Quotes About Trauma

A person is not likely to conceive something monstrous if he does not know it somehow or other from experience. We simply tend to refuse to take a child's suffering seriously enough.

I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.

The cruelty of individuals is not something imposed on them by some mysterious agency but by their parents and other people involved in their upbringing. It takes shape in the brain of a child exposed to cruelty.

The once-beaten children still living inside adults often fear being punished if they dare to truly SEE, without illusions, what their parents did to them in their first years of life. Once they understand that this danger no longer exists, they can liberate their life.

And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents' sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them.

But that can only be possible when mothers and fathers no longer unconsciously assume that their children have been brought into the world to alleviate the frustrations and repair the damage they have suffered in their own lives.

This is an astounding statement, because I know of literally no one who suffers from psychic symptoms and seeks treatment for them without having at least been beaten and humiliated in childhood.

The life-saving function of repression in childhood is transformed in adulthood into a life-destroying force.

Today, I believe that to mistreat children as I was mistreated—to punish them, to forbid them to weep, to speak, to defend themselves, to revolt against brutal treatment—is the greatest crime that there is. It is a crime to discipline children so much that they become blind, dumb, lifeless and then, later, to deny the whole thing. No wonder such children would later as doctors rather subject others to electroshock treatment than confront the repressed misery of their past.

The child's dependence on his or her parents' love also makes it impossible in later years to recognize these traumatizations, which often remain hidden behind the early idealization of the parents for the rest of the child's life.

However, it may also be true that there is still a small, unintegrated child living within, whose panic and fear have never been admitted, never consciously experienced, and thus direct themselves at others. These fears can suddenly assail us without apparent reason and cause us to panic. Unconscious fear of one's father or mother can last for decades if it has not been consciously experienced in the company of an enlightened witness.

Empathizing with a child's unhappy beginnings does not imply exoneration of the cruel acts he later commits. (This is as true for Alois Hitler as it is for Adolf.)

Those who persecute others are warding of knowledge of their own fate as victims.

Because the victims are "only children," their distress is trivialized. But in twenty years' time these children will be adults who will feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children.

No one realized that it was the inhuman and absurd discipline imposed on him at this boarding school, where he spent eight years of his life, that completely exhausted his physical and mental energies.

Consciously experiencing one's own victimisation instead of trying to ward it off provides protection against sadism; i.e., the compulsion to torment and humiliate others.

Those who say they would rather fight to the death than be raped are fools. I would rather be raped a thousand times. You do what you have to.

When I was raped I lost my virginity and almost lost my life. I also discarded certain assumptions I had held about how the world worked and about how safe I was.

memory could save, that it had power, that it was often the only recourse of the powerless, the oppressed, or the brutalized.

We lay there with our bodies touching, and as I shook, a powerful knowledge took hold. He had done this thing to me and I had lived. That was all. I was still breathing. I heard his heart. I smelled his breath. The dark earth around us smelled like what it was, moist dirt where animals lived their daily lives. I could have yelled for hours.

In the tunnel where I was raped, a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheater, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered. I was told this story by the police. In comparison, they said, I was lucky.

she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their traumas for popularity and booze.

In the walls of my sex there was horror and blood, in the walls of hers there were windows.

Like someone who has survived a gun-shot, the wound had been closing, closing - braiding into a scar for eight long years.