Quotes About Trauma

Curiously, it turned out emotional abuse was more likely12 to cause depression than any other kind of trauma—even sexual molestation. Being treated cruelly by your parents was the biggest driver of depression, out of all these categories.

Even if a woman is abused a very long time ago, it comes out in her life in a negative way.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

Pearl Harbor was the defining event in my life. It shaped who I am, and all of my hang-ups and my drives, I think, stem from that.

I spent so much of my life shut down from the abuse of my childhood. I didn't have friends and I didn't have connections with people.

Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life.

Growing up in a violent home is a terrifying and traumatic experience that can affect every aspect of a child's life, growth, and development.

Many people say that recovery from an aneurysm is like having a layer of skin ripped off - your experience of life is more intense.

I was 11 when I was molested. It was like a nuclear explosion going off in my life, destroying everything.

I think I ran so hard and so fast, in a lot of ways, from my life and I kind of took a fall. It was like - what do they call it? - post-traumatic stress syndrome.

I lie in my darkened room. Scavenger birds peck at the oozing matter that leaks from my crushed skull.

Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,

Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed.

Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I fell.

Incest is rape by extortion. Thus the child's very childhood becomes a weapon used to control her.

If I, as a child, claim that something awful has happened—that someone has done something terrible to me—and everyone around me acts as if nothing is the matter, then either I must be crazy, or all of them are. And when you're a kid and your life depends on all these people, there is no choice: of course, I must be crazy.

Sometimes sex is the price that is exacted from her for warmth and attention. And if these sometimes wonderful moments of closeness must coexist with terrifying, confusing moments of abuse, she learns to see the two as parts of the same experience. She grows to think she wanted the incest itself. Because they've become enmeshed, she doesn't know that it was love she wanted, not sex.

The bully and the victim never quite forget their first relations.

We lie and cover up our sins and mute the traumas they cause. We dissociate the trauma from our national self-understanding and locate it, if at all, in the ungrateful cries of grievance and victimization among those who experienced the pain and loss.

King conveyed the gravity of the moment in 1968 and the necessity for the Poor People's Campaign, he conjured, without a hint of nostalgia, a history of the heroism of everyday people acting against all odds, a history no less full of disappointment and trauma. He

This is the undertow of black politics: traumatic memories that cling to our choices like ghosts who can't find peace as white America refuses to change again. Like Baldwin, we have to bear witness to it all and tell the story of how we got here—and then, just maybe, we can muster the resolve and will to push this damn rock up the hill again.

It was hard to live through the early 1940s in France and not have the war be the center from which the rest of your life spiraled. Marie-Laure still cannot wear shoes that are too large, or smell a boiled turnip, without experiencing revulsion. Neither can she listen to lists of names. Soccer team rosters, citations at the end of journals, introductions at faculty meetings – always they seem to her some vestige of the prison lists that never contained her father's name.

Here was the worst curse: he managed to force the dream from his conscious mind often enough that when it returned to him (opening the pantry door, say, recalling the sweep of floodwater), the experience of it became fresh and bleeding once more.