Quotes About Recovery

In recovery, they say there are no victims, only volunteers, […]

She told me not long ago, "I'm not suicidal, but sometimes I wish I was dead." This is the point beyond exhaustion, when you can't see how you'll ever fill up again. And then she does, through what she calls lunch-money faith: nothing dramatic, and just enough.

my disease wanted me dead, but would settle for getting me drunk...

While it is hard to fathom who we are and how we are to live when public chaos shatters our routine, the slow-motion pain of each private death and cataclysm we endure is harder. Each slams us off our feet, yet we have agreed to pretend to be fine again at some point, ideally as soon as possible, so as not to seem self-indulgent or embarrass anybody.

Then Mason made an astonishing comment. He said to the girl, adamantly, in his slightly garbled and mumbly way, "You know, I used to have brain cancer. I was in a coma, and then I was here again." I had to close my eyes at the beauty of his understanding—that he was here again. He had woken up, as we are all called to do. I said, "You are a miracle.

My therapist said starving and dieting are like putting ice cream on a leg wound. I said that ice cream would feel cool and numbing. She said yes and then it would melt.

Trauma, which is stored differently in the brain than memory, seeps out of us as warnings of worse to come.

Years after her death, I started thinking mean things about myself, and that holding on to her shirt was pure neurotic clinging. That it was ridiculous. Part of me understood that my hold on it had to do with the excruciating mess and weirdness of my family: how only a handful of people in your lifetime help redeem this mess, so that when one of them dies, hope dies. You never fully recover. You can't.

Physical injury is the least of the harmful accidents that this universe inflicts on its inhabitants; it is soonest mended.

Sometimes when we are drowning in our own loss we lash out--anger is momentarily easier to cope with.

treatment—presumably

sometimes it's not the errors you make but how you recover from them that mark the difference between failure and success

It was only that I'd suffered like that, hour after hour, that I'd gone into the circle of hell and come back out. They hadn't been in the circle of hell. And I felt quiet all over. In this common occurrence, I understood the meaning of utter loneliness.

She came at him sideways, away from his legs, reaching down to pull the duct tape away. He didn't even notice the pain, spitting out the rag someone had put in his mouth earlier. She turned, and handed him a bottle of water. You're probably thirsty. The drug I gave you tends to make your mouth dry. No, I think that was caused by the sock someone stuffed in there, he said. Your work?

Too bad he took a tumble out that window when he was too drunk to know what he was doing, she said, cheerfully callous. It'll be a cold day in hell before I ever let a man near me again.

You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough.

It was ridiculous of her to feel so wounded.

In a way," I told Peggy, "it's like the grief has been covered over with some kind of blanket. It's still there, but the sharpest edges are Ã¢â'¬Â¦ muffled, sort of. Then, every now and then, I lift a corner of the blanket, just to check, and—whoa! Like a knife! I'm not sure that will ever change.

In a way," I told Peggy, "it's like the grief has been covered over with some

Freedom's easy to lose and hard to get back.

Because that's what people need after traumas, apparently - lots of long conversations about the effects of trauma.

The stitches in my forehead itched, loud noises made me jump, and I'd been wearing the same socks for three days in a row. Everyone

One thing I had learned from medicine, however, was that denial was often a good strategy; it could buy time for wounds to heal themselves.

PTSD is a disorder of recovery, and if treatment only focuses on identifying symptoms, it pathologizes and alienates vets. But if the focus is on family and community, it puts them in a situation of collective healing." Israel