Quotes About Trauma

My father used to beat me with his belt...while it was still on him.

I was sexually abused by my step father for years and years, and that caused scars you can't see. And we know many people have the kind of scars you can't see.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

My father beat me with a curtain rod when I was nine, (That was) the inspiration for Creep

Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

Now I know it's because somewhere in my mind, I still harboured hatred and fear for that man, so it was just easier to erect the brick wall and never look back.

Second, because of their ignorance, some refused to believe a child who tried to tell them about the abuse. Indeed, in some circumstances, the abused child was beaten by a parent for having the nerve to suggest their beloved clergy would do something so heinous, so abuse piled on top of abuse.

Since the accident, Jonathan had noticed, she held on to things, a doorframe, a chair, as it either she or the world needed steadying.

She gave her name as "Olivino," recalled her father's surname as "Oatman" and said she'd had six siblings, mentioning Lucy and Lorenzo by name. She identified her abductors as Apaches. Asked if they had treated her well, she said, "No. They whipped me." In response to the same question about the Mohaves, she "seemed pleased," noted Burke, and answered, "Very well.

Individuals in this predicament may find it next to impossible to relax their wakeful hypervigilance in relation to their surroundings even when no longer confronted by any immediate challenge or danger; a prolonged or repeated exposure to trauma can put individuals on the defensive for the simple reason that it causes them to anticipate, and brace themselves against, more trauma.

I'm not depressed. I'm fucked up. I have been since I can remember. There's not a version of my life that isn't fucked up.

It's horrifying for kids to be able to see and feel more than the people who are caring for them," his social worker explains. "They can't accept the lies. It makes them feel crazy because they literally have to invalidate their own perceptions.

Among self-injurers, at the root of dissociation and behind all of the symptoms of traumatic stress, from numbness to loss of control, is a range of painful childhood experiences, including emotional deprivation, physical neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and childhood loss. Because the combination of pain, shame, and grief from these early experiences often remains unresolved, feelings of dread and emptiness can build up and quickly grow to unbearable proportions.

Children who are blamed for their own abuse also have great difficulty trusting their perceptions. "When adults say 'It didn't happen,' or 'You wanted it'—those kinds of comments really eat away at a kid's sense of reality," says psychologist David Frankel. "Cutting grounds you; the pain is real. In that light, self-mutilation can be an effort to avoid a state of disorganization where you don't know what reality is.

There were no fear of death in children's eyes because they had seen hanging, stoning to death and chopping heads in playgrounds and parks.

I don't want to be the person who gasps in fear whenever she hears the sound of a doorbell or a phone. I just want to lose myself in these hills, in the river winding west to the city of bridges.

I haven't sought self-forgiveness because I feel I was preyed upon and not responsible for the many bad things that happened to me.

Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.

I always thought the more fucked-up childhood you have, the better artist you get, because you have more material to work with. I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative.

she eloquently explains how forgiveness could only surface after a whole sequence of emotional responses to trauma that began with the simple act of having compassion for her own pain.

Why doesn't anyone ask me anything about the last two years?" I asked her. "The answer is very simple. We're afraid to ask because we're afraid of knowing... Maybe if we don't talk about it, and maybe if we pretend it never happened, it will be forgotten.