Quotes About Trauma

el trauma que el niño sufre no es la agresión exterior, sino la huella psíquica que queda de la agresión; lo importante no es la naturaleza del impacto, sino la señal que deja, impresa sobre la superficie del yo".

A war produces corpses, but it does not bury them. At least, it doesn't bury them deep. I suspected that North's corpses were coming back to greet him, for we all have a string of spirits trailing at our back. They are like the anchoring tail of an enormous kite. If you handle them with respect, they only whisper a little bit sometimes, and the trail behind you is faded and vague. Handle them wrong--as North, perhaps, was finding out--and the spirits turn from mist to the dark smoke of napalm.

Don't ever go to war. Even if you win, the battle is never over inside you.

We grieve for our past traumas and present fears, for all of the feelings we never dared experience consciously.

Serial murderers are frequently found to have unusual or unnatural relationships with their mothers.

Nick Makoha's Kingdom of Gravity (Peepal Tree Press) is a bold and brilliant poetry debut that does not avert its gaze from trauma and atrocity (exploring along the way the brutal rule of Idi Amin and the civil war) and yet is light on its feet and fills you with hope. The Guardian

Inevitably, with memory comes pain.

The caseworkers told her she was too young to remember being there, but they were wrong. She remembered the floorboards, sticky with blood, the terrifying sound of the fridge, the unstoppable thirst, and the endless blackness that came and lasted so long as she sat with her mother who would not waken.

It was an epiphany, the kind only a horrible trauma can induce.

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.

Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped.

Abuse is not caused by bad relationship dynamics.

It was easier to talk about nothing than something. Because something was too terrible to discuss. Too dark and terrible to even think about.

I knew that my trauma, no matter what it was, was not unique. I knew that pain was the universal driving force of so many people—I knew that only in the details was it specific, and I just found it urgent to cut right to the chase and get right to the point.

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.

and one who has not lived through it could never believe what happened.

Trauma isn't just something that happens to you. It happens in you

The history you don't want to talk about. The details you wish you could forget. The pain that never goes away, no matter how much time passes. I

By early 1979, the border area is a dead-eyed, stinking hell. He signs on as an aid worker with the Red Cross and they give him a stipend and a room. In January, the Vietnamese Communists crossed the Cambodian border, swept the Khmer Rouge aside, and took Phnom Penh in less than two weeks. The refugees wash up in their black clothes, so debilitated and disturbed that Hiroji thinks he is walking through an exhumed cemetery, they are more soil and sickness than human beings.

We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory.

If we remove the dulling effects of the nineteen centuries that had passed, and make ourselves contemporaries with Christ and his little band of apostles, we might restore the difficulty, the trauma, the great paradox of Christ's appearance which requires us to fit together both a divine and a human nature, the creator of the universe and the babe born in a manger.

Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.

We talk about unplugging, but we're enchanted—by the endless social media circus of love and hatred, the vapid, alarming, sensational, and unforgivable. We're snagged by every new notification. And while we've always had our individual struggles and heartbreaks to deal with, now we have the tragedies of the entire world delivered to us hourly on our mobile devices. This is all very hard on the soul. Traumatizing, in fact.