddenly called out to be rewritten. I couldn’t get insi

Part of the process in healing from trauma, like recovering from addiction, is developing connection and support with others.

No matter how much you cry, the tears will dry. No matter how many nightmares, flashbacks, visions, or terrors you endure, they will pass. To weather these in order to find your true self and the happiness you deserve, that is not a risk. To waste the time you have in this body, never showing your soul to yourself or anyone else, living in fearful misery – that is really the most dangerous thing you can do.

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.

When we believe a wounding story, our whole world is diminished.

As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.

While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.

We don't heal in isolation, but in community.

There are the medical dangers of football in general caused by head trauma over repetitive hits.

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.

When we are forced to endure what we cannot endure, something breaks inside our minds. That broken-mindedness is commonly called trauma.

At first, like a lot of trauma survivors, I was impatient and wanted immediate results. Once I caught myself in this behavior, I realized that it takes consistent commitment to heal patterns. After three or four months, I noticed a huge positive shift within myself. I felt a new level of happiness and contentment that I hadn't even known existed. I finally understood how my old trauma patterns had attracted drama in my present life. once I saw this dynamic, I made a conscious decision to "Drama

When you hold onto a script that doesn't serve you, you leave no space to write a new one that does.

Spiritual assets make us more resilient to the trauma and difficult experiences life inevitably throws at us.Since spiritual assets bring us closer to our Higher Power, we do not face the difficulties alone, and we may find a greater purpose and meaning within the stress & trauma. When we lean on our spiritual assets to get us through, the traumatic event becomes less destructive. Instead, it becomes transformative; we see the difficulties in a new light.

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

Dr. Peter Levine, who has worked with trauma survivors for twenty-five years, says the single most important factor he has learned in uncovering the mystery of human trauma is what happens during and after the freezing response. He describes an impala being chased by a cheetah. The second the cheetah pounces on the young impala, the animal goes limp. The impala isn’t playing dead, she has “instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.

Without realizing it, I fought to keep my two worlds separated. Without ever knowing why, I made sure, whenever possible that nothing passed between the compartmentalization I had created between the day child and the night child.p26

How resilient was the body, to return to its prior form so quickly! Yet the mind was formed of a less pliable substance. The emptiness in her thoughts would not be so easily filled. Instead there was a hollowness among them-a place she had reserved for future joys which now would never arrive.

The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It’s so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.

Outside, the sun shines. Inside, there’s only darkness. The blackness is hard to describe, as it’s more than symptoms. It’s a nothing that becomes everything there is. And what one sees is only a fraction of the trauma inflicted.

In 1973, Jan Erik Olsson walked into a small bank in Stockholm, Sweden, brandishing a gun, wounding a police officer, and taking three women and one man hostage. During negotiations, Olsson demanded money, a getaway vehicle, and that his friend Clark Olofsson, a man with a long criminal history, be brought to the bank. The police allowed Olofsson to join his friend and together they held the four hostages captive in a bank vault for six days. During their captivity, the hostages at times were at

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

Snow girl was glad she had left her own feelings behind.

And I knew then that there would be no telling me what he saw. I understand somehow that certain images, certain sounds, could not be shared and could not be lost.

Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and

I think I broke Kerri,” she said. “Go fix her,” Al commanded, unfazed. “We’ve got enough broken parts.

TRAUMA STEALS YOUR VOICE People get so tired of asking you what's wrong and you've run out of nothings to tell them. You've tried and they've tried, but the words just turn to ashes every time they try to leave your mouth. They start as fire in the pit of your stomach, but come out in a puff of smoke. You are not you anymore. And you don't know how to fix this. The worst part is...you don't even know how to try.

I watch what happens below and Iam grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space

It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.

 “So how’d you do it? How did you get to where you aren’t scared all the freaking time?”Erin’s smile drooped a little, tired with the effort. “You’re making an assumption,” she said. “Just hang in there. It’ll get easier.” “But not better,” Alexander said. “But not better.

We don't go back to wallow, we go back to undo the lies that are back there that are holding its captive from living a wondrous and full life.

This world isn’t a fair place, because we never know how much time we’ve really got.

Grandiosity is when we are wrapped up in winning life's false contest. This happens only when we live to impress the abusive parents in our heads, not when we are soberly and philosophically working to advance civilization.

Trauma, if it doesn't destroy us, wakes us up both to our own relational capacities and to the suffering of others. Not only does it makes us hurt, it makes us more human, caring, and wise.

I believe that we belittle survivors by assuming that they will fail.

a trauma that breaks you into brand new pieces.

Karen couldn't understand how these encounters had marked him, and she had always believed that a person without trauma was dangerous in some way, untested. Also bizarre: in all of his stories, Dan ended up succeeding.

One of Coin's men lays a hand on my arm. Its not an aggressive move, really, but after the arena's I react defensively to any unfamiliar touch. I jerk my arm free and take off running down the halls. My mind does a quick inventory of my odd little hiding places and i wind up in the supply closet, curled up against a crate of chalk.

Sometimes… we have a war in our hearts. We’re torn in two directions. The way we feel and the way we should feel. They rarely align. The battle goes on.

We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. I

The holes are slowly filling up, and despite itself the brain will work until the job is completed.

To thoughtful natures, events are like depth charges: the surface is calm, but the shock spreads further.

A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives,” she said once. “Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, Meredith said, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.

Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma.

I could have lived like that. For a long time. People do it. Like a piece of cardboard, walking around tall and flat in the world, without nerve endings, sinews stiff enough to keep any weakness they’re holding safely twined up. It keeps the good things from getting in, too. But you barely register emptiness when you only have two dimensions. People do it, keep their constriction mostly intact; except for the moments when they don't.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

A common feature of many theories of trauma is the idea that the causative—the wounding—event is not remembered but relived, as it is in the flashbacks of combat veterans, experienced anew with a visceral immediacy that affords no critical distance. To remember something, you have to consign it to the past—put it behind you—but trauma remains in the present; it fills that present entirely. You are inside it. Your mouth is always filled with the taste of blood. The killers are always crashing thr

My parents also had a tough time recognizing me at first. because my eyes were black and swollen shut and I had two tubes coming out of my head.

And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her.And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.There is a great white silent empty in her running.She runs.

The culture and heritage should stay intact and be maintained as it provides the individuals with some degree of resiliency. The effects of the trauma is what should be focused on and treated. Improving the quality of life for survivors is the focus of treatment. It is not to erase the past.

Traumatic events challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place. Traumas that are caused by human behavior. . . commonly have more psychological impact than those caused by nature.

It is my hope that this book helps those who know and love people with DID: family members, lovers, coworkers, and friends. It is also my hope that those charged with intervening in families in which there is violence will take away a more nuanced approach to their important work, informed by a deeper understanding of trauma.Most of all, I hope that those of you who have DID know that the disorder itself is an incredible survival technique. You should feel proud to have survived. Trauma has had

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].

Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness.

EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, if you move your eyes from side to side as you think about distressing memories, that the memories lose their power.And because of some experiences, both with myself, but even more with the patients of mine who told me about their experiences, I took a training in it. It turned out to be incredibly hel

This morning I was ten years old. Tonight I am older than the stars.