Quotes About Trauma

Using data gathered in 2011, the CDC study estimated that across all age groups, 19.3 percent of American women "have been raped in their lifetimes" and that 1.6 percent of American women—nearly two and a half million individuals—"reported that they were raped in the 12 months preceding the survey.

Traumatic memories have a number of unusual qualities. They are not encoded like the ordinary memories of adults in a verbal, linear narrative that is assimilated into an ongoing life story….[R]ather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images. It

A rapist, by definition, is only interested in gratifying his own desires. A rapist doesn't care what a woman wants. If he did, he wouldn't rape. —

Rape is the most underreported serious crime in the nation.

In fact, most women who are sexually assaulted do not resist. The fear is overwhelming. They often feel helpless. Sometimes they make a conscious choice not to resist because they are afraid if they resist, they will be hurt even worse.

According to many peer-reviewed studies, a large percentage of the victims of non-stranger rapes "actually feared they were going to be killed," even when "there was no weapon and no overt violence." Thompson

You hear that rape victims avoid sex afterwards. But it's actually just as common for some victims to become promiscuous in self-destructive ways.

traumatized people find themselves reenacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form, without realizing what they are doing….There

Many traumatized people expose themselves, seemingly compulsively, to situations reminiscent of the original trauma….Freud thought the aim of repetition was to gain mastery, but clinical experience has shown that this rarely happens; instead, repetition causes further suffering for the victims or for people in their surroundings. In

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup. She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her, its contours designed to fit her body perfectly, everything smooth and sleek and luxurious, and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture- like she was inside an iron maiden. Her friend had become her worst enemy.

There's a fine line between forgetting an event, and suppressing the memory of it.

As one anthropologist pointed out to me, trauma is usually a group experience, so trauma recovery should be a group experience as well. But in our society it's not.

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

Nobody likes war not even those who survive it, not even the winners.

We are traumatized people. And nothing else has trauma's power to deform the mind and heart.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Here I did three fucking combat tours serving my country and I feel like a fucking fugitive.

The character damage of a trauma survivor 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.

All who hear should understand that no person's suffering can be measured against another person's suffering. It can be extremely damaging if anyone makes comparisons. Combat veterans frequently doubt that they are worthy of treatment, knowing other vets who are worse off now or went through worse than they did. Many survivors of trauma obstruct their own healing by placing themselves in "hierarchies of suffering", usually to their own disadvantage.

Combat trauma destroys the capacity for social trust, accounting for the paranoid state of being that blights the lives of most severely traumatized combat veterans.

This is a paradox: The opportunity to see and care for the dead body of a loved person reduces trauma to the bereaved, while seeing and handling the dead bodies of strangers is often traumatic in itself.

Bradshaw llama a este recuerdo de la herida primigenia "el niño herido". Es este niño herido que llevamos dentro el que nos hace actuar así.

Darla's head bled profusely after the crash. Roslyn's tongue tingled as she remembered tasting the gooey substance out of curiosity.

I don't think. I can't allow myself the luxury. I've lived with fear since I was a child.