Quotes About Trauma

I learned that my emotional truth was being dictated by my subconscious perspectives of life, by the definitions of life that had been imposed on me as a child, by the subconscious attitudes that I had adopted because of the emotional traumas I had experienced as a child.

Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will lead to revolt.

What Cathy took from her rejection experience was self-doubt. Until this current traumatic hospitalization, Cathy hadn't realized the fear she was carrying around, how burdened she was by it, and how that fear kept her in a mode where she had to continuously prove her value to others and herself.

She was also heard to tell him on several occasions, "I wish you were dead." These abuses, quite obviously, had an impact on the young boy. At age four

Donnelly was abducted at gunpoint on December 30, 1977. He was driven to Gacy's home where he was raped, tortured and sodomized with various objects. His head was held under water in the bathtub until he passed out. Then Gacy revived him, before holding him under water again.

Pretty straightforwardly, the more categories of adversities a child suffers, the dimmer his or her chances of a happy, functional adulthood.45

Powerful support for an amygdaloid role in fear processing comes from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In PTSD sufferers the amygdala is overreactive to mildly fearful stimuli and is slow in calming down after being activated.13 Moreover, the amygdala expands in size with long-term PTSD.

genes and fetal environment are relevant. But most important, recall the logic of collapsing different types of trauma into a single category. What counts is the sheer number of times a child is bludgeoned by life and the number of protective factors.

Suppose a major traumatic stressor occurs, of a sufficient magnitude to disrupt hippocampal function while enhancing amygdaloid function. At some later point, in a similar setting, you have an anxious, autonomic state, agitated and fearful, and you haven't a clue why—this is because you never consolidated memories of the event via your hippocampus while your amygdala-mediated autonomic pathways sure as hell remember. This is a version of free-floating anxiety.

Axonal remapping in blind or deaf individuals is great, exciting, and moving. It's cool that your hippocampus expands if you drive a London cab. Ditto about the size and specialization of the auditory cortex in the triangle player in the orchestra. But at the other end, it's disastrous that trauma enlarges the amygdala and atrophies the hippocampus, crippling those with PTSD. Similarly, expanding the amount of motor cortex devoted to finger dexterity is great in neurosurgeons but

Interestingly, traumatic stress early in life (abuse, for example) greatly increases the risk of IBS in adulthood. This implies that childhood trauma can leave an echo of vulnerability, a large intestine that is hyperreactive to stress, long afterward.

He now knew that war was not at all like culling deer, and the last one, with the man so close, had been the worst. The shock on the enemy's face as the arrow halted his run would haunt him always. Robert Reid – White Light Red Fire

She was thankful she no longer felt very bad, When you are bludgeoned on the head repeatedly, you naturally and mercifully become more or less insensible and stupid

Is the girl all right?" "She's had an ordeal but she's young," Augustus said. "She won't forget it, but she might outlive it.

She didn't know what to do with the severed leg. She had cut it off, but she didn't want to touch it or even look at it.

Apparently having your girlfriend get shot in the head and Life Flighted away takes its toll on a guy. Imagine that? I told him it was no biggie, but he's been kind of edgy about it.

The ache starts in my chest and spreads through my veins. The abuse I can handle; it's the happiness that cripples.

Maybe it's true that shared trauma brings people closer together-a common hardship, a battle to survive-because when times are quiet people relax and go their own separate ways. They're lulled into believing they've got everything under control and don't need what they did before.

I'd killed him in the end, but revenge only makes things all better in the movies. In real life, once the villain is dead the trauma lives on inside the victims.

Therapy can get you only so far with exorcising your childhood nightmares; after that it's willpower, and you, and people you can trust to hold your hand along the way.

The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don't go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them.

You can experience trauma without getting stuck as the victim forever. You can choose to work the shit and rebuild yourself, or you can sit in the ruins and mourn forever.

I dropped the blood-coated chair leg and collapsed to my knees. I couldn't swallow. I couldn't breathe. I was splattered with blood. I'd never beaten someone to death before. It had felt good.

I stuff my mouth with old fabric and scream until there are no sounds left under my skin.