Quotes About Trauma

Expressive arts therapy--the purposeful application of art, music, dance/movement, dramatic enactment, creative writing, and imaginative play--is a non-verbal way of self-expression of feelings and perceptions. More importantly, they are action-oriented and tap implicit, embodied experiences of trauma that can defy expression through verbal therapy or logic.

Neurobiology research has taught helping professionals that we need to "come to our senses" in developing effective components for trauma intervention.

Possibly the most compelling reason for use of the expressive arts in trauma work is the sensory nature of the arts themselves; their qualities involve visual, tactile, olfactory, auditory, vestibular, and proprioceptive experiences.

Taken as a whole, maltreatment and neglect demonstrate a powerful capacity to create enduring dysfunction in multiple domains. The earlier in a child's life maltreatment occurs, the greater the risk of enduring and pervasive problems into adulthood (Perry, 2005, 2008).

bottom-up modalities (primary sensory, somatic, movement, rhythmic) help establish basic homeostatic stability will top-down treatments such as insight, reflection, trauma integration, narrative development, social development, or affect enhancement be effective (Kliem & Jones, 2008; Perry, 2008, 2009).

It is the integrative synergy of the arts, based on cultural traditions and current trauma-informed practice, that is requisite to addressing traumatic stress with most children, adults, families, groups, and communities.

Highly anxious children or severely traumatized children don't play.

Trauma-related manifestations of impaired cortical development or functioning may include communication disorders, understanding causality, motivation, academic problems, conservation of matter, ordering events, classifying, forming hypothesis, problem solving, or moral and ethical thinking.

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet.

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself" (p. 5)

The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them. Or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess (and thus which possesses them).

Cathy slowly discovers the terrible childhood Dawn has had; rejected by her parents, left to fend for herself, then subjected to violent treatment by her relatives.

Emotional scars often run the deepest.

Repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse usually begins to surface around age 30 when natural electro-chemical changes occur in the brain. The is a widely known and established fact. The fact that the Vatican placed a ten-year statute of limitations on reporting such abuse eliminates a vast number of their victims from joining the class action suit. Neither Cathy nor Kelly is eligible for compensation under this rule. How many others are being ignored?

He "had business at Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska" where the wayward boys were being traumatized and sexually abused in accordance with the Catholic involvement in Project Monarch. Survivor Paul Bonacci of the infamous Franklin Cover-up case has named Alex Houston as one of his abusers there in Boys Town.

In many Asian American novels, writers set trauma in a distant mother country or within an insular Asian family to ensure that their pain is not a reproof against American imperial geopolitics or domestic racism; the outlying forces that cause their pain—Asian Patriarchal Fathers, White People Back Then—are remote enough to allow everyone, including the reader, off the hook.

The lie that Asians have it good is so insidious that even now as I write, I'm shadowed by doubt that I didn't have it bad compared to others. But racial trauma is not a competitive sport. The problem is not that my childhood was exceptionally traumatic but that it was in fact rather typical.

For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You're a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent. Watching

For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You're a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent

resilience, become an upstanding doctor whose kids are also doctors. For many immigrants, if you move here with trauma, you're going to do what it takes to get by. You cheat. You beat your wife. You gamble. You're a survivor and, like most survivors, you are a god-awful parent. Watching Dao,

Much later, when I could think about it clearly, I consoled myself that there were many worse ways in which I might have been raped.

Later, when he was able to grasp it between shaking hands and pour a trickle into his mouth, the pain of swallowing made him pass out again. In his dreams, he was once again bound on the sloping ladder, the water cascading into his mouth, his own involuntary swallowing pulling the narrow length of linen farther and farther into his gut.

Just as the ripples of a stone thrown into a pond will spread further and further away from the source, so the ripples of the disaster in 1948 hit my parents first and then spread to us and to our children long afterwards. Seeing only the ripples, it was easy to confuse the original cause with its effects.

He looked as if someone had machine gunned his soul.