Quotes About Trauma

I was probably about 13 or 14. I got pulled from a rope swing and some boy kicked me in the head and fractured my skull. It was a horrible time.

My parents sent me to Switzerland on a Kindertransport.

Everyone always told me that I had the symptoms of a P.O.W.

I called my mother up and I said, 'You know, I've been to the best doctors in the world and I've spent almost half a million dollars and they're telling me I have symptoms of a P.O.W. and all I did was grow up in your home.'

When she was eight years old, Bridget Barsamian woke up in a hospital, where a doctor told her she shouldn't be alive.

The look in her eyes is of a person who drank from the end of a gun barrel and found it delicious.

My soul left me when I was six. It flew away past a flapping curtain over a window. I ran after it, but it never came back. It left me alone on wet stinking mattresses. It left me alone in the choking dark. It took my tongue, my heart, and my mind.

Dissociation gets you through a brutal experience, letting your basic survival skills operate unimpeded…Your ability to survive is enhanced as the ability to feel is diminished…All feeling are blocked; you 'go away.' You are disconnected from the act, the perpetrator & yourself…Viewing the scene from up above or some other out-of-body perspective is common among sexual abuse survivors.

You're too sensitive' victims of sexual abuse are told over and over by those whose reality depends on being insensitive. Most adults who have been in the victim role cringe when anyone tells them they are sensitive. In fact, sensitivity is a lovely trait and one to be cherished in any human being.

Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious.

Sometimes buried memories of abuse emerge spontaneously. A triggering event or catalyst starts the memories flowing. The survivor then experiences the memories as a barrage of images about the abuse and related details. Memories that are retrieved in this manner are relatively easy to understand and believe because the person remembering is so flooded with coherent, consistent information.

During sexual abuse, children feel and incorporate the rage, pain, shame, and sense of perversion that the perpetrator is projecting. They take these feelings into the very core of themselves, and they are badly traumatized by the emotions surrounding the assault, as well as by the assault itself.

You may experience waves of disbelief after each memory you retrieve. Whether as a phase or waves, the disbelief is usually accompanied by massive self-hate and guilt. 'How can I even think such a thing? I must really be warped,' you tell yourself.

Memory repression thrives in shame, secrecy, and shock. The shame and degradation experienced during sexual assault is profound, especially for children who have no concept of what is happening to them or why. Sexual abuse is so bizarre and horrible that the frightened child feels compelled to bury the event deep inside his or her mind.

War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.

That's right," he said, "I must remember that, not to get excited. Everybody is very thoughtful. They put you in uniform and teach you what every young man ought to know, and take you across the ocean into the middle of hell, bombs, bullets, shells, flame-throwers, your friends die right against you and bleed down your neck, and after two years of that they bring you home and turn you loose and tell you now remember don't get excited.

Being able to play these memories forward with circus music and backward with silly music allows the feelings to become separated from the images and the memories will no longer haunt you. The purpose of memories is to learn from them or to enjoy them or to use them as guides for your behavior, and it doesn't help to relive trauma. Over the years, I've helped many, many people whose lives had been crippled by traumatic experiences to get away from the memories.

One of her classmates asked a prisoner what was the worst thing about being there. "The first time they fuck you in the ass," he replied, and this was the first time that she and her classmates learned about that kind of rape.

I've been in a car three or four times when it filled with water and it's not a comfortable feeling.

Your mouth bleeds, and you bleed around your teeth, and you may have hemorrhages from the salivary glands—literally every opening in the body bleeds, no matter how small. The surface of the tongue turns brilliant red and then sloughs off, and is swallowed or spat out. It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one's tongue.

The character damage of a trauma survivor," he concludes, "can be understood as a reflection both of his or her radical aloneness and of the continued presence of the perpetrator in the victim's inner life.

Almost all people are carrying a great and secret hurt, even when they don't know it.

Many of us were taught a vision of God as Tormentor when we were small, impressionable children, and it got deposited in the lowest part of our brain stems, like all traumatic injuries do.

The past was in them, still disturbing but no longer a governing history; the trauma strengthened the convictions they possessed about how to lead their lives.