Quotes About Trauma

My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life.

The whole world has changed after September 11th.

As a kid growing up in Chicago, I've been shot at before. I remember I very calmly went down on the ground. Afterwards, you're like, 'Omigod.' You just don't have time to think.

Everything in adulthood can be traced back to childhood.

I ended up living in fear for most of my childhood.

My childhood was appalling.

Well, I had the most appalling childhood.

The one-word story about why I have a chip on my shoulder is 'bullying.'

My relationship was always abusive, so I chose to not socialise much. People who knew me knew that what pain I was going through.

The cruel ambush of 9/11 supposedly 'changed everything,' slapping us back to reality. Yet we are constantly shocked, shocked by the foreseeable.

I think everyone is forgetting what plastic surgery is for - if you have a face-eating tumour, lose a breast or are involved in a car accident, then it's a good idea.

There was so much pain. Every time I grew, I had to go back in for a surgery. And I remember just being really, really scared but also, like, knowing exactly what to do. Like as a 3-year-old, I knew to crawl on top of the operating table.

I'm sure I would still have anxiety even if I got a bunch of surgery, and was the most conventionally attractive, cis-passing woman in the world; I think those are traumas that never go away.

Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it's described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddnly fell into the water, but what if you're swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?

Davis calls PTSD living at the whim of your worst memories.

A woman is beaten every nine seconds in this country.

because though a rape is reported only every 6.2 minutes in this country, the estimated total is perhaps five times as high. Which means that there may be very nearly a rape a minute in the United States. It all adds up to tens of millions of rape victims. A significant portion of the women you know are survivors.

As the feminist psychiatrist Judith Herman puts it in her book Trauma and Recovery: "His correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. . . . Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients." If they were telling the truth, he would have to challenge the whole edifice of patriarchal authority to support them.

sexual assault. If that term confuses you take out the word "sexual" and just focus on "assault," on violence

David Morris, in The Evil Hours, his remarkable book on trauma, notes, "Part of trauma's corrosive power lies in its ability to destroy narrative, and . . . stories, written and spoken, have tremendous healing power for both the teller and the listener.

The former marine, David J Morris, author of a book on post traumatic stress disorder, notes that the disorder is far more common and far more rarely addressed among rape survivors than combat veterans.

To tell a story and have it and the teller recognized and respected is still one of the best methods we have of overcoming trauma.

R]apists tend to lie, a lot...

Here in the United States, where there is a reported rape every 6.2 minutes, and one in five women will be raped in her lifetime