Quotes About Trauma

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Pain is very often a maimed creature without a mouth.

The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silences. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody as been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Creo en la ficción y en el poder de las historias porque así hablamos a través de lenguas que no son nuestras. No se nos silencia. Todos nosotros, cuando sufrimos un gran trauma, dudamos, tartamudeamos; hay grandes pausas en nuestro discurso. La cosa se atasca. Recuperamos el lenguaje a través del lenguaje de otros. Podemos recurrir al poema. Podemos abrir el libro. Alguien ha estado allí por nosotros y buceó en las palabras.

The psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.

Six months later, Maureen stabbed Mom.

I think a lot of the work I've done and a lot of the work I'm going to do in the future still ties to 9/11 and the fallout from it.

I am a community social psychologist and a lot of my work deals with social work and helping people overcoming addiction and trauma.

I had to steel myself against this psychic devastation - to see your father on the street. It's hard enough to pick up somebody you don't know from the streets, and then to actually have other people pick your father up - it was psychically devastating.

The night I flew out from Rwanda, I landed in Nairobi, and I was on my way back home, and my left side started to paralyze and remained paralyzed with pain, and the stress and so on began to appear physically.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people.

Neurobiological research has shown that in people with chronic PTSD, both stress hormone secretion and areas of the brain connected to memory function, such as the hippocampus, appear to be affected, although exactly how and why remains controversial.

They came and bound me up and I had awful stretch marks. I hated my breasts after that.

When I was making 'Strong Island,' it was very clear to me that my brother's death was a point on a line that stretched back into the 1940s and beyond in my family - and in the nation.

When I was 8 years old, I was struck by a car and broke a few ribs.

For me, school was a nightmare. I struggled.

I lost my spleen, I lost the hearing in my left ear, so I had a lot of internal organ damage.

Many people, for many reasons, feel rootless - but orphans and abandoned or abused children have particular cause.

Well, I guess the sexual abuse by Mel Phillips in a sense, he had a fetish for feet. He used to play with my feet and other kids' feet, and that was his thing.

I have an obsession with mortality. I saw a friend die when I was 18, and I can't get over it.

I have irrational fears, and they all go back to losing my father as a kid. I've never gotten over it.