Quotes About Trauma

Staring down the barrel of a gun is the scariest thing you could ever experience. It's not funny. It's not for the movies.

Divorce is hard enough when you're an adult - never mind when you're a child. That was probably when my shyness started, when I was at my shyest.

For many child soldiers, war and violence are all they have ever known. If we don't take it upon ourselves to show them an alternative, then they're going to be soldiers forever, and they'll continue to be recruited and to participate in violence if another conflict starts five or 10 years down the road.

You know what my grandmother said, eventually: 'When a man beats you, he doesn't like you. He has women issues and it starts probably with their mothers.' And I said 'You're probably right.'

I was taken to a boarding school when I was four years old and taken away from my mother and my father, my grandparents, who I stayed with most of the time, and just abruptly taken away and then put into the boarding school, 300 miles away from our home.

I stayed because it was normal. After the first hit, you don't think they're going to do it again. And it does escalate, but I stayed because it became normal. I didn't call the police because I didn't want them to go to jail and it just was normal.

I didn't actually rob anyone but once I was kidnapped by two older boys for half a day and they were trying to get me to steal or mug someone.

I feel I'm able to get rid of any demons lurking in my psyche through my writing, which leaves me free to create all of this and to enjoy our family life, stepping away from all the fictional traumas and the dramas. If I write about family in crisis, then I won't have to live through it, I guess.

At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life's many losses buried in those sands.

For those keeping track, the only rights we have are these: to seek the survival of our individual bodies, to create more bodies like our own, and to know that everyone's body will perish through a process of corruption or mortal trauma. (This is presuming that one has been brought to term and has survived to a certain age, neither being a natural birthright. Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.)

He didn't have to remember, I remembered. I had bronzed the words. No, they were fragments of bullet, lodged in my heart. Whenever I moved a certain way they ached, so I learned a totally different way, a new walk, except it wasn't really a walk, it was more a permanent limp.

So perhaps there are no phantom pains after all; perhaps all pain is real; perhaps each long-ago blow lives on into eternity in some different permutation and shape; perhaps the body is this hypersensitive, revengeful entity, a ledger book, a warehouse of remembered slights and cruelties.

what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper

Because I barely survived Shane Hall. I barely survived myself. It was a dark time. My home life was traumatic. I was a chaotic, angry kid. Why reminisce?

After I accidentally broke my arm, and my foster mom…" He paused, jaw working. "When I survived the crash on the way to the hospital and my foster mom didn't, I started breaking my arm on purpose. Drinking all day. And I decided that I didn't deserve good things.

But what fully realized person doesn't? No one expects men to be flaw-free. Women are expected to absorb traumas both subtle and loud and move on. Shoulder the weight of the world. But when the world fucks with us, the worst thing we can do is bury it. Embracing it makes us strong enough to fuck the world right back.

In other words, they are doing the necessary therapy to understand their trauma-related issues, but they are ignoring the needs of their bodies and not balancing their daily stressors with support and stress relief.

The more I worked with clients' grief issues, the better they were getting. Additionally, trauma was not being talked about as a relational issue; it was talked about as if it happened just within a person. It was during this period that it also became clear to me that the trauma I was seeing in clients was the direct result of relationship pain, and that if it remained unresolved, it would continue to drive dysfunctional relationship patterns.

But even blessed and intelligent families lose it when their emotional problems overwhelm them. For our families it appeared to be alcoholism that led to relationship trauma … or was unhealed relationship trauma the prequel that led to using alcohol to self-medicate emotional pain?

Confrontation reduces the effects of inhibition," reversing the detrimental physiological problems that result from inhibition. When we make a lifestyle of openly confronting painful feelings and we "resolve the trauma, there will be a lowering of the overall stress on the body." Confrontation "forces a rethinking of events. Confronting a trauma helps people understand and, ultimately, assimilate the event.

We have understood and recognized how emotional trauma changes not only the mind and heart of a person, but the body as well; how living with chronic emotional pain affects what we now know to be our limbic system; how when the limbic system is impacted, our ability to regulate our emotions is undermined; and why we can't "just get over it" when we have been impacted by the repeated mobilization of our own fear/stress response.

The effects of being traumatized in childhood don't tend to disappear on their own; they tend to reemerge later in some form of overreaction, compulsive behavior, learning difficulty, intimacy issues, addictions, or process addictions

Healing trauma is healing codependency. As historical pain is processed rather than projected and the self becomes more distinct and present oriented, codependent behaviors begin to clear up naturally.

Because emotional and sensory memory are processed by and stored in the body, the most successful forms of therapy for trauma are experiential.