Quotes from Lenore Terr

A whole life can be shaped by an old trauma, remembered or not.

This is the difference between traumatic memory and ordinary memory. Traumatic memory stays vivid.

When a child is traumatized, something more discrete and more specific happens than a general loss of capacity for love and work. An ever-present, ever-draining abscess forms. The child goes on living an ordinary life. But if something touches the traumatic "abscess," the child hurts.

Psychic numbing occurs when horrors are extreme, long-standing, variable, and repeated—in other words, when a state of horror becomes predictable.

The themes of trauma—man's helplessness, the world's randomness, and ugly, unexpected death—are difficult ones for a person to express in art.

Often children would rather put together some made-up reasons for tragedies and feel guilty about these made-up causalties than experience the humiliation of being victims to the world's randomness.

There seems to be little cultural difference in this. The face of horror in childhood is grave and relatively immobile. It may look dazed, but it rarely looks hysterical.