Quotes About Trauma

Since physical escape is impossible, the child escapes mentally. She floats out of her body, imagining that somebody else is being raped or beaten, and turns off her emotions, saying, "This isn't happening to me.

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one's own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding their identity; of inner battles for survival; or other images of anger, conflict, and violence. P13

Many people with Dissociative Disorders are very creative and used their creative capacities to help them cope with childhood trauma.p55

People with BPD are like people with third degree burns over 90% of their bodies. Lacking emotional skin, they feel agony at the slightest touch or movement.

saw that my clients very probably had experienced an invalidating environment for much of their lives, and probably a traumatic invalidating environment.

The psychological trauma created by the removal, combined with the neglect or abuse that preceded it, leaves the child forever changed and forever different from other children.

it is my trauma patients who seem the oldest souls in the world, though some of them are quite young people. They are proud human spirits who seem ancient and ageless at the same time. Over the years, I have seen brighter passions in their eyes than in the eyes of any priest or guru. I have heard more wisdom from their mouths than I have read in any book.

I believe that most of us cannot know what we would do, trapped in a situation that required such a seemingly no-win decision. But I do know that anyone wanting to recover from psychological trauma must face just this kind of dilemma, made yet more harrowing because her circumstance is not anything so rescuable as being locked in a house, but rather involves a solitary, unlockable confinement inside the limits of her own mind.

The person who suffers from a severe trauma disorder must decide between surviving in a barely sublethal misery of numbness and frustration, and taking a chance that may well bring her a better life, but that feels like stupidly issuing an open invitation to the unspeakable horror that waits to consume her alive. And in the manner of the true hero, she must choose to take the risk. For

these severely traumatized patients, people who have been through living nightmares, people who might blamelessly choose death, often emerge from successful treatment by constructing lives for themselves that are freer than most ordinary lives from what Sigmund Freud, a century ago, labeled as "everyday misery." They become true keepers of the faith and are the most passionately alive people I know. Or

after twenty-five years of treating trauma survivors, I have learned that getting hit is actually one of the more bearable ways a person can be assaulted.

She didn't want a corporation's excuse for a trauma support specialist poking around in her emotions.

There were other ways of battering women too, ways that did not involve physical violence, and Kate sometimes thought that the mental battering was worse.

When Riley Tatum vanished twelve years ago, no one sounded an alarm. No one called the cops, gathered a search party, or posted flyers. She simply disappeared from the streets into an abyss. Swallowed whole. She should have died. Been long forgotten. But for reasons she didn't understand, the darkness spat her out.

For a year afterward the children ran to hide themselves whenever a car backfired or a plane was flying overhead, screaming, "The FBIs are coming.

What had her life been like in Venda? Or maybe, more precisely, what had they done to her? She was not the result of happy, content parents. It was like she'd been held prisoner in a cellar her whole life. She flinched at sun and an open sky. As soon as we hit the Heethe plateau, she kept her eyes straight ahead on some distant point, her focus like steel, her shoulders rigid, like she carried a heavy pack on her back.

You could have shot me with an arrow. You could have done a hundred things, but instead you dangled Zane in front of me, knowing what he had done. In an instant, you brought back the horror of a night to a small child. That's what I became.

Back when we were kids, the experts thought kids were protected if they couldn't access their most damaging memories. But now they know suppressed memories can cause all kinds of problems as an adult- anxiety, depression, PTSD, amnesia...

We both know that the people who do bad things often had something bad done to them. It's a vicious cycle.

Not surprisingly, the toddlers who made the transition to their adoptive homes with the least amount of trauma also formed the strongest and quickest attachments to their adoptive parents. They also displayed the fewest long-term problems.

The loss of a parent is a young child's greatest fear. To be abandoned, whether through termination of parental rights, voluntary relinquishment, death, or any other means, is a child's worst nightmare come true.

In violence we forget who we are.

You know, you're the sort of woman who ought to be raped. It might do you good

I developed a deep, abiding fear of jeans, which I still have. I hold my breath and shut my eyes when I pull on a pair in the dressing room, afraid they will now, as then, get stuck at my hips and there I will stand, absurd, staring at the excess of hips that should, if I were a good person, be "slim".