Quotes About Trauma

Quite a few of the dogs that come back from Afghanistan or Iraq or police dogs that are involved in violent confrontations where there's gunfire can in fact exhibit the symptoms and suffer from PTSD.

My dad was a violent alcoholic. Really aggressive.

People on a daily basis walk up to me, panic, and tell me something extremely graphic and violent about their life.

I was the victim of a violent attack in March 2008. I had sulphuric acid thrown in my face and was severely injured leaving me with loss of site in my eye and full thickness burns on my neck, chest, face and hands.

I managed to escape a violent carjacking. It was a very traumatizing point in my life and it made me realized that many women in South Africa are affected by crimes like this.

Psychologically, it's difficult to ever shrug off the effects of extreme hardship or poverty, family bereavement, chronic ill health or the memory of violent conflict.

Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell.

One of the things that I share with Bryan Becket is this hole in my childhood memory. There's about five years of my life that's virtually gone. I've thought about it a lot, and I've come to the conclusion that it might be for my own protection that those memories are gone, and maybe I don't want to dredge up those things.

The Holocaust remains unique in contemporary Jewish consciousness for its capacity to engender the most visceral grief and abject pain.

There's a term for this irrational fear of joy: cherophobia (chero is the Greek word for "rejoice"). People with cherophobia are like Teflon pans in terms of pleasure—it doesn't stick (though pain cakes on them as if to an ungreased surface). It's common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner.

It's common for people with traumatic histories to expect disaster just around the corner. Instead of leaning into the goodness that comes their way, they become hypervigilant, always waiting for something to go wrong.

Acts of violence always come from people who were violated themselves.

we are all victims of victims.

There are generally three parties to child abuse: the abused, the abuser and the bystander.

Memories can kill, Yvette. The past can reach right up and grab you and drag you to a place you shouldn't be. Like a burning building.

It was as though I wasn't human.' 'That's the necessary first step,' said Myrna. 'They dehumanise their victim. You've put it well.

They'd evaded the monster. Instead, it had devoured a frightened child.

the line from Ruth's poem. Who hurt you once, so far beyond repair?

With his words, he crushed these people. Killed these people. They were never, ever the same. They now lived in a netherworld where the unthinkable happened. Where the boundaries would now forever be proscribed by "before" and "after.

when put in a room with both parents, would almost always embrace the abuser.

like buzz bombs in the Blitz.

On previous trips the pirates have stolen valuables, killed people, raped and abducted girls...the women work frantically to ugly themselves up by smearing black charcoal paste on their faces and bodies. With ashen faces, some of the younger, prettier girls reach into the bags we have vomited into and scoop out handfuls of it to smear on their hair and clothes.

This is what the war has done to me. Now I want to destroy because of it. There is such hate and rage inside me now. The Angkar has taught me to hate so deeply that I now know I have the power to destroy and kill.

The first victims are always the children.