Quotes About Trauma

el castigo, la privación y la fuerza únicamente consiguen volver a traumatizar a estos niños y exacerbar sus problemas.

I think about children who are molested when they are so young that they don't have the language to process what has happened. The experience locks into the brain in a way it wouldn't if the child could express with words what happened.

When you have friends, family, and other healthy people in your life, you have a natural healing environment. We heal best in community. Creating a network-a village, whatever you want to call it-gives you opportunities to revisit trauma in moderate, controllable doses.

Resilience is a capability that can wax and wane, not a permanent, innate trait…even the most seemingly resilient people can be drained by relational poverty and ongoing stress, distress, and trauma.

If the challenge is going to build resilience, it has to be moderate—just right. Finding the "just right" is a major issue with children who have had trauma. Remember, they frequently live in a persistent state of fear. And fear shuts down parts of the cortex—the thinking part of the brain. In a classroom, what may seem to be a moderate, developmentally appropriate challenge for many children may be an overwhelming demand on a child with a sensitized stress response

No one knows what a moderate dose of revisiting a trauma memory is better than the actual traumatized person.

ultimately altered their ability to respond properly to stress for a lifetime.

This is a common thread in our culture: We're reactive; we prioritize convenient, short-term solutions; we're risk-averse; and we use material things rather than relationships as rewards. Here, have a toy. Be good and we will give you a thing. Giving toys instead of calming touch is an outrageously misguided practice. It's the result of developmentally ignorant, trauma-uninformed policies—and another example of the need to change our systems.

is even more difficult to understand and take into account how early childhood trauma can express underlying genetic vulnerabilities.

The mind wants to see what we believe, so it clings to things that support those beliefs—that worldview—and ignores things that don't. But trauma shatters this inner landscape. Your worldviews are broken to pieces.

We often use our belief in another person's "resilience" as an emotional shield. We protect ourselves from the discomfort, confusion, and helplessness we feel in the face of their trauma. It's a kind of looking away; it lets our worldview go unchallenged and lets our life continue with minimal disruption.

What this also means is that early experiences will necessarily have a far greater impact than later ones.

Very often, "what happened" takes years to reveal itself. It takes courage to confront our actions, peel back the layers of trauma in our lives, and expose the raw truth of our past. But this is where healing begins. —

But this help is often mistimed, disorganized, and almost always ignorant of trauma. Thousands volunteer their time in the first few weeks; six months later, no one does.

colonization intentionally fragments families, community cohesion, and cultures, and that disconnection is at the heart of trauma.

until you heal the wounds of your past, you will continue to bleed. The wounds will bleed through and stain your life, through alcohol, through drugs, through sex, through overworking. You have to have the courage to pull out the wound and begin to heal yourself.

Based on her years of experience and practice, the firefighter had a moderate activation of her stress-response systems; the event felt predictable and controllable. For her, it was a resilience-building experience, not a trauma.

be excluded or dehumanized in an organization, community, or society you are part of results in prolonged, uncontrollable stress that is sensitizing (see Figure 3). Marginalization is a fundamental trauma.

Even in the absence of major traumatic events, unpredictable stress and the lack of control that goes with it are enough to make our stress-response systems sensitized—overactive and overly reactive—creating the internal storm.

I finally connected the dots as to why I was afraid to be home alone at night. The attack on my grandmother, while we were asleep and at our most vulnerable, had been traumatizing.

I see that a key to healing from trauma is finding your "church home"—your people, your community. This can help build resilience, post-traumatic healing, and ultimately post-traumatic wisdom. It can help you become wise. Dr. Perry: It is impossible to be truly wise without some real-life hardship.

Talk about a system that needs trauma training. Law enforcement should be at the top of the list. Training about trauma, the brain, stress, and distress is essential if you are going to be a first responder—especially a police officer. Anyone given the responsibility of carrying a gun in service of society should have extensive training in these things.

a child with traumatic experiences will often have difficulty learning—and also be overreactive to the feedback and criticisms that come with struggling in school. This can lead to behavior problems. The behaviors are often misunderstood. So many of the things that people and systems do with good intentions actually cause additional pain for the families and children they're supposed to be serving.

Dr. Perry: It's like when you weren't aware of why you were afraid to be alone at night. You weren't aware of the associations you'd made earlier in your life. Our behaviors begin to shape themselves around the emotional landmines left by previous trauma.