Quotes About Trauma

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

Vicarious traumatization. It can happen to those who bear secondary witness to the traumas of others.

I was watching how we'd filled the room with floating smoke, how our slightest movements stirred it. I was back at our old house on Carter Avenue, the night Daddy threw the barbell and Ma soaked herself in the tub, smoking, her brown nipples half in, half out of the water.

Stop it! My whole life still hurts!

We had tasted what it was like being dead. We had rolled it around in our mouths and swallowed it and now the stink from it was coming from us. We weren't all right. We would have to learn to be alive again.

Jackson Blue, who had read and retained every important book the central library had to offer, once told me that when a child is orphaned at an early age a large part of his psyche remains fixated there. "It's like the boy just turns into a man instead'a growin' up into one," he said.

When a full-thickness injury occurs to the skin or an incision is made, there is always a scar. The

Many children from troubled families have difficulty relaxing and having fun. Ability to be spontaneous and to play is a need and a characteristic of our Child Within.

When we are not allowed to remember, to express our feelings and to grieve or mourn our losses or traumas, whether real or threatened, through the free expression of our Child Within, we become ill. Thus we can consider viewing a spectrum of unresolved grieving as beginning with mild symptoms or signs of grief, to co-dependence, to PTSD.

Furthermore, people like Marcus can over-estimate the degree of threat or mis-read visual cues such as facial expressions, resulting in an inability to modulate emotional pain. Imagine what will happen when he experiences a situation in early recovery that reminds him of the old trauma. For example, if his male supervisor at work gets angry with him, Marcus' brain has learned to go into a "fight or flight" pattern, which leads to another angry outburst.

In order to survive, the traumatized child's Real Self (True Self or Child Within) goes into hiding deep within the unconscious part of its psyche. What emerges is a false self or ego which tries to run the show of our life, but is unable to succeed because it is simply a defense mechanism against pain and not real. Its motives are based more on needing to be right and in control.

Now he realized that somehow those who had served in France and elsewhere knew a world that couldn't be shared. How could he tell his sister—or even his father, if the elder Rutledge was still alive—what had been done on bloody ground far from home? It would be criminal to fill their minds with scenes that no one should have to remember. No one.

He covered her face with a pillow and lay on it. She got half a breath before he crushed her, and she thrashed like hell but in that second she knew it was foolish.

If we are going to talk about how undocumented immigrants impact our society, we ought to first address how our national policies have disrupted their lives. Above all, solidarity with the immigrant poor should seek to know them not as statistics, but as human beings who endure extraordinary hardship and trauma in their struggle just to survive—especially since the structural causes of their impoverishment lie on our side of the border.

Robbins had opened Gabby up. Her charred skin was peeled back, and her ribs were removed. She was pink inside, like steak that had been burned on a high heat but remained raw in the middle.

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)

The government researchers,aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing acts desired for national security and defense." p. 53 – 54

But Mom was the craziest. The gun had really sent her into outer space. After finding it, she'd beaten him with a wooden spoon—so hard that he couldn't sit down the rest of the day, only lie on his stomach in bed.

She knew she couldn't escape unscathed, and the trauma would take her a long time to get past. And she might never fully heal mentally. There was no denying the fact, though, that everything had changed for her. To know what to expect wasn't the same as actually living it.

O! how many ghosts in a wound of war.

When loneliness is a constant state of being, it harkens back to a childhood wherein neglect and abandonment were the landscape of life.

People who suffered nightmares frequently were three times more likely to commit suicide, and that was regardless of whether they were clinically depressed or suffering from PTSD.

Girls who weren't sad and tired. Girls better than me. Who had learned to turn their trauma into adventures for him to stumble blindly through. Instead of wallowing in their brokenness and breaking everything in their path as penance.

this man sucked my nuts when I was a kiddo