Quotes about traumatic-experiences

Just like there's always time for pain, there's always time for healing.

When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced - and their effects reversed - by sufficient acts of kindness.

...the heart is a muscle like any other. Tearing it down is the only way to make it stronger.

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

To take such a complex creature, on who was meant for God and is destroyed by sin, and attempt to understand how the development of that creature can be affected by hideous trauma is to attempt the impossible.

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

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.

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

I hold the hands of people I never touch.I provide comfort to people I never embrace.I watch people walk into brick walls, the same ones over and over again, and I coax them to turn around and try to walk in a different direction.People rarely see me gladly. As a rule, I catch the residue of their despair. I see people who are broken, and people who only think they are broken. I see people who have had their faces rubbed in their failures. I see weak people wanting anesthesia and strong people w

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.

Maybe it was our shared trauma, or maybe it was a combination of things, but I felt warmth emenate from my heart and spread throughout my chest.

Whether we are speaking of a flower or an oak tree, of an earthworm or a beautiful bird, of an ape or a person, we will do well, I believe, to recognize that life is an active process, not a passive one. Whether the stimulus arises from within or without, whether the environment is favorable or unfavorable, the behaviors of an organism can be counted on to be in the direction of maintaining, enhancing, and reproducing itself. This is the very nature of the process we call life. This tendency is

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance.

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.

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.

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

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.

Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)

Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...

Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in a hellish contortion of agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water and praying for God to end their suffering. They screamed and groaned in an unending litany, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters. The predominant color was blue, tho

Was this how trauma worked? she wondered. Those closest to it remained dumbfounded by the fact that those who weren't present could derive meaning from it?

Some of the experiences endured by human beings on this earth are virtually unbelievable.

Several researchers demonstrate the ways people fail to label trauma as such or underreport traumatic experiences. In a sample of 1,526 university students, Rausch and Knutson (1991) found that although participants reported receiving punitive treatment similar to that of their siblings, they were more than twice as likely to identify their siblings’ experiences as abusive as they were to label their own in this way. The authors reported that participants were likely to interpret parental treatm

For anyone who wonders what it's like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it's like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It's having outbursts of anger for what seems like no apparent reason, for even the smallest of offenses. It's forgetting how to be your once cheerful, perky self, and having to relearn basic social skills when mingling with new people (especially if those people are ignorant, or just plain terrible at showing s

...a freeze response (dissociation, collapse, numbing, paralysis, deadness) during the incident that threatened your life or limb. Sometimes it's difficult for people to understand that this is really survival response...

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

I think someone gave me candy when I was younger, someone whose face I don't remember; a blank face from my nightmares.  He gave them to me to cover up the taste of something vile, and I associate the candy with the vile act before it.”Dr. Jane moved over to the couch to sit next to me, put her arm around my shoulder, and cooed as if she were comforting a child.  I felt like a child.  I needed someone to hear the horror of this memory and explain what this might mean.

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.