Quotes About Trauma

It had not occurred to me that it would get this bad, that indignity would dance upon bloodshed.

I wished there had been obvious signs of destruction on all of us kids: bruises or burn marks, something that indicated how violent our house was, but words and neglect don't leave visible marks. And that confuses even the person who knows better. (169)

just because one suffers from depression, from childhood memories, or from whatever does not necessarily mean that one is not in the grip of a power complex!

Imagine: they celebrated the Declaration of Independence! But for decades, groups like Tillman's "raped, murdered, lynched, and robbed as a means of intimidating, and instilling pervasive fear in, those whom they despised.… Between 1882 and 1968, there were at least 3,446 reported lynching of blacks in the South.

You cannot rescue someone from the scars of an abusive upbringing by replaying the same narrative on a cosmic scale and mouthing the word "love" as you do so.

His emotional state is irrelevant." Raphael's face was brutal in its repudiation. "It's because of him that you didn't have what you needed to heal as a child.

He was having a hard time with Aodhan so far out of reach, the two yet struggling to come to a balance in their relationship - Illium had become used to being the stronger one in the partnership, the one who looked after a badly traumatized Aodhan. But Aodhan was coming out of his shell, and the man he'd become wasn't the boy Illium remembered.

One thing I know from living with Jack is that war, any war, stains a man deep, and nothing can get the stain out. They can wear clothes like a rancher or a banker, but the stains are under there, never far from the surface of their skin.

Her rapist went unpunished, and yet she was sterilized.70

Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina is a coming-of-age novel about Ruth Ann (Bone) Boatwright and a difficult childhood made even harder by her violent and predatory stepfather.

documentary The Invisible War (which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and

This was excellent news. It had only been a few weeks since her attack so I hoped there would still be scars.

They'd separated the boys from the girls on the fifth day; it seemed obvious, when they worked out the girls were doing it. Already there are parents telling their boys not to go out alone, not to stray too far. "Once you've seen it happen," says a gray-faced woman on TV. "I saw a girl in the park doing that to a boy for no reason, he was bleeding from the eyes. The eyes. Once you've seen that happen, no mom would let her boys out of her sight.

But Wishbone didn't know the whole story. He hadn't seen the ravaged bodies, the burning flesh. One minute friends laughed, full of life; next minute, destroyed. Those things never escaped one's mind. Once you witnessed that, you saw evil, and it didn't live in just Americans or Japanese. It lived close by, in friends, in neighbors, and, most frighteningly, inside yourself.

There is now converging evidence supporting the idea that offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception.' Rachel Yehuda

How can I see anything but this: how trauma lives in the sea of my body, awash in the waters of forgetting.

The greater a child's terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

Apathy in the face of continual violence is something someone who has never lived through a war cannot understand.

They say that love is blind, but it's trauma that's blind. Love sees what is.

Peaceful?' they ask, at a loss for words. For those lucky enough never to have experienced war, the word "peaceful" has little meaning.

There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.

Like many abuse victims, he carried the shame of the abuser, taking their malfeasance as an indication of personal worthlessness.

Rape was about violence, hate and dominance. Sex had little to do with it.

Rescuing girls from brothels is the easy part, however. The challenge is keeping them from returning. The stigma that girls feel in their communities after being freed, coupled with drug dependencies or threats from pimps, often lead to return to the re-light district.