Quotes About Trauma

He'd been hit by a car, knocked off his bike. At the funeral the vicar had called it an "accident". But somehow the word wasn't enough. It wasn't big enough, powerful enough - didn't mean enough. He hadn't spilled a cup of tea, he hadn't tripped over his own feet. He'd had the life smashed out of him. It felt like there should be a whole new word invented just to describe it.

Between 1945 and 1947 tens of millions of men, women and children were expelled from their countries in some of the biggest acts of ethnic cleansing the world has ever seen.

I know a plastic surgeon who put the gun/ in his mouth, fired, and lived./ Thing of the echo. The brain in its great hall/ banqueting, then besieged.

As long as the abuse or neglect experienced in childhood remains buried within, we re-recreate our family in adult relationships.

The unspoken words in the hearts of traumatized people reminding God to act to the evil of this World

Her nightmares came from what she saw and experienced when the door had opened to reveal evil and violence that until that trip had been closed to her. Now she knew what some people—despite their manner and packaging—were capable of. It still shook her to her core.

For the next few minutes, time stood still and Cassie was transported into a real-life version of hell. Even as she watched it, she knew she'd never be able to scrub the images from her mind for the rest of her life. She had to remind herself to breathe.

The sound of the discharge within the cab was so loud, all Joe could hear was a dull buzzing in his ears.

Joe instantly lost hearing in his right ear, and it was replaced by a dull roar.

Maybe memory was just a wicked curse, and the kind of mind what could wipe out painful recollections a blessing. Maybe .....

If you carry around somebody else's nightmare, who knows what else your insides might hide or when it might come out?

Faye guessed she was seeing images in her mind. The sort of images you had to live with for the rest of your life, like war wounds, but in your heart rather than on your skin.

Her own scars were all on the inside. But that didn't mean they hurt less than if a belt had torn open the skin on her back.

Forgive Olof? When he had robbed them of their childhood, turned them into adults who clung to each other like victims of a shipwreck? He was the driving force behind everything they had done, everything they still were doing.

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.

We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But then you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.

The past is a sadly inadequate word for what we've been through

The human spirit is a mysterious thing: traumas that flatten some people bounce off of others.

The human spirit is a mysterious thing: traumas that flatten some people bounce off of others. Pain and hope get tangled into uncuttable Gordian knots.

unlock hidden memories. Some trauma is just too much for the conscious mind to handle and you have to go in through a back door to access it. So I reluctantly submitted to a few sessions. It wasn't what I thought it would be. No swinging amulet, no metronome. It was more like those guided imagery exercises they'd sometimes have us do at camp.

No whim of fate, no Freudian trauma, no loss of a loved one will be as devastating to the human spirit as some prolonged ambivalent relationship that leaves us forever unable to say goodbye.

Being trained as an efficient killer wasn't enough. You also had to learn to control your stress and your fear, becoming so used to violence that you could detach yourself from the trauma of it and assess the level of violence necessary to respond. When the fight-or-flight response kicked in, Mother Nature shut off our brains. It was a biological survival mechanism.

He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.

What happened after that, and will be related later, was something entirely unexpected and so awful that Ludens had never spoken about it afterwards to anyone.