Quotes About Trauma

But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.

He beat me like he beat the children. Cept he don't never hardly beat them. He say, Celie, git the belt. The children be outside the room peeking through the cracks. It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how come I know trees fear man.

Healing begins where the wound was made.

How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.

He never ast me nothing bout myself. He clam on top of me and fuck and fuck, even when my head bandaged. Nobody ever love me, I say.

They were given Christian names that went with their new summarily acquired (with the help of the lash and the threat of annihilation) religion, and then, having been branded on face or body, they were prodded onto the ships, packed, as the cliché goes, like sardines in a can.

Perhaps I'm being histrionic, trying to displace my actual grief with this imaginary trauma.

Child abuse isn't evil because it may produce neurotic adults but because it abuses children.

She scarcely ever had a moment to herself, but she was grateful for that, too. When she was alone, the things she had seen and done the day of the uprising rushed into her mind, like filthy water into a holed boat, and dragged her down so quickly she felt she was drowning.

Es fácil entender que los traumas dañen el cerebro, pero los investigadores también han descubierto que los pensamientos negativos y la mala programación del pasado también lo afectan.

Instead of obsessing about some traumatic or stressful event that you fear is in your future, based on your experience of the past, obsess about a new, desired experience that you haven't yet embraced emotionally.

realized back then that when crisis or trauma occurs, we spend too much of our attention and energy thinking about what we don't want instead of what we do want.

If you are a parent, teacher, camp counselor, or school resource officer and you see children severely change or restrain their arm behavior around their parents or other adults, at a minimum it should arouse your interest and promote further observation. Cessation of arm movement is part of the limbic system's freeze response. To the abused child, this adaptive behavior can mean survival.

Hell had been his Vietnam. It had stamped its mark on him for all eternity, and no amount of denial or self-imposed ignorance was going to change it. Ever.

Human beings are like the screwed-up children of alcoholic parents in that way, picking up the pieces afterward and trying to make up reasons why.

It was a tough night," Marcus said briefly, another humorless smile crossing his mouth. "But they got what they paid for." "Jesus," Thomas murmured. Marcus slanted a glance at him, and his green eyes were hard, brittle. "Don't think about it, pet. I don't. No one who lives it dwells on this fucking stuff. You just thank God or your own balls for getting yourself through it, pulling yourself up into something better. The day I see pity in your face, I want your fucking ass out of my life.

The killed are dead, the bereaved are traumatized. The trauma may be converted to hatred that may be converted into revenge addiction.

for each traumatic event that happened to a child, they were two to four times more likely to grow up to be an addicted adult.

It turned out that for every category of traumatic experience you went through as a kid, you were radically more likely to become depressed as an adult. If you had six categories of traumatic events in your childhood, you were five times more likely to become depressed as an adult than somebody who didn't have any. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult.

child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what happened to them to another human being.

people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches.

Others are run by people like the man I met in L.A. who too often seem to be playing out their own traumas and internal stigma on people too raw and fragile to argue back.