Quotes About Trauma

If we truly want to understand ourselves, we need to understand our history—our true history. Because the emotional residue of our past follows us.

What I've learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. A deep longing to feel needed, validated, and valued begins to take hold. As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what

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.

often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.

do think that, in most cases, neglect and trauma co-occur. But they cause very different biological experiences and can have very different effects on the brain and the developing child. Some people

have used the term "complex trauma" to try to capture developmental neglect and maltreatment, but I believe that lumps too many things into one box.

This is where the work begins—the work to excavate the roots that were put down long before we had the words to articulate what was happening to us.

sensory experiences that last mere seconds or are endured for years can remain locked deep in the brain. Yet as our brains develop, constantly absorbing new experiences while continuing to make sense of the world around us, every moment builds upon all the moments that came before.

Over the years, I've found that seemingly senseless behavior makes sense once you look at what is behind it. And since the brain is the part of us that allows us to think, feel, and act, whenever I'm trying

to understand someone, I wonder about that person's brain. Why did they do that? What would make them act that way? Something happened that influenced how their brain works.

Certainly, our work supports that observation. One of our major findings is that in determining someone's current mental health, the history of their childhood relational health—their connectedness—is as important as, if not more important than, their history of adversity.

Cuantas más relaciones saludables tiene un niño, mayores probabilidades habrá de que se recupere de un trauma y crezca sano. Las relaciones son los agentes de cambio, y la terapia más poderosa es el amor humano.

labor asistencial como las investigaciones sugieren que las experiencias de curación más importantes en la vida de los niños traumatizados no suceden en la propia terapia.

if you have experienced trauma but haven't excavated it, the wounded parts of you will affect everything you've managed to build.

Though we all ''perform'' for others to some extent, the mask slips easily for those who have sufferd early neglect.

It's important to clarify that most people who are abused don't go on to abuse others in the same way. On the other hand, it is becoming clear that it's the very rare person who has been abused who doesn't have some form of adaptation that impacts how they deal with people. It doesn't have to be a "pathology," but it can influence the ways in which you form and maintain relationships.

I fall in that category. For years, I would say yes to things I knew I really did not want to do, or avoid difficult conversations because I could not live with the discomfort of speaking up for myself. I've known other victims of trauma who sabotage situations until someone else says no for them—meaning their relationship ends, a friendship becomes toxic, or they lose a job. This is what I hear you saying when you talk about people who poison intimacy.

Neglect is as toxic as trauma.

I suppose I took comfort in the illusion that I could go back. But I'd been around long enough to know history is sealed and unchangeable. You can move on, with a heart stronger in the places it's been broken, create new love. You can hammer pain and trauma into a righteous sword and use it in defense of life, love, human grace and God's blessings. But nobody gets a do-over. Nobody gets to go back and there's only one road out. Ahead, into the dark.

who was experiencing a bit of post-traumatic stress.

You're driving in the car and you feel like your whole world has fallen apart. And people in the car beside you are laughing and carrying on. Their life is normal, and you think, 'Goddamn it. What gives you the right to laugh?' Because nothing has happened to them. You don't understand how everything else can go on normally when your life will never be normal again. Ever.

the atmosphere of war brutalizes everyone involved, begets a fanaticism in which the original moral factor is buried at the bottom of a heap of atrocities committed by all sides.

In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.

It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.