Quotes About Trauma

Even traumas that we have pushed outside our consciousness affect us deeply. They affect our nervous systems, our bodies, our reactions to events, our choices, our feelings about ourselves and others, and many other aspects of our experience. Out of sight is not out of bodymind.

Another way to talk about this thin-skinned quality is to say that trauma tends to make you more reactive. Reactivity here means having a bigger reaction than the situation calls for, whether it is more fear, more insecurity, more anger, more mistrust, or more of any other emotion. We all get reactive at times, yet those who are caught in trauma-related disorders become reactive a lot of the time.

Your capacity to stay present will increase as you (1) practice grounding, (2) defuse traumatic triggers and learn to self-regulate, (3) learn to recognize dissociation right away and how to come out of it, (4) develop more sense of safety, reinforced by good boundaries, and (5) cultivate witness consciousness, the capacity to notice your thoughts and feelings without being caught inside them.

If you are plagued by trauma symptoms but have no memories, that itself becomes an issue to make peace with.

When we heal from trauma, what was shattered becomes whole again. We learn to claim aspects of self that got lost or frozen and integrate these with our growing capacities. Part of this will involve a new identity that grows out of this process. As we recognize our resources and our wholeness, a new me is born, one whose sense of value has been restored.

We are now able to use this recognition of body states as useful messages rather than indications of present threats. And by achieving all of this, we will have achieved wisdom—the integration of emotions, the feelings of the body, and our ongoing conscious awareness and thinking. We will have progressed from the state of being a trauma victim to becoming a trauma survivor.

Without a belief in a fair and moral universe, a sense of control of one's fate, a coherent sense of self, and a continuous personal narrative, life makes no sense. Living becomes a pointless exercise of getting through the day. People reeling from trauma are thrown into a crisis of meaning that goes far beyond disillusionment; they are plunged into an abyss of despair."18

Although the number of these alters varies widely, the average is about ten, and research suggests that the average age at which alters begin developing is just under six years old.30 The transition from one personality to another (called switching) is most often sudden and triggered by some environmental cue.

Traumatic experiences are so powerful that they often affect your entire worldview. It's like wearing glasses that distort your vision.

Dead girls in the rear-view mirror may appear more real than they are.

If our perception of God's character is distorted due to our own experiences of life's disappointments and our own histories of trauma, then having an all-seeing and always-present God could be stifling and produce fear instead of love and trust.

Traumas not only cause injury and pain, traumas block or slow the process of maturity.

Mi único trauma es la vida.

Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents' pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence.

the pain-body is there because of certain things that happened in the past. It is the living past in you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past.

It was as though the dark part of my past had become a physical being, a black beast pounding on the gates of my memory.

Yes, the living, the mangled, the scarified, with the crazed responsibility of remembering everything, everything.

I do like rocks. I had a terrible trauma this week: I didn't know what had become of my favorite rock. And I thought, Oh my God, I can't live. Fortunately, it was found.

Morris chopped off the girl's hand with a hatchet then guttered laughter. The poor mulato wailed, her stump pumping. What'choo do that for! Cutton bellowed. He hadn't even gotten his trousers off before Morris had pulled this move.

Edward St. Aubyn

If they come into a house and there is a son and a mother there, they hold a gun to their heads. They make the son sleeps with his mother. If it is a daughter and a father, they do the same thing.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside us in the absence of an empathetic witness. —Peter Levine, The Unspoken Voice

hippocampus damage on a national scale can be measured by the number of guns owned by a country's citizens. According to The Washington Post, the U.S. has the highest per capita gun ownership in the world—nearly 90 guns for every 100 people—and the highest rate of gun-related murders in the developed world.4 The hippocampus senses danger lurking behind every tree.

soul retrievals to recover parts of myself I had lost to trauma,