Quotes About Trauma

Finding balance can be an exhausting challenge for anyone with trauma-altered stress-response systems. The search to avoid the pain of distress can lead to extreme, ultimately destructive, methods of regulation.

Yes. Unfortunately, our schools are typically not trauma-aware and tend to prohibit many of the regulatory activities we've mentioned: walking, rocking, fiddling with things while listening to a lesson, listening to music with your earbuds while doing homework. "Somatosensory regulation," such as the rhythmic activities we have discussed, actually opens up the cortex and makes the reasoning parts of the brain more accessible for learning.

these children need patterned, repetitive experiences appropriate to their developmental needs, needs that reflect the age at which they'd missed important stimuli or had been traumatized, not their current chronological age.

demonstrated resilience and high academic achievement despite a range of adversities including poverty, traumatic loss, and community or intra-family violence.

Trauma leaves you shipwrecked. You are left to rebuild your inner world. Part of the rebuilding, the healing process, is revisiting the shattered hull of your old worldview; you sift through the wreckage looking for what remains, seeking your broken pieces. Dreams, intrusive images of the trauma, and reenactment play are your mind struggling to make sense of your new reality.

understanding how the brain reacts to stress or early trauma helps clarify how what has happened to us in the past shapes who we are, how we behave, and why we do the things we do. Through this lens we can build a renewed sense of personal self-worth and ultimately recalibrate our responses to circumstances, situations, and relationships. It is, in other words, the key to reshaping our very lives.

This dissociative response is used when there is inescapable, unavoidable distress and pain. Your mind and body protect you. Because you cannot physically flee, and fighting is futile, you psychologically flee to your inner world.

As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.

A lifelong set of beliefs and behaviors can emerge when trauma is experienced at a young age. In one of the most serious manifestations, early sexual abuse can poison intimacy, even if the person has no actual recollection of specific instances of abuse.

The lesson for me was that a key aspect of What happened to you? is What didn't happen for you? What attention, nurturing touch, reassurance—basically, what love—didn't you get? I realized that neglect is as toxic as trauma. —Dr. Perry

asking the fundamental question "What happened to you?" can help each of us know a little more about how experiences—both good and bad—shape

asking the fundamental question "What happened to you?" can help each of us know a little more about how experiences—both good and bad—shape us.

And just as with trauma, several essential questions can help us assess whether a situation is neglectful, and if so, how great the impact will be. When during development did the neglect take place? What was the pattern? How severe or depriving was the neglect? How long did it last? And, since absolute neglect is rare, what 'buffering' factors were present when the neglect occurred?

This split between verbal and performance scores is often seen in abused or traumatized children and can indicate that the developmental needs of certain brain regions, particularly those cortical areas involved in modulating the lower, more reactive regions have been not been met.

Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different. But we cannot move forward if we're still holding on to the pain of that past. All of us who have been broken and scarred by trauma have the chance to turn those experiences into what Dr. Perry and I have been talking about: post-traumatic wisdom. Forgive yourself, forgive them. Step out of your history and into the path of your future.

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.

Children and adults with developmental trauma frequently experience chronic abdominal pain, headaches, chest pain, fainting, and seizure-like episodes—all very common symptoms related to a sensitized stress response.

It's that we have changed our fundamental question from 'What's wrong with you?' to 'What happened to you?

when you experience trauma in the first years of life, meaning from birth through age two—before you've developed the ability to explain the event—it can have a deeper impact on your brain than when you actually do have the words to explain it.

The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

A child exposed to unpredictable or extreme stress will become what we call dysregulated.

Why is it that people who are victims of trauma are so often drawn to abusive relationships? Dr. Perry: Let me broaden the question, because it is so important in understanding not just abuse but all behavior. The key point is that all of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with.

Oprah: What if you don't have the resources to get a therapist? Dr. Perry: Great question. Most people who experience adversity and trauma do not have access to therapy, let alone a clinical team like I just described. But what we're learning is that having access to a number of invested, caring people is actually a better predictor of good outcomes following trauma than having access to a therapist.

When someone has symptoms in each of those four categories, the DSM label is PTSD. It is really important to remember, however, that PTSD is not the only way that trauma impacts our mental and physical health. The adverse effects of trauma that we discussed at the beginning of the chapter can have just as significant an impact on someone's life. In fact, the majority of the long-term effects of trauma don't manifest as PTSD.