Quotes About Trauma

The prospect of going home again scared them. They couldn't imagine how they could ever settle to it. How they could just walk around the streets and pretend to be normal, look women in the eye again after what they had done and seen, ride on trams, sit at a table with a white cloth, and control their hands and just slowly eat. It was the little things that scared them. The big things you could hide in. It was little ones that gave a man away.

I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It's remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I'd been slammed into a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist-show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election.

One of the things that happens when you're going through traumatic life situations is your work becomes one of the only places where you can escape and take control. I think it's in that sense that "tortured" souls sometimes produce great work.

David W. Blight

I stopped keeping an eye out for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve because, when I was five, my mother told me that Santa was a wicked pervert who would cut off my peepee with a pair of scissors...if I didn't stop chattering about him, he would be certain to put me on his list and look me up. Christmas was never the same after that, but at least I still have my peepee.

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

It was like tag, but a girl was never "It," only boys were "It," girls simply ran and ran until we found ourselves cornered in some quiet spot, away from the eyes of dinner ladies and playground monitors, at which point our knickers were pulled aside and a little hand shot into our vaginas, we were roughly, frantically tickled, and then the boy ran away, and the whole thing started up again from the top.

Kossula was no longer on the porch with me. He was squatting about that fire in Dahomey. His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He had forgotten that I was there. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke. His agony was so acute that he became inarticulate. He never noticed my preparation to leave him. So I slipped away as quietly as possible and left him with his smoke pictures.

the first leg of their journey from humanity to cattle; with sorting and feeding and starvation and suffocation and pestilence and death; with slave ship stenches and mutinies of crew and cargo; with the jettying of cargoes before the guns of British cruisers; with auction blocks and sales and profits and losses

I was an abused kid.

I grew up in a terrible home of abuse and I didn't realize I was in a home of abuse.

Broadchurch' has always been about the impact of crime, on all those affected.

It's just a matter of sometimes the CTE in your brain affects what happens in your life... and sometimes... it does not.

Witnessing a mother's slow physical decline can be the equivalent of of experiencing long-term trauma. The daughter's feelings of helplessness, anger, and fear persist. And persist. And persist. She may alternate between wanting to protect her mother and resenting her, an advance-and-retreat dance of identification and rejection than can span years.

some wounds aren't easy to see.

On more than one occasion, Williams had to open the skull the old-fashioned way and surgically remove two or three inches of broken-off steel from behind the eye sockets, cleaning up after Freeman had made a mess.

All the problems that came up... they all arose because of the foreign bodies within us ? things that happened in our childhood, some big, some small, but all significant; things that happened ten years ago, but still control our lives today; things from our yesterdays that will decide what we drink, dream, and doubt, till the day we die. But you can't see those things, because they're not on the outside.

One thing was for sure: time didn't heal all wounds. Some were still every bit as fresh as the day they were inflicted.

The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those-maybe everyone-who trips on acid, never really came back. he recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something-innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed

I don't want my sons to be traumatized by what happened to their father or grandfathers or great-grandfathers, but everyone should know about the lives of those who came before them so that they can figure out why their fingers are bent or why sometimes they feel bone-crushingly sad for no reason that anyone else can see.

But ignoring the tough stuff doesn't make it go away. It just allows it to fester. Maybe you need to start dealing with the scary stuff, and maybe you need the help of a professional counselor to do that. Maybe you have pain from your childhood that you've buried or locked away, something you need to deal with. Please do. Don't let that stuff control you any longer.

I had never had a childhood that was anything but a miserable effort at trying to be an adult," Picasso said.

There are so many crises in foster care—the original abuse, the shock and alarm when a child is removed, the courtroom fights, kids rebelling, bio parents panicking, foster parents molesting, relapses, rehabs, reabuse—that basic, low-level functioning begins to seem exemplary. These are the mediocre flatlands of child welfare, where if it's not a crisis it's not a problem.