Quotes About Trauma

I think generational trauma also plays a big part in the reactions to Israeli politics.

The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life's traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive.

There is a hidden blessing in the most traumatic things we go through in our lives. My brain always goes to, 'Where is the hidden blessing? What is my gift?'

Ishmael Beah's memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.

my ianfu sisters who had died in the comfort station.

bullet wound n. ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment

Where torture has been long applied we find that it is developed to grades of incredible horror.

What ever happened to mental hygiene?" he asked rhetorically. "It doesn't exist—and never did. When you went through high school, you were never taught how to deal with stress, how to deal with trauma, how to deal with tension and anxiety—with the whole list of mood impairments. There's no preventive maintenance. We know how to prevent cavities. But we don't teach children how to be resilient, how to cope with stress on a daily basis.

Everything that's been done to us we carry forever.

it wasn't so much the war as what we took into the war. Whatever cracks were already there the war forced apart, and what we might otherwise have kept inside came spilling out.

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. Wake

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.

My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.

not a bullet hole but a "ballistically induced aperture in the subcutaneous environment.

If there isn't, the skull can literally burst, fracturing the cranium into numerous pieces, each about the size of a quarter.

all humans have an innate capacity to heal from traumatic experiences. We as a species are genetically encoded with the capacity to heal ourselves. If we did not possess this ability, our species would have become extinct shortly after we were born. Not only can we heal from traumatic experiences, but trauma itself has been part of the natural evolutionary process of our species, and all traumatized individuals have access to this natural healing method that is genetically encoded within them.

Culturally we are taught to disregard our gut instinct. But it is a crucial element of our ability to face and cope with traumatic situations.

Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother?

OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] also states that a "school should also ensure that hearings are conducted in a manner that does not inflict additional trauma on the complainant", which implies that the school should not start the proceedings with a presumption of innocence, or even a stance of neutrality. Rather, university officials should assume that any complaint is valid and the accused is guilty as charged.

This should be of no surprise when we realize that a common denominator of all traumas is an alienation and disconnection from the body and a reduced capacity to be present in the here and now.

Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.

We are born in debt, owing the world a death. This is the shadow that darkens every cradle. Trauma is what happens when you catch a surprise glimpse of that darkness, the coming annihilation not only of the body and the mind but also, seemingly, of the world.

Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again.

The Holocaust never quite leaves Israeli Jews alone. Arabs use it against them and they use it against Arabs. Jews use it against other Jews. Even the president of the United States, it seems, can use it against the prime minister of Israel.