Quotes About Trauma

My dad was a tyrant. He used to physically beat the crap out of us.

My dad died when I was 14. It was very sudden, traumatic, and confusing. I always felt I could have gone down a bad road at that point, but I made a choice to be a winner.

We were led to a pediatric ophthalmologist. It's a hard date for me, April 14, 1998. The doctor came back from the examining room and told us she had tumors in both eyes.

When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.

intenté escribir lo que fue la «historia de mi vida» en los bosques, inmediatamente después de mi fuga del campo de concentración.

the descendants of today's raped and mutilated victims will arise to seek vengeance on the avengers.

evacuar en público era angustioso o imposible; un trauma para el que nuestra civilización no nos prepara, una herida profunda en la dignidad humana, un atentado obsceno y lleno de malos presagios, pero también la señal de una perversidad deliberada y gratuita.

It's been happening since I was in kindergarten. Not them all the time, but other kids, you know. Every day. It never stops, and it never goes away, thanks to the Internet--it just keeps happening every minute, every day. And I just want it to stop. I think about how to do it, you know. How to kill them. All kinds of elaborate things, like trapping them in pits and burying them alive, or covering them with concrete.

I'm fine," I automatically tell her, because that's what I always tell her. And myself. But it doesn't take a paid psychologist to figure out that I'm not okay. I'm having flashbacks. Cold sweats. Nightmares. And now this

While I was still Gina, but after The Event, I'd taken up running, and it had been grueling and exhausting until I built up my strength. Now, when I stop holding myself back, I run like I feel breath on my neck, as if I'm running for my life. It's not healthy or safe, and I'm well aware that driving myself that hard is a form of self-punishment, and also an expression of the fear I live with every day.

I warned myself against the danger of compassion in this case. How easy it would be to imagine the traumas of childhood that might have deformed her into the moral monster she had become, and then to convince myself that those traumas could be balanced - and their effects reversed - by sufficient acts of kindness.

Not all wounds are the bleeding kind

When you're trying to figure out who…you've got to keep in mind the roots of violence.

suffer lasting psychological trauma. Still, I don't think it's a good idea to subject her to an interrogation tonight." "Not an interrogation

face that looked partly melted.

Afghans love beautiful things, but we have seen so much ugliness, we sometimes forget how wonderful a thing like a flower is

Tanks were normal. Bombs were normal. Why couldn't eating be normal?

The first time I didn't say anything, because she shot me in the mouth.

Your husband will beat you with an extension cord and the bus will pull away leaving you standing there in tears, but you were my mother.

The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood.

What molds us is what maims us.

This was the photograph, I knew, that had already burned its way into my dreams and my shadows, into that part of my mind that I have no control over. Its image would reappear in all its wanton cruelty for the rest of my life, particularly when I was least prepared for it.

Another long pull of the sawteeth across the pink folds of his brain, and Teddy had to bite down against a scream and he heard Rachel's screams in there too with the fire and he saw her looking into his eyes and felt her breath on his lips and felt her face in his hands as his thumbs caressed her temples and that fucking saw went back and forth through his head— don'ttakethosefuckingpills

He feels that today he has developed a kinship with grief and trauma and nurses' asses.