Quotes About Trauma

Without words, young children sometimes show parents the parts of their experience that have overwhelmed them.

The key to completing this uncompleted immobility response lies in uncoupling our fear from the response itself. This allows the stuck energy to be freed up for use wherever it is needed within the body.

They may avoid any activity, person or other reminder that resembles what originally frightened them.

We have a lot going for us; we can conquer our fears. With the full use of our highly developed ability to think and perceive, we can, through the felt sense, consciously move out of the trauma response.

For someone who's been traumatized, that feeling of balance and wholeness is such a surprise, it can cause an "identity crisis." We don't recognize ourselves because we're no longer filled with shame and fear and collapse.

Here we see the transition between traumatic re-enactment and healing play. The next time he held on to mommy, there was less clinging and more excited jumping.

Getraumatiseerde individuen zitten tussen de wal en het schip, gevangen in het slechtste van twee werelden. Op het ene moment worden ze overspoeld door dwingende emoties als verschrikking, woede en schaamte, het andere moment zijn ze afgesloten van alles, vervreemd van een op het gevoel gebaseerde instinctieve gronding. Het gevolg is dat ze niet ervaren dat het leven zin heeft en geen koers kunnen uitzetten.

The power of goodness—in this case, the organism's innate capacity to restore itself to health and balance—is encouraged by a bystander, an empathetic witness who helps to prevent trauma by embodying kindness and acceptance.

Traumatized adults often re-enact an event that in some way represents, at least to their unconscious, the original trauma.

However, when that same child experiences the triumph of moving out of the fear and frozenness back into life, a very special kind of self-confidence blossoms—the newfound feelings of resiliency and capability.

who have been traumatized, this can be a monumental leap of faith, but we can recover from trauma; indeed, my experience assisting others to heal from trauma has shown me this recovery is innate.

glazed eyes, pale skin, rapid or shallow pulse and breathing, disorientation, appears overly emotional or overly tranquil, i.e., acting like nothing has happened),

wild animal would following a frightful encounter with a predator. What ethologists call tonic immobility—the paralysis and physical/emotional shutdown that characterize the universal experience of helplessness in the face of mortal danger—comes to dominate the person's life and functioning.

One of my clients, while working through his childhood abuse at the hands of "barrio" gang members, said it this way: "I don't have to justify my experience with memories any more.

The "talking cure" for trauma survivors should give way to the unspoken voice of the silent, but strikingly powerful, bodily expressions as they surface to "sound off" on behalf of the wisdom of the deeper self.

The quality of the environments that are thought to be so important to development, including stress, life events, and trauma (and probably also maternal attunement and sensitivity), can all be inherited. It is likely that personality characteristics that we had often thought of as—and what the child might experience as—the consequence of the parents' behavior toward the child are in fact genetic predispositions.

The AAI scoring system (Main and Goldwyn 1994) classifies individuals into Secure/Autonomous, Insecure/Dismissing, Insecure/Preoccupied, or Unresolved with respect to loss or trauma—categories based on the structural qualities of narratives of early experiences.

interaction. It is, however, consistent with the mixed evidence that sometimes (but not invariably) links DRD2*A1 with susceptibility to trauma (Comings

For my children. For you. So that you could be safe. So that what happened to them," he nods toward the photo of his mother and his sister, "would never happen to you. Because it will never really go away, this thing. It goes underground for a generation or two, but always reemerges.

When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?