Quotes About Trauma

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

Emotional wounding creates the deepest distortions in one's personal illusory reality and therefore the greatest suffering.

Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing.

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

I don't know that I'm afraid of anything anymore. Once you experience war you can never be the same. You see the world differently.

Severe early childhood trauma creates a child with equally intense coping mechanisms—these children are often seen as "mature for their age" and "old souls." While maybe true, it often negates the fact that their innocence was taken away at an early age and they are in survival mode. —Azia Archer

Sometimes, PTSD sufferers will shut out memories of painful periods in their lives and experience amnesia. Thus, a traumatized individual might not remember when his spouse died in a car accident. Another person who was abused might have gaps in her memory of childhood.

The only time I ever went hunting I remembered it as a grisly experience.

The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas.

And somewhere along the way, I found a little bit of healing. It wasn't enough to undo all of the damage done to me when I was a child; that, I think, cuts too deep. But enough.

It involved Melisande, and the razor-sharp blades they call flechettes, and a good deal of me screaming ... I have dreams about it still, and Elua help me, some of them are exquisite.

Alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.

And I know only too well how time can cast a sort of skin over an event—a membrane that gets thicker until a point where broaching the subject is all but impossible, even when you think you can face the grief and terror once more.

And she wondered if, in going away, in leaving this country, she would expunge that final vapor of the dragon's breath. Oh yes, the dragon. Priscilla had described their memories of war as being like a dragon that lived deep inside. The dragon had to be kept quiet, had to be mollified; otherwise he could breathe fire into the most ordinary of days. If

Yet, despite the pressures of being a sole proprietor, Maisie knew that the curtain of darkness from her past was lifting. Not that she forgot, not that she didn't still have nightmares or close her eyes and see images from the war in stark relief. But it was as if she were on firmer ground, and not at the mercy of memory's quicksand.

In my estimation—and I could be taken to task by the authorities for such comments, so please reflect upon this conversation with care—the numbers of shell-shocked men ran into the hundreds of thousands. And, arguably, there is no man"—he held Maisie's eyes with his own—"or woman, who returned from Flanders unscathed in the mind.

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn't want to admit. The discovery of one's sexual preference doesn't have to be a trauma. It's a trauma because it's such a traumatized society.

The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.

Elijah Muhammad himself has now been carrrying the same message for more than thirty years; he is not an overnight sensation, and we owe his ministry, I am told, to the fact that when he was a child of six or so, his father was lynched before his eyes. (So much for states' rights.)

But he listed Wayne's blinding as unsolved. The snake venom had bleached his pupils white, and the skin around his eye sockets had required grafts. The doctors had had to use skin from his buttocks, and because his buttocks were hairy, the skin around his eyes grew hair, too.

Head-on impact. The frontseat men sustain massive chest wounds. Their hearts explode. The backseat men sustain downward-thrust trauma and are thus disemboweled.

Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

On the left side of my cheek a row of crusted scabbed stitches hold a deep 1 inch-long gash together. My nose is bent and swollen beneath its bandage and red lines streak from my nostrils. There are black and yellow bruises beneath both eyes, there is blood both wet and dry everywhere. (James Frey)

The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us.