Quotes About Trauma

Leon Hubbard died ten minutes into lunch break on the first Monday in May, on the construction site of the new one-storey trauma wing at Holy Redeemer Hospital in South Philadelphia. One way or the other, he was going to lose the job.

In Tacoma, Washington, I speared myself on my guitar's whammy bar – it went right through my hand. I went into shock,

As unsupported children, we have to dissociate because we are not able to effectively grieve.

If however, a person is also afflicted by ongoing family abuse or profound emotional abandonment, the trauma will manifest as a particularly severe emotional flashback because he already has Cptsd. This is particularly true when his parent is also a bully.

The worst thing that can happen to a child is to be unwelcomed in his family of origin - to never feel included. Moreover, many survivors have little or no experience of any social arena that feels safe and welcoming.

Those who are repetitively traumatized in childhood often learn to survive by over-using one or two of the 4F Reponses. Fixation in any one 4F response not only limits our ability to access all the others, but also severely impairs our ability to relax into an undefended state. Additionally, it strands us in a narrow, impoverished experience of life.

I was appalled at how much pressure my clients were getting to just forgive and forget. Consequently, many of them were diving right back into denial, and minimizing all the trauma that they had endured. Their recovery processes then, screeched to a halt as their inner critics denigrated them for being so unforgiving.

Chronic emotional abandonment devastates a child. It naturally makes her feel and appear deadened and depressed. Functional parents respond to a child's depression with concern and comfort. Abandoning parents respond to the child with anger, disgust and/or further abandonment, which in turn exacerbate the fear, shame and despair that become the abandonment mélange.

Natural anger eventually arises when we really get how little and defenseless we were when our parents bullied us into hating ourselves.

Freeze types sometimes have or appear to have Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD]. They often master the art of changing the internal channel whenever inner experience becomes uncomfortable. When they are especially traumatized or triggered, they may exhibit a schizoid-like detachment from ordinary reality.

grieving the losses of childhood, and understanding how abusive and negligent parenting is at the root of our problems.

Toxic shame can also be created by constant parental neglect and rejection.

A great loss brings up an emotional storm that opens up a hidden reservoir of childhood pain

We need to understand exactly how appalling parenting created the now self-perpetuating trauma that we live in. We can learn to do this in a way that takes the mountain of unfair self-blame off ourselves. We can redirect this blame to our parents' dreadful child-rearing practices. And we can also do this in a way that motivates us to reject their influence so that we can freely orchestrate our journey of recovering.

Survivors who want to defend their healthy ambivalence can respond to make-up-your-mind assaults by replying that the matter in question is emotional and clearly not a matter of reason or choice. I remember how my own natural

Extensive childhood abuse installs a powerful people-are-dangerous program.

Mindfulness is a perspective of benign curiosity about all of your inner experience. Recovery is enhanced immeasurably by developing this helpful process of introspection. As it becomes more developed, mindfulness can be used to recognize and dis-identify from beliefs and viewpoints that you acquired from your traumatizing family.

repression of one end of the emotional continuum often leads to a repression of the whole continuum, and the person becomes emotionally deadened.

For many survivors, authority figures are the ultimate triggers. I have known several survivors, who have never gotten so much as a parking ticket, who cringe in anxiety whenever they come across a policeman or a police car.

John Briere, quip that if Cptsd were ever given its due, the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] used by all mental health professionals would shrink from its dictionary like size to the size of a thin pamphlet.

Moreover, most of the diagnoses mentioned above are typically treated as innate characterological defects rather than as learned maladaptations to stress – adaptations that survivors were forced to learn as traumatized children. And, most importantly, because these adaptations were learned, they can often be extinguished

Traumatized children often over-gravitate to one of these response patterns to survive, and as time passes these four modes become elaborated into entrenched defensive structures that are similar to narcissistic [fight], obsessive/compulsive [flight], dissociative [freeze] or codependent [fawn] defenses.

When contempt replaces the milk of human kindness at an early age, the child feels humiliated and overwhelmed. Too helpless to protest or even understand the unfairness of being abused, the child eventually becomes convinced that she is defective and fatally flawed. Frequently she comes to believe that she deserves her parents' persecution.

As I am writing this, my son's friend synchronistically tells him: "This Lego creature I made spreads brain attack and eats away at the person." I marvel at this synchronicity and think: "What a fitting image for the trauma-inducing parent".