Quotes About Trauma

I kept trying to find a way to turn myself so that I couldn't see the telephone poles or be in the path of father's breath. I was feeling dizzy and then very sick and the father was shouting, 'WHAT THE--GO TO THE HEAD, DO IT IN THE HEAD! DON'T PUKE ON ME, CLYDE! CLYDE!' I never did finish my letter to Jesus. I tried for a while but I couldn't think of anything else to say besides, Have a Good Summer and Stay Crazy.

My mind flashed back to the Cultural Revolution, when a group of Red Guards pulled our neighbor, Granny Li, out of the opera company's dormitory block and ordered the rest of us to bring out our thermos flasks. We then had to stand and watch as the Red Guards poured ten flasks of boiling water over Granny Li's head.

As noted earlier, having a highly affectionate and responsive mother turns on different suites of genes, compared to being raised indifferently. Not surprisingly, neglect and trauma make social connection more difficult. These changes, too, are mediated by oxytocin, vasopressin, opioids, and dopamine.

Si te salvas por los pelos, quedas traumatizado. Si te salvas holgadamente, piensas que eres invencible.

I walked away exhilarated by my success, because there's nothing like making a difference in someone's life, even if that difference is a lifetime of nightmares and a fortune in therapy bills.

Memory, in fact, gives you no choice over which moments you can erase, and it is annoyingly persistent in retaining the most painful ones. It is extraordinarily faithful in recording the most hideous details, and it will recall them for you in the future with moments that are even only vaguely similar.

That is the way with a wound. The wound begins to close in on itself, to protect what is hurting so much. And once it is closed, you no longer see what is underneath, what started the pain.

I know what to avoid, what to worry about. I'm like those kids who live with gunfire going off around them. I don't want pain. I don't want to die. I don't want to see other people around me die. But I don't have anything left inside me to figure out where I fit in or what I want. If I want anything, it's to know what's possible to want.

The enormous difference between the relationships you need, and the one you deeply want. The need is created out of an accumulation of negativities, planted by traumatic experiences: fear, doubts, anxiety, dependence, weakness in certain realms, inadequacy, incompleteness. A certain relationship can remove the fear, calm anxiety, supply a certain completion, replace a loss, fulfill an organic insufficiency, lull an insecurity, supply a substitute love.

When Allendy says, "I am cold and grey," I sense the obscure, buried, sunken, eclipsed man who was stifled by his mother. No one was ever born without that light or flame of life. Some event, some person stifles or drowns it altogether.

She tried to stand but he had her by the hair and with his other hand he was jerking back and forth on himself, and she couldn't breathe and then he let out a groan as warm spurts fell wetly across her cheek and nose and eye, and Davey was laughing as if he'd just scored points in a game, and Luke let go of her hair and she fell back on her hands.

I will say here what I have never said before: my pacifism was not challenged by the beating and torture I experienced in marriage some thirty years ago; I finally got away not because I knew that he would kill me but because I thought I would kill him.

The victim of encapsulating violence carries both the real fear and the memory of fear with her always. Together, they wash over her like an ocean, and if she does not learn to swim in that terrible sea, she goes under.

and if you are a stubborn child, a strong-willed child, you say the almost-ten-year-old version of fuck you something happened all right the fuck put his hands in my legs and rubbed me all over; my legs; *my legs*; me; my; my legs; my; my; my legs; and he rubbed

I had an abhorrence for killing, but it was raped from me, raped from my brain; obliterated, like freedom.

I'm a veteran of Birkenau and Massada and deep throat, uncounted rapes, thousands of men, I'm twenty-seven, I don't sleep. They leave the shell for reasons of their own. I have no fear of any kind, they fucked it out of me some time age, it's neither here nor there, not good or bad, except girls without fear scare them.

Incest is a crime committed against someone, a crime from which many victims never recover.

This realization can lead to the demand to live life to the full now, but it can also be a traumatic shock to a believer, who may start to doubt in a way which is wholly disorienting. The latter response is part of what Nietzsche terms 'nihilism', which is the result of holding metaphysical beliefs that turn out to be illusory. Avoiding nihilism means never even entertaining such comforting fictions in the first place, so that there is nothing to lose.

A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it's not empty or terrified at all. It's as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life?

After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, you need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. Evincing a better self, in response to things that have caused you hurt.

As we talked, I came to understand that hope is like a happy childhood; it equips its beneficiaries to deal with the traumas that inevitably ensue. It is experienced as primal love. (p.15)

You know, Honora says, you read a word like massacre and you think, I know what that means. It means the slaughter of innocent people. And then you go on. You read another fact. You read the word trial. Or conviction. But then....when it happens to you, when you live the word, you realize that the word itself means nothing. It tells you nothing at all. It doesn't begin to convey the horror, does it?

Each time her mind flashed on that image for a second, a fraction of a second, it blinded her like a flashbulb, burning out the center of her mind's eye to blackness.

I didn't want anybody to see me walking out of the hospital with this baby. We got into the car and my mom said, "What's wrong?" I said, "I'm afraid that someone's gonna come take the baby." I was waiting for the police to come. Giving up my first son had left such an imprint. It was trapped in my brain…I was not allowed to be a mother. Society