Quotes About Trauma

Stop trying to find something in food that will make you feel better. I used to have eating disorders; I'd binge and purge all the time: fried oysters, po' boys, muffulettas, beignets, coffee and doughnuts. I tried to medicate myself with food when people made fun of me or hit me with a bat in school. I'd always turn to food.

When I was 7, an old lady was driving too fast in my neighborhood and hit me with her car. I was running out of the house, and when I got halfway into the street, my mom saw the car and yelled for me to run back. As I turned around the car hit me, dragged me five houses down the road, and I fractured my collarbone.

There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.

In your twenties, if you have any amount of complexity in your childhood, or any trauma that you haven't dealt with, it comes out. That's why you have a lot of artists that don't make it through.

It's been an obsession with me from childhood, the horrors of the twentieth century.

When you live in an alcoholic family or an abusive family, you tiptoe, you don't want to step on any mines.

My childhood was bad. No father. Mother was greedy and brought me up awful - never made me breakfast once. I don't want to get started. One story is worse than another.

No one wants for their child to become a refugee. It's an awful experience.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

Compelled to become instruments of war, to kill and be killed, child soldiers are forced to give violent expression to the hatreds of adults

You've been told that you're broken. That you're damaged goods ... there is also Post-Traumatic Growth. You come back from war stronger and more sure of who you are.

Look at an infantryman's eyes and you can tell how much war he has seen.

If you had seen one day of war, you would pray to God that you would never see another.

Wars damage the civilian society as much as they damage the enemy. Soldiers never get over it.

Wars don't happen on battlefields; they go on happening in people's hearts for generations and generations, and the ecological damage is unfathomably complex and dire.

For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.

The war has ruined us for everything.

In violence, we forget who we are

No country has suffered so much from the ruins of war while being at peace as the American.

There are strange hells within the minds war made.

Anyone who experienced World War I close-hand was grossed out by it forever. It just was so awful.

I saw a large, red dried swath that I immediately identified clearly as blood. I covered the war in Vietnam. I saw a lot of it [blood] there.

When I was in the war, I was lucky that I was in a plane and never saw the carnage close-up.

Just as verbally and physically abused children internalize blame, so do incest victims. However, in incest, the blame is compounded by the shame. The belief that 'it's all my fault' is never more intense than with the incest victim. This belief fosters strong feelings of self-loathing and shame. In addition to having somehow to cope with the actual incest, the victim must now guard against being caught and exposed as a 'dirty, disgusting' person