Quotes About Trauma

My father talks about people dying on coffin ships going to America and my mother talks about people dying on trains going to Poland. My father says our people died in the famine and my mother says those who died under the Nazis are our people, too. Everybody has things they can't forget.

As it turns out, the atrocities we suffered were committed by none other than ourselves, and the inner sense of guilt and fear sparked by this incident helped form the roots of the frantic hatred that thrives to this day. (2007: 9)

A scar had been beaten into his mind which would only heal by experience.

forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?

He strained to say something else. I leaned toward him. He focused on me. "Rape," he promised. "Many, many times. Until you bleed . . ." "I'm so flattered.

I've seen a lot of political violence in my life. I know what it looks like. I know what it smells like. I know what motivates young men to do it. I've talked to them about it. I know what victims feel like, you know? I know the abominable effect it has on politics. I know how intractable it is.

Among young people, often a key factor in them committing suicide is the trauma of transient relationships. They throw themselves into a friendship or network of friendships, then it collapses and they're desolate.

Here's something a little more personal: In my teens, I was having a hard time and ended up in a therapy group of young women, some of whom had endured terrible childhood traumas.

I'd always been a little bit uncomfortable talking about my sexuality just because it took me a while to fully accept it. I had a bit of traumatic time with my friends when I was younger, and it kind of just put me off talking about it.

Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.

I was a high school senior and home alone one night with my younger brother. And a guy - gunman - kicked in our front door at our home in New Jersey and held the two of us captive. We escaped. He caught us again. We escaped again. So, a pretty horrific experience.

As a European from a different, younger generation, the trauma that was Nixon's presidency never really had a hold over me. For one thing, I never voted for him.

My dad had just come back from Vietnam, and I think he had PTSD that he never treated, in that sort of macho-denial way. So they were divorced by the time I was 2, and my mom tried to raise me and my younger sister by herself. That proved very taxing, so there was a lot of moving around.

My position in the family turned out to be a lucky one; I bore neither the brunt of my mother's newness to parenthood nor the force of her middle-aged traumas, as my younger sister, Ruth, did.

It was traumatic for my children to see the British army en masse coming into our home and searching the house. I recall on one occasion, when our home was raided, my youngest son was standing at the top of the stairs - he would probably have been only three years of age - in his pyjamas. The soldiers came up the stairs, and he peed himself.

You do run and scream and cry and work yourself up into hysterics, and then you get back to the hotel at the end of the day, and you feel really off and really strange. And that's because rationally, even though you know everything is OK, you have put yourself through this traumatizing experience, and your body is still going.

If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you're not dreaming about it, something's probably wrong.

It is funny how it is almost more painful to fall over and scrape your knee than to be blown up. Your body goes into incredible protection mode.

I knew I was shot. Didn't know how bad it was. You know, in a weird way, your body kind of goes numb. You know, as bad as the wounds were - and obviously, I know now how severe it was - at the time, I guess my body had been shutting down a lot of the real pain.

Maybe it's good to be traumatized in your youth, to make you think differently and step outside the box. Anybody can be comfortable, but if you get your world rocked, shaken as it were, then maybe it causes you to really go to a whole other level in a different way.

Over a period of 11 months, I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often, these terrible memories come to me. I can't ignore them.

However light-hearted you try to be about it, the loss of youth, and everything that goes with it, is quite a trauma.

I don't believe in organized religion - I dealt with them hand in hand, and a whole bunch of Catholic priests tried to molest me. Telling me I was gay and I should go home with them and stuff.

Trauma super charges addiction and makes it really bad. It doesn't necessarily cause it, though it can trigger it. It's not necessarily the issue but if you have bad addiction, it's there.