Quotes About Trauma

My Miracle, living through a Traumatic brain Injury

As awful as crime can be, it's what happens afterward - the struggling to get out of bed, to put one foot in front of the other - that alters people.

But when I went to Hiroshima and began to study or just listen to people's descriptions of their work, it was quite clear they were talking about death all the time, about people dying all around them, about their own fear of death.

When I was labeled stupid, that scarred me forever.

What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.

I had panic attacks as a little girl, and they were not subtle.

I started writing to deal with my childhood abuse and to help me get over it. I began putting my thoughts on paper because I saw a show on Oprah where she said it was "cathartic" to write things down. Being from a substandard public school system, I didn't even know what "cathartic" meant. I had to look it up. So I started writing, but I didn't

I remember one really horrible fight when he was tearing into my mother—and then he came after me with a fury I had never seen before. I was beaten bloody that night.

One night I told my mother something that I had kept a secret. I had seen Emmitt touching one of my sister's young girlfriends inappropriately. When I told my mother, the look of panic and shock in her eyes made me feel like I might have shattered her soul. My own heart split open.

The children walking over the bricks of their destroyed homes, their mother putting up a tent, their father in jail... in tears and confusion looking at the tanks coming down the street, the men holding metre-long machine guns... they stare... need I say more ...just imagine how it would feel to be a Palestinian....

Trauma comes back as a reaction, not a memory.

When there is abuse by itself it's scary enough. When there is abuse within a religious setting it is so terrifying to people... nobody can bear it when it's linked to religion, but when it's linked to religion that is not mainstream it seems to frighten people more. As if yes, abuse exists, Satanism exists, but you can't have Satanist abuse.

A number of neurotic ancestors, combined with with persistent, unresolved terrors of childhood, had deprived me of the comfortable gift of natural courage.

The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can't. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

Life is a merciless bully for children born into circumstances of grinding poverty, to unhappy families broken apart by crime, drugs, alcohol. It brutalises the affections, cramps the intellect, destroys aspiration.

I compare it to being in a car accident. There's so much adrenaline rushing through you that you remember being in the accident but you don't remember any of the details.

I've been in a car three or four times when it filled with water and it's not a comfortable feeling.

I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.

he was literally holding his face together.

Shock, and loss of blood.

He has integrated his early fears and guilts into one interwoven grid, the ship said to itself. There is no way I can serve up a pleasant memory to him because he instantly contaminates it.

At one point they'd repeated everything enough, and I wanted to tell them to stop showing the planes hitting the tower. We didn't need to see it again. And yet I didn't turn it off. Because I was hanging on every minute, wanting to be there when whatever was going to happen next actually happened.

That dehumanizing loss of safety. It is something all of us feared and many of us knew firsthand.

But Harry is shaking. He can't help it—he's shaking. He can't believe what happened, and knows he shouldn't be embarrassed, but he is. He feels reduced, ridiculed. By shitheads.