Quotes About Trauma

Addiction's some kind of disease? No, it's not. It's a mask for pain that usually comes from childhood and fatherlessness.

I had a very rocky, difficult, emotional childhood with my parents.

I had a rough childhood.

If you don't feel safe as a child, you can't learn.

After I was assaulted in Egypt, I learned fear. I've just never been so scared in my life. I've never been so close to death.

People always think that domestic abuse is something that you live with and get over. But no. You have mental scars.

There are certain things that are too painful for people to even write about sometimes, and there are certain things that are too hard to read about again.

I had gone to a talent show - I was interested in American hip-hop music - with my older brother, to another town, and my town was attacked. I went from having an entire family to the next minute not having anything. It was very painful.

The panic attacks - I still have them. They started when I was around 8. They always have to do with my death.

Parental child abduction is child abuse.

I was haunted by a bear attack that happened in Algonquin Park in 1991. The problem was that I don't believe in ghosts, so that ruled out an exorcism. My other choice was to start writing.

I want Alzheimer's. I want Lou Gehrig's disease. I want Parkinson's. I want Huntington's. I want to be the face and voice of all these neurological traumas. I want them all.

Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

The first Black Migration to this country was forced migration. It was the Middle Passage.

Er de uelskedes sår nu lægt for altid? Hvordan skulle de være det, da den tidlige kærlighedsmangels traumatiske spor aldrig kan udviskes helt, og følelsen af fremmedhed desuden er menneskets grundbefindende! De uelskedes sår vil altid springe op på ny ved livets kritiske tidspunkter. Men vi kender retningen: Vi må igen slippe en afhængighed fri for at give plads for kærligheden. De uelskedes sår er det skød, vi fødes af mange gange.

I don't know what parts of me the Ceph have blown away and I don't know how much else has been broken down to keep the rest of me going, but I know that at least my balls are still intact. I know this because I can feel them crawling back up into my abdomen.

We had survived, but in war, a man does not have to be killed or wounded to become a casualty. His life, his sight, or limbs are not the only things he stands to lose.

Cousin Mike, the person most people believe put Richard on the path he traveled, died of a massive heart attack in April of 1995. He was overweight and still haunted by the ghosts of things he'd done in Vietnam, regularly using heroin. The Army gave Mike a hero's burial with a twenty-one-gun salute.

The only exercise I ever got was carrying dead bodies.

Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.

Genocide, after all, is an exercise in community building.

From all this historical evidence, it ought to be clear that depression is often the central mood characteristic of adults whose bodies were assaulted, whose wills were broken in childhood, and whose anger was forcibly suppressed. The rage and resentment never disappear; they just take more covert and dangerous forms, dangerous to the self and, potentially, to others.

How did it ever get to be that bad? I think something happened to Germany after the Great War. You could see it on the streets of Berlin. A callous indifference to human suffering.

Being hurt personally triggered a curiosity about how such beliefs are formed.