Quotes About Trauma

I was like some daft child who burns himself once and after that is willing to shiver in the darkness rather than make a fire.

Because of the prominent role that such vicious daydreams play as a preliminary to the act of serial murder, Robert Ressler and his colleagues reached the conclusion that fantasy is the mainspring of sexual homicide. "My research convinced me that the key was not the early trauma but the development of perverse thought patterns," Ressler has written. "These men were motivated to murder by their fantasies.

To be sure, not every abused child grows up to be a psychopathic killer. But virtually every psychopathic killer has suffered extreme, often grotesque, mistreatment at the hands of his or her parents or guardians. In the language of logic, severe child abuse may not be a sufficient cause in the creation of serial murderers, but it appears to be a necessary one.

Recent scientific research has reinforced the findings of people like Otnow and Athens by demonstrating that a traumatic upbringing can actually alter the anatomy of a person's brain. Brain scans performed on severely abused children have found that specific areas of the cortex—related not just to the intelligence but to the emotions—never develop properly, leaving them incapable of feeling empathy for other human beings.

Denial and minimizing is often seen in genuine PTSD and, hence, should be a target of detection and measurement.

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.

When we heard those shots and he saw Ploeg lying in front of the house, what he said was, 'My God, the lizards!'" With wide-eyed disbelief Anton looked out over her head.

Whenever their partner's behavior looks or sounds like the real threats they've experienced in the past, they activate the defenses they used back then. Their defensive arsenal is ready to be deployed at the slightest provocation. An unsuspecting or well-intentioned partner can stumble over a tripwire and never know what they did to set off the attack.

Heather Dune Macadam

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma," writes Alain de Botton in his book Status Anxiety, efficiently summing up Draper, Grey, and Trump in one blow. "It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

My heart was beating so hard that for a second I thought I might pass out. It was like revisiting the hole where you'd once been held in solitary confinement: a force field of muscle-memory-stored pain and toxic energy so palpable I was afraid that if I stayed any longer it might suck me back in.

War is not pretty from any angle, and the most vulnerable organ in the body is the brain.

Many of the men brought aboard suffered from "shell shock," or "combat fatigue," as it is called in this war. But call it what you like, we did not have to be psychiatrists to realize that the human mind can look at one scene just so long, can absorb meaning and reality to just a certain point. With these men that point had been passed. Their minds had refused to accept the pictures which their senses presented;

Previously traumatized wild elephants appeared to regain a degree of faith in new humans once the matriarch has established trust with just one new human. But it must be the matriarch.

In the aftermath of the shooting, John did not experience any sense of relief at having survived the lethal series of assaults. Nor did he gloat over his victory. In fact, he was horrified that he had caused such severe physical damage to another human being. It didn't help that some of his fellow officers seized upon this opportunity to call him "back shooter" and other phrases used in police humor as a way of dealing with the trauma of violence.

Humiliation scars deeper than the lash.

Nobody heard the two shots, but plenty of people saw Warren's head explode, or felt the wet gore splatter them, or saw his headless body drop to the ground, blood pouring from his neck like a dropped carton of milk.

Because I don't remember what actually happened but that's what we were into back then. That's why I didn't want to report the rape. I knew the police would take blood and urine samples from us and our partying would come out," she said. "We'd be trashed in court as a couple of drunken druggie sluts. Nobody would believe that we were raped. Even if they did, by some miracle, and the men were convicted, I'd still lose.

The rape was horrible, but being ignored by you was like being violated again," Albert said, his anger building once more. "It tore her apart.

Genetics or brain chemistry, trauma or karma? It doesn't really matter what it's called—after all, no one really knows for sure what causes this affliction—except that it ends. Can I stop doing this? Am I even able? The bees trapped inside my body buzz and whir, needling my nerve endings with delicate stings.

This is the difference between traumatic memory and ordinary memory. Traumatic memory stays vivid.

When a child is traumatized, something more discrete and more specific happens than a general loss of capacity for love and work. An ever-present, ever-draining abscess forms. The child goes on living an ordinary life. But if something touches the traumatic "abscess," the child hurts.

The themes of trauma—man's helplessness, the world's randomness, and ugly, unexpected death—are difficult ones for a person to express in art.

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be "bound hand and foot" and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners "went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy," in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes "infamous and embarrassing.