Quotes About Trauma

Even though the injury has faded, I still see it the way it was right after the accident: raw and red, a jagged lightning bold splitting the symmetry of my face. In this, I suppose I'm like a girl with an eating disorder, who weighs ninety-eight pounds but sees a fat person staring back at her from the mirror. It isn't even a scar to me, really. It's a map of where my life went wrong.

So you see, this is why I never told my story. If you lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it. And if you didn't, you will never understand.

The most damaging aspect of abuse is the trauma to our hearts and souls from being betrayed by the people that we love and trust.

Doesn't everyone know that being left out hurts? It doesn't hurt to me...it kills. I've been bullied for 5 years. Isn't that enough?

Woke up from a nightmare about being pregnant and having a miscarriage. Most horrifying dream I've had yet...

Ninety percent of our life is created for Emotional Belief Systems, not logical reasoning. This explains why past trauma, pain and fear creates powerful less than belief systems that have wedged like crossbows.

People out there must be told about the self-loathing that follows rape and how it's the greatest breakage in divine law to mutilate themselves, as I have done.

No, no, now you listen—you—this whole time. The bruises—it was Lehrer. Not Gordon. Lehrer. He—I was fourteen, Noam! I was . . . but he . . . and I couldn't tell anyone because, god, didn't even need his power!" Dara laughed, a mad sound, and he wasn't touching Noam anymore, had both hands pressed up against his own skull. "No one believed me.

All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

This is a book on war, memory, and identity. It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.

is the last word (I hope) on the horrors of the Vietnamese re-education camps that our allies were sentenced to when we left them swinging in the wind.

It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. Any

Nations, without exception, disposed of body parts all the time. How could we bear ourselves otherwise if not for the mass graves of our forgetting?

We cannot know whether our pain is like anybody else's pain until we talk about it. Once we do that, we speak and think in ways cultural and individual. In this country, for example, someone fleeing for his life will think he should call for the police. This is a reasonable way to cope with the threat of pain. But in my country, no one calls for the police, since it is often the police who inflict the pain.

Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.

You can't blame her,' said Amit. 'After a life so full of tragedy anyone would become hard.' 'What tragedy?' asked Mrs. Chatterji. 'Well, when she was four,' said Amit, 'her mother slapped her--it was quite traumatic--and then things went on in that vein. When she was twelve she came in second in an exam...It hardens you.

Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma -- the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless" -- was not part of literature. Not a single woman who has been through the process of rape has taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm.

We don't kill women who've been raped, but we do expect them to have the decency to show that they are damaged goods, that they have been polluted. They may become hookers, or ugly, whatever, as long as they spontaneously exit the marriage market.

Es la posibilidad de la muerte, la proximidad de la muerte, la sumisión al odio deshumanizado de los otros, que hace que esa noche sea imborrable. Para mí, la violación posee ante todo esa particularidad:

By 1989, the total number of Vietnam veterans who had died in violent accidents or by suicide after the war exceeded the total number of American soldiers who died during the war.

Once, back home, I decided to count how many days out of my twenty months in Afghanistan I'd been on combat missions. 217 days. And I'm still paying the price for every one of those days.

All of your scars are on the inside, are they not?" he asked. I nodded. "Not so severe as yours, I feel." "Why? Because they may not have involved as much bodily pain?

In common with many who have a brain injury, I initially lost my confidence and felt very vulnerable, as if a protective layer of skin had been stripped away.

One Child's courage to survive.