Quotes About Trauma

What Shaylene saw as Burton's primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.

She realized then that she was screaming. Not words or anything, just screaming.

Everything that's been done to us we carry forever. Most of us do our damnedest to hold on to the good and forget the rest. But somewhere in the vault of our hearts, in a place our brains can't or won't touch, the worst is stored, and the only sure key to it is in our dreams.

He is unable to think in words. The shells begin once again to pound the water around him, to make it into a bloody broth of metal and the dead.

Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence G. Calhoun (2004). "Posttraumatic Growth: Conceptual Foundations and Empirical Evidence," Psychological Inquiry 15: 1–18. The researchers have a test of post-traumatic growth, called the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), that you can find online. We also recommend the excellent Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg. Also see:

Horror in your country is something you take a dose of to remind yourself that you are not suffering from it. For me and the girls from my village, horror is a disease and we are sick with it.

The gasoline flowing through the pump made a high pitched sound, as if the screaming of my family was still dissolved in it" [p.181].

When people who believe themselves to be addicts or alcoholics come under great stress or trauma, they mentally give themselves permission to drink or use drugs as a remedy.

She looked as if she had been mauled by a tiger.

She had to do something. Anything. She had to focus, think, fight. She wasn't anybody's point to prove. She was fucking Batgirl. Her body was broken and her mind jagged and fractured by trauma, but she was still alive, and she wasn't going down without a fight.

Wo ein Messer einmal tief ins Fleisch geschnitten hat, tut die Berührung durch eine Feder weh.

I try to forget the horror of what happened. Or—perhaps forget is the wrong word. How can I forget? And yet how can I move forward even a step without tamping down the despair I feel? When I close my eyes, I hear Maisie's cries and Mam's screams, smell the acrid smoke that must have started from that pile of newspapers, feel the heat of the fire on my skin, and heave upright on my pallet in the Schatzmans' parlor, soaked in a cold sweat.

Around the world, a woman's body is still very much a battlefield and hundreds of thousands of women bear the invisible wounds of war.

Rape is as much of a weapon of war as the machete, club, or Kalashnikov.

Unbearable pain that is expressed and acknowledged becomes bearable. But borderlines received no such responses in their childhood. Therefore, they are stuck in the past, trying to elicit what they needed as a child—validation of their unbearable pain.

Africans believed they were being captured and shipped over the ocean to be eaten. The insecurity of life in a world of slavery is hard to imagine, let alone the extraordinary length of time that the threat of abduction loomed.

She's crushed,' McLeod said. 'That's why she came forward. She blames herself for what happened to Anezka.

We're taught to find the antecedents to our adult failures in childhood traumas, and so we spend our lives looking bacwards and pointing fingers, rather than bucking up and forging ahead. But what if your childhood was all a big misunderstanding? An elaborate ruse? What does that say about failure? Better yet, what does that say about potential?

Lily had lived in fear before she knew why she was afraid. She'd grown up knowing that people hated her. Perfectly ordinary people, the kind of adults who ought to be helping her to cross the road, hated Lily and wanted her gone. That was the climate of her childhood.

I think that everything that happens to you stays in you, even if it stays in a part of your mind where you can't find it. That's why you should never try to forget when people urge you to.

I am a child of Cosmopolitan culture, have been traumatized by supermodels and too many quizzes and know that neither my personality nor my body is up to it if left to its own devices. I can't take the pressure.

White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power. Now he was going back in time with the hawk.

White had learned that going back in time was a way of fixing things; uncovering past traumas, revisiting them and defusing their power.

Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods.