Quotes About Trauma

Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations—each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma—America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.

Few – if any – of these patients would survive or emerge unscathed from whatever it was that had damaged their brains.

I'm packed with broken glass and memories and it all hurts.

When a bullet broke the store-house of the self, inside the skull, how could those myriads of photographs survive, or the personality that they made up? Why should they survive, what use were they to life?

It was better not to remember such terrible details.

During the first, in 1857, he forced himself to witness a public execution in Paris, and the sight shook him so deeply that he vowed he would never again serve any government.

Some of them were scarred from head to foot where they had been whipped. One man's back was nearly all one scar, as if the skin had been chopped up and left to heal in ridges. Another had scars on the back of his neck, and from that all the way to his heels every little ways; but that was not such a sight as the one with the great solid mass of ridges from his shoulders to his hips. That beat all the antislavery sermons ever yet preached.

He had heard Auntie talk about the veterans - drunk all the time, she said. But he knew why. it was something the old people could not understand. Liquor was medicine for the anger that made them hurt, for the pain of the loss, medicine for tight bellies and choked-up throats.

[Domestic violence is] a carefully laid physical, financial and psychological trap.

Emotional abuse systematically degrades, diminishes, and can eventually destroy the personhood of the abused.

PTSD has a terminal side to it that calls for more urgency.

The Green New Deal for Public Schools represents the level of school infrastructure investment that is urgent and necessary to heal the harm from decades of disinvestment, redlining and cycles of poverty and trauma, particularly for Black and brown children.

Having traveled to parts of the world where war has done its usual nasty work on people's lives, I have come to develop a particular hatred for the shape, the look, the sound of the AK-47.

What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.

I was in the orphanage in New Orleans until I was almost a year old. I don't think I ever got held by my mama, so that was completely and utterly traumatic. I think it was trauma from the first breath, and I think I've spent my whole life trying to heal from that trauma. So it shaped my brain.

I was sort of traumatized by girls in the third grade. Because there was a girl in my third grade class I had a crush on. I bought her a box of Valentine's Day chocolate. And I put it in her cubby with a note that said something like, 'I am deeply in love with you, Your Secret Admirer.' And I didn't sign my name.

Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms. Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one's own choices as one was growing up.

That was part of the reason why my 1959 crisis was so traumatic to me: it was my first acute life crisis. By comparison, my 1980 and 2000 professional crises were un-traumatic. I did eventually switch career directions from membrane physiology to evolutionary physiology around 1980, and from physiology to geography after 2000. But those decisions weren't painful, because I had come to assume from my previous experience that things would probably turn out OK.

In addition, in one of the largest child evacuations in history, 80,000 Finnish children were evacuated (mainly to Sweden), with long-lasting traumatic consequences extending to the next generation

Yet it seemed just possible that in the chaos and the destruction, the trauma and the devastation, some great natural reckoning was perhaps at work, which on a human scale found expression in the catastrophe of war and which, beyond the narrow grasp of the ordinary explanations for such disasters, was merely pursuing its own organic course. To what logic did ants turn to comprehend the fall of the gardener's spade?

You don't forget nightmares, but when they've been exposed to enough sunlight, they fade.

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.

Bir katliami unutmak da katliam turunden bir seydir.

After the accident he lacked a sense of fully inhabiting his own life, as if he were still, somehow, tumbling through that tumbling air…He wasn't in despair, he was just tumbling, perpetually tumbling, relentlessly tumbling at the mercy of that terrible weightlessness and the betrayal of gravity…He was there, but he was always in that other place, the tumbling place, the place he was used to now.