Quotes About Trauma

If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?

You know how cats are. They'll heal themselves if you keep them locked up. In a couple of months his bones mended. But the fear didn't; it stayed in that cat's bones. He wasn't cocky no more. Now he jumps when I go by him with the wheelbarrow. Fear like that stays inside you forever if you don't find a way to get rid of it.

Next to the sale of their children or spouse, rape was perhaps the worst nightmare of slavery. We have no way of knowing how often it happened... We do know that white women were haunted by the fear that their husbands, fathers, or sons were having sex with their slaves. And we know that black mothers nervously watched their daughters to protect them from dangers they could not understand.

Every so often I was overwhelmed by a phantom pain that cut through me like a knife. I was certain that if I looked down I would find blood all over, like the knife I once held in my hands, but it was all in my mind.

We all acquire two types of scars; one is visible for all to see and the other resides deep within us. Both possess pain but others can only determine if the external scars have healed. The emotional scars within are usually more painful and can linger for years.

I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.

Nearly any therapeutic philosophy works to reduce work-induced anxiety, stress, and trauma except psychoanalytic or psychodynamic (Freudian) approaches.

There's nothing wrong with her except she's completely fucked up.

Like the battered child, the battered woman gets a powerful feeling of overwhelming relief when an incident ends. She becomes addicted to that feeling. The abuser is the only person who can deliver moments of peace, by being his better self for a while. Thus, the abuser holds the key to the abused person's feeling of well-being.

A Federal research project selected 1,600 children who had been abused or neglected and followed them for nearly twenty years.

Once you saw someone die, you were never the same. A body always left its mark. Katie

My mutilation was accomplished when I was a child of seven. I no longer remember myself any other way.

The steady day-in and day-out pounding of undermining influences, such as a parent's scathing criticisms, could cause even more psychological trauma than a single traumatic event. These damaging influences, because they blend into the everyday background of our lived, are even more difficult to remember and exorcise.

Dr. Strange: 'That was--agh--smart of you, Logan.' Wolverine: 'Yeah? Which part?' Dr. Strange: 'You knew that severe physical trauma to the host body could--sss--cease a demonic possession.' Wolverine: 'Oh, uh, sure.' Spider-Man: 'He didn't know that. He stabbed you just to stab you.' Dr. Strange: 'Well, *argh* either way.

I compare it to being in a car accident. There's so much adrenaline rushing through you that you remember being in the accident but you don't remember any of the details.

Those who suffer terrible wars have a finer sense of when they begin and when they end.

The core lessons these children have taught me are relevant for us all. Because in order to understand trauma we need to understand memory. In order to appreciate how children heal we need to understand how they learn to love, how they cope with challenge, how stress affects them. And by recognizing the destructive impact that violence and threat can have on the capacity to love and work, we can come to better understand ourselves and to nurture the people in our lives, especially the children.

AFTER ALL, ONE OF THE DEFINING elements of a traumatic experience—particularly one that is so traumatic that one dissociates because there is no other way to escape from it—is a complete loss of control and a sense of utter powerlessness. As a result, regaining control is an important aspect of coping with traumatic stress.

What happened to you as an infant has a profound impact on this capacity to love and be loved.

Bruce D. Perry

Although I do not mean to imply that all of these children will be severely "damaged" by these experiences, the most moderate estimates suggest that at any given time, more than eight million American children suffer from serious, diagnosable, trauma-related psychiatric problems. Millions more experience less serious but still distressing consequences.

if you look at Indigenous and traditional healing practices, they do a remarkable job of creating a total mind-body experience that influences multiple brain systems. Remember, trauma "memories" span multiple brain areas. So these traditional practices will have cognitive, relational-based, and sensory elements. You retell the story; create images of the battle, hunt, death; hold each other; massage; dance; sing.

In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child's life.

The fact that the brain develops sequentially—and also so rapidly in the first years of life—explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.