Quotes About Trauma

The survivor may, seemingly without reason, visualize someone being abusive.

Some survivors have confidence but not self-esteem.

Most traumatizing parents are especially contemptuous towards the child's expression of emotional pain.

Drasticizing becomes obsessive to help the child foresee and avoid punishment and worsening abandonment. At the same time, it continuously fills her psyche with stories and images of catastrophe.

Emotional abuse is also almost always also accompanied by emotional abandonment, which can most simply be described as a relentless lack of parental warmth and love.

Many traumatologists see attachment disorder as one of the key symptoms of Complex PTSD.

When abuse or neglect is severe enough, any one category of it can cause the child to develop Cptsd. This is true even in the case of emotional neglect if both parents collude in it, as we will see in chapter 5. When abuse and neglect is multidimensional, the severity of the Cptsd worsens accordingly.

While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it.

freeze response is triggered when a person, realizing resistance is futile, gives up, numbs out into dissociation and/ or collapses as if accepting the inevitability of being hurt.

I once heard renowned traumatologist, 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.

Similarly, effective recovery is unwinding the natural potential you were born with out of your unconscious. This is your innate potential which may be, as yet, unrealized because of your childhood trauma.

When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal.

Here we will also see how verbal and emotional abuse alone can cause Cptsd, and how profound emotional abandonment is typically at the core of most Cptsd.

Many abandoned children enter adulthood feeling that the world is a dangerous place where they are ill-equipped to defend themselves

Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

Although humans rarely die from trauma, if we do not resolve it, our lives can be severely diminished by its effects. Some people have even described this situation as a "living death.

The symptoms of trauma can be stable, that is, ever-present. They can also be unstable, meaning that they can come and go and be triggered by stress. Or they can remain hidden for decades and suddenly surface. Usually, symptoms do not occur individually, but come in groups. They often grow increasingly complex over time, becoming less and less connected with the original trauma experience.

Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don't even recognize its presence. It affects everyone. Each of us has had a traumatic experience at some point in our lives, regardless of whether it left us with an obvious case of post-traumatic stress. Because trauma symptoms can remain hidden for years after a triggering event, some of us who have been traumatized are not yet symptomatic.

We may deny that an event occurred, or we may act as though it was unimportant. For instance, when someone we love dies, or when we are injured or violated, we may act as though nothing has happened, because the emotions that come with truly acknowledging the situation are too painful. In addition, dissociation may be experienced as part of the body being disconnected or almost absent. Frequently, chronic pain represents a part of the body that has been dissociated.

Trauma can be prevented more easily than it can be healed.

Physicians and mental health workers today don't speak of retrieving souls, but they are faced with a similar task—restoring wholeness to an organism that has been fragmented by trauma. Shamanistic concepts and procedures treat trauma by uniting lost soul and body in the presence of community. This approach is alien to the technological mind. However, these procedures do seem to succeed where conventional Western approaches fail.

In order to stay healthy, our nervous systems and psyches need to face challenges and to succeed in meeting those challenges. When this need is not met, or when we are challenged and cannot triumph, we end up lacking vitality and are unable to fully engage in life. Those of us who have been defeated by war, abuse, accidents, and other traumatic events suffer far more severe consequences.

Trauma happens when any experience stuns us like a bolt out of the blue; it overwhelms us, leaving us altered and disconnected