Quotes About Trauma

I couldn't breathe. I - I went into - literally, my kidneys stopped functioning. They stopped, you know, processing the fluid that was starting to build up in my body.

These poor wretches were stolen from their homes, carried to a strange country, and sold to servitude, from which they sought to escape on the first occasion which offered.

At the time, she was too traumatized to go to the police and report a felony committed by one of the most powerful men in the state. And besides, what good would it do? The Kokomo cops were Klansmen.

Dr. Maté has written several best-selling books, including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.

The whole point of addiction is that people are compelled to it by suffering, trauma, unease, and emotional pain. If you want to help people, ask why they are in so much pain that they are driven (there's that word again) to escape from it through ultimately self-harming habits or substances. Then support them in healing the trauma at the core of their addiction, a process that always starts with nonjudgmental curiosity and compassion.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.

By revealing that there is no external solution to the contradiction of being, the absolute tells us that we can no longer hope for relief from the trauma of history. This is the point when contradiction makes itself manifest as irreducible and when politics becomes unavoidable.

I can say I have forgiven my captors. That being said, I never want to see them again. I'm not OK with they did to me.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren't sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don't cry: you scream, you try to run. When it's over and you're OK, that's when you cry.

I was born with chronic asthma, and when I was about five or six years old, one day I had an asthma attack so bad I began to become comatose.

I think everything that played a part in my life growing up is in my music. Being homeless, living in shelters, dealing with over-aged, older men that hit on me... all that is in the music.

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

A un niño con quemaduras le gusta el fuego

The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.

When you endure horror day after day, month after month, it becomes normalized. I built high stone walls around my heart—walls that no one could break through or climb over for more than twenty years. My MO was to not think about it, not talk about it. Don't feed the beast. Don't give it any oxygen. It'll go away. For a long time, I made that work, but every now and then, some random thing would trigger a flood of memory and anxiety and crush my soul all over again.

In leading his patients to understand that breakdown was nothing to be ashamed of, that horror and fear were inevitable responses to the trauma of war and were better acknowledged than suppressed, that feelings of tenderness for other men were natural and right, that tears were an acceptable and helpful part of grieving, he was setting himself against the whole tenor of their upbringing. They'd been trained to identify emotional repression as the essence of manliness.

Two miles up the road to hell. No point blaming those women because they couldn't imagine it. He could hardly realize it himself, sitting there by the window, stirring his coffee, bubbling with excitement about his room, the work he intended to do there, and the new idea that was beginning to take root in his mind.

It's strange, isn't it? You go on and on, or I do rather, seeing God knows what horrors and learning not to care or anyway not to care more than you need to do the job, and then something happens that gets right under your skin.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's afterimage imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscura of dreams.

Rape is a crime against sleep and memory; it's after image imprints itself like an irreversible negative from the camera obscure of dreams. Though their bodies would heal, their souls had sustained a damage beyond compensation

My life did not really begin until I summoned the power to forgive my father for making my childhood a long march of terror.

The imprint of Dachau branded me indelibly and caused me to suffer the miscarriage of my hopeful philosophy. If man was good, then Dachau could never have happened. Simple as that.

front of Billy, waving their guns back and forth like twin Rambos. A barrage of bullets pelted the metal shelves and the floor where she'd been standing. He'd set her up. She scrunched into a ball and covered her ears. No! Not again. The shooting stopped. Angel raised her head, relieved none of the officers