Quotes About Trauma

We need rituals for all traumas and loss, whether it is betrayal or infidelity or violence or murder. Ritual helps us heal, and ritual helped me heal and become ready to consider the person who murdered Angela, his story, his pain.

Just as this scale predicted the future health and happiness of the children in this study, so does knowing and telling our own stories of harm predict our future health and happiness in recovering from that trauma. When we know our stories and make sense of what has happened, we get connected to the larger story of our lives and its meaning. We become more resilient, we are able to handle stress, and we heal.

Damaged children are all of the same tribe: I can look at any adult and recognize one instantly— we're everywhere. Lost childhood lingers like tribal scars— in an off-kilter smile or a look in the eye— there's always some sign.

It's what happens when you live through things you shouldn't have been able to live through and can't reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.

Shell shock, they said in the First World War. Battle fatigue, in the Second. It's what happens when you live through things you shouldn't have been able to live through and can't reconcile that knowledge with the fact that you did.

The body forms internal scars as well as surface scars when a wound heals—and so does the mind.

I have lived through a fucking world war," I said, my voice low and venomous. "I have lost a child. I have lost two husbands. I have starved with an army, been beaten and wounded, been patronized, betrayed, imprisoned, and attacked. And I have fucking survived!" My voice was rising, but I was helpless to stop it. "And now should I be shattered because some wretched, pathetic excuses for men stuck their nasty little appendages between my legs and wiggled them?!

What Jack Randall had done to him had sunk into his soul as surely as the flails of the lash had sunk in his back, and had left scars every bit as permanent. I

must have stayed that way for some time; I slept sometimes, dreaming of the last few days of the Jacobite Rising—I saw again the dead man in the wood, asleep beneath a coverlet of bright blue fungus, and Dougal MacKenzie dying on the floor of an attic in Culloden House; the ragged men of the Highland army, asleep in the muddy ditches; their last sleep before the slaughter. I would wake screaming or moaning

of a musket ball embedded in his

Coming back, he saw the dark spots on the back of Jamie's shirt, blotches where fresh blood had seeped through the bandages. The sight filled him with fury, as well as fear. He'd seen such things; the wean had been flogged. Badly, and recently. Who? How?

I was standing in the street with people walking past me and I could feel my face evaporating. I thought I was on fire as the acid ate at my skin.

I got attacked when I was six years old by a Mastiff.

I did some research into domestic violence, and there were some stories that will stay me with forever.

I saw domestic violence my whole life.

All domestic violence stories break my heart.

When I was five, I compound-fractured my arm, pulverising my elbow.

Reconciliations are for after the violence has ended.

Childhood was abusive and horrible, I endured some stuff I don't even want to talk about. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

As long as there is rape... there is not going to be any peace or justice or equality or freedom. You are not going to become what you want to become or who you want to become. You are not going to live in the world you want to live in.

But in the secret history of anger--one man's silence / lives in the bodies of others.

No" — I could never be another person's father, fate, god, "No" — it should never happen to another child, what happened to me; my childhood. (Auschwitz).

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

Castles Burning: A Child's Life in War, Magda Denes