Quotes About Trauma

El misterio es éste: ¿por qué yo quedé mutilada y ella no? Me siento recién salida de una catástrofe. ¿Por qué no olvido? No sé por dónde empezar a olvidar. Aun estoy asombrada de no estar loca. Pero ¿se puede vivir siempre así, asombrada, enloqueciendo de asombro?

Enseguida el niño comprueba que ha sucedido algo mucho más terrible que los fantasmas sin forma que venían atormentándolo: en un segundo, su vida ha transcurrido en su casi totalidad. Sus padres están muertos hace mucho. La casa es otra. Nadie escucha su llanto.

There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn't seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.

They've seen too much to be children.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

A parallel to this system of punishment is the trauma caused by enforced unemployment in capitalist society. Add to this an inability for the unemployed to find any imaginable alternative occupation, and the extent of the effects of network exclusion becomes clear.

Stories about the most difficult things need to provide catharsis, or the reader will stop reading, or go mad.

Therapy takes us backward into a forgotten past, but this was not a safe and secure time, else we would not have emerged from it scarred by battle wounds and armoured in self-defense.

You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on, looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place.

Most find the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting more stressful than the shooting itself.

No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.

The unresolved painful experiences of our past lead us to make unhealthy decisions in the future.

they refuse to cry, because they don't ever want to feel again the anguish and the pain they've locked away inside. Abused individuals often don't cry for the same reason.

Once you've experienced any emotional pain, the pain is imprinted on your inner being and remains there until you intentionally resolve it.

The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew that my IQ had been damaged.

I lost my mother when I was 7 and they put her in a mental hospital. My brother and I watched her being taken away in a strait jacket. That's something you never forget. And my stepmother was like in the movie 'Precious.' I couldn't handle it. So I said to myself, 'I don't have a mother. I don't need one. I'm going to let music be my mother.'

I had one of those families that let me watch things they should not have let me watch. When I was a kid, I remember I watched 'Alien' at, like, 6. It was traumatizing.

My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television. I don't think any child should be asked to do that under any circumstances.

Sometimes when I'm watching television and something, an image, will come on that has to do with 9/11 or some of these families telling their stories, or children talking about drawing pictures of airplanes flying into towers, you know, I find myself still choking up.

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

I nearly drowned in a park pond when I was six years old and I've been terrified of water ever since.

I have a pathological terror of falling through ice. I nearly drowned once. I fell off a boat and got a cramp, and was rescued by an oil-rig diver, a great bear of a man who simply leant into the water and scooped me out with one finger.

I actually have a fear of the water because I nearly drowned. I got caught in a rip tide, and I wasn't a good swimmer because that was when I was emigrating from England to Australia.