Quotes About Trauma

In an interview Butler has stated that the meaning of the amputation is clear enough: "I couldn't really let her come all the way back. I couldn't let her return to what she was, I couldn't let her come back whole and that, I think, really symbolizes her not coming back whole. Antebellum slavery didn't leave people quite whole.

I reappeared wet, muddy, and scared to death.

I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

Coming Home had been made before and Apocalypse Now and Deer Hunter, different kinds of movies.

No person should ever have to witness so much death,

But always there was that dark thought -- Vietnam

Indeed, one of the most frightening consequences of the Holocaust may well be that rather than serving as a warning to preserve humanity at all cost, it has provided a license to privilege physical survival over moral existence.

As a young man you don't notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.

There's no such thing as an uninjured soldier.

the death of someone close to them. The girls I see show the same signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as the soldiers coming back from Iraq and

Once a 'Romeo Pimp' has gained a victim's trust, he systematically breaks down her resistance, support systems, and self-esteem. Victims are coerced into submission through gang rape, confinement, beatings, torture, cutting, tattooing, burning, branding, being deprived of basic needs, and threats of murder."   —The State of Human Trafficking in California

So many people suffer from abuse, and suffer alone.

The implications are sobering: the non-West not only finds itself replicating the West's trauma on an infinitely larger scale. While helping inflict the profoundest damage yet on the environment – manifest today in rising sea levels, erratic rainfall, drought, declining harvests and devastating floods – the non-West also has no real prospect of catching up with the West.

It was easy to denounce that American vision of endless space and well-being and leisure as a deception; to accuse it of obscuring the inner cities and drugs and violence, and the ruthless suppression of remote and near enemies. But to people from tormented societies, America was the country whose nation-building traumas seemed to lie in the remote past, and where many individuals could afford to look beyond the struggles for food, shelter and security that still weighed upon people elsewhere.

Trauma often robs a person of the surrounding memories—which is inconvenient, but merciful

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions.

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.

I could bear the memory, but I could not bear the music that made the memory such a killing thing.

In bottom-up approaches [to processing trauma], the body's sensation and movement are the entry points and changes in sensorimotor experience are used to support self-regulation, memory processing, and success in daily life. Meaning and understanding emerge from new experiences rather than the other way around. Through bottom-up interventions, a shift in the somatic sense of self in turn affects the linguistic sense of self.

Stockholm Syndrome is what it is called when you begin to identify with your captors…. They get nicer every day that they don't kill you.

Verbal abuse by its very nature undermines and discounts its victim's perceptions.

As long as this child within is not allowed to become aware of what happened to him or her, a part of his or her emotional life will remain frozen, and sensitivity to the humiliations of childhood will therefore be dulled.

Abuse is rejection. It is painful and toxic.

deny the abuse, she may grow to fear his anger and his unpredictability. At the same time she may fear the loss of love and the security she believed she had in the relationship.