Quotes About Trauma

Shortly after the war Valentin had come into a little money, and had been drinking it ever since. He considered it his duty to celebrate his good luck in having come out alive. It was nothing to him that that was now several years ago. One could never celebrate it enough, he used to explain. He was one of those with an uncanny memory of the war. The rest of us had forgotten many things; but he remembered every day and every hour.

And we stand still again, and suddenly we feel that everything out there in front of us, that absolute hell, that ragged patch of shell-holes, is still there inside us.

Memory is a deadly disease for a refugee; it's his cancer of the soul.

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

Two years of rifle fire and hand grenades - you can't just take it all off like a pair of socks afterwards -

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war.

Über diesen Feldern scheinen die verlorenen Jahre weiter zu bestehen, die Jahre, die nicht gewesen sind, die keine Ruhe finden – der Schrei der Jugend wurde zu früh erstickt, fand ein zu jähes Ende. In der Nacht brechen sie aus der Erde hervor wie geisterhafte Irrlichter.

The war has ruined us for everything.

Suddenly my mother seizes hold of my hand and asks falteringly: 'Was it very bad out there, Paul?' Mother, what should I answer to that! You would not understand, you could never realize it. And you shall never realize it.

Viss, ko cilv?ks p?rdz?vojis, k??st par d?ku. Pret?ga padar?šana! Un, jo briesm?g?ks kaut kas bijis, jo d?kain?ks tas k??st atmi??s.

We forget nothing really . . . the front-line days . . . are too grievous for us to be able to reflect on them at once. If we did, we should have been destroyed long ago . . . - terror . . . kills, if a man thinks about it.

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.

We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don't want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war.

had had enough of blood and terror to last me for the rest of my life.

to say that their mental health is not being undermined by bombing is to talk nonsense.

I was blown up while we were eating cheese.

There had been too much emotion, too much damage, too much of everything.

A severed femoral artery empties itself faster than you can believe.

You saw fear and apprehension. The fear was made by what he had been through. The apprehension was for the possibility of evil he imagined.

Adultery has always hurt. But for modern love's acolytes, it seems to hurt more than ever. In fact, the maelstrom of emotions that are unleashed in the wake of an affair is so overwhelming that many contemporary psychologists borrow from the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages and uncontrollable panic.

Consequently, what Proust called "the demon that cannot be exorcised" has simply gone in search of a socially acceptable vocabulary.9 "Trauma," "intrusive thoughts," "flashbacks," "obsessiveness," "vigilance," and "attachment injury" are the modern vocabulary for betrayed love.

The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another. We know from trauma that healing begins when perpetrators acknowledge their wrongdoing.

It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives.