Quotes About Trauma

Traumatized children?" mused Ramsay. "When we read the boys 'The Snow Queen,' Patrick put all our glasses in the bin in case he broke one and got a bit in his eye.

When something that terrible, that horrible happens to you, you don't want to talk about it with anyone. You want to bury it deep inside you and let it rest in peace. You want to forget it ever happened. You want to stay home from school.

When something that terrible, that horrible happens to you, you don't want to talk about it with anyone. You want to bury it deep inside you and let it rest in peace. You want to forget it ever happened.

I would rather have had someone shoot me in the head with a nail gun,

Something in her past that makes her want to tear things to shreds.

Ruth Kluger's Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.

Borderline individuals are the psychological equivalent of third-degree burn patients. They simply have, so to speak, no emotional skin. Even the slightest touch or movement can create immense suffering."1

The experience of war never quite leaves a young man or woman. A great many are utterly destroyed by it. All are indelibly and subtly marked by it, because, for good or evil, the memory never quite leaves any of us." Col.

Sus oídos, escucharon un último disparo; una bala viajó por su cuerpo sin permiso, atravesándolo por una pierna.

My dad used to flush my mother's head down the toilet. I was so screwed up.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.

After a series of traumas, one can lose the capacity to feel fear appropriately.

Here is what I think now, reading what I wrote down for the police at age fifteen, right after I was raped. I was a good girl. Always a good girl, even when I was bad. I did my homework. If I can only be good enough, someone will eventually notice that I am trying so hard, exhausting myself with my effort to be good. This is true even today.

Why does the threat of violent death alter some of us, even if subtly, forever? Why does it make us unusually numb or calm when we ought to feel terrified? Why do scents or sounds trigger in some of us a feeling of terror or unbearable dread, even in situations where we know, at least, intellectually, that we are perfectly safe?

I spoke on a panel once with a famous new age author/guru in leather pants and she said that the problem with women is that we don't "speak from our power," but from a place of victimization. As if the traumas forced upon us could be shaken off with a steady voice- as if we had actual power to speak from.

White Americans are in the midst of a public mental health crisis—just check the acting out: suicide, addiction, mass shootings.

We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.

A hospital alone shows what war is.

I cannot bear to look at his hands, they are like wax. Under the nails is the dirt of the trenches, it shows through blue-black like poison.

Erst das Lazarett zeigt, was der Krieg ist.

Albert expresses it: ''The war has ruined us for everything.'' He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and death.

What do they expect of us if a time ever comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been killing;-it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come out of us?