Quotes About Trauma

We were not criminals. We're mothers. The difference was I was not an authenticated mother. I was an illegal mother. I was a denied mother. And I had to come home and live my life after being robbed of my child. It's as if I was an unwilling accomplice to the kidnapping of my own child. So you have to live with the trauma of losing your child and then you have to live with the trauma of knowing you didn't stop it. How do you do that?

At this point I was just hoping he wasn't going to be scarred for life.

Some nights," I said, "I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it's not napalm. It's apple butter. And it's not a street. It's my mother.

When Taimour was hit by a bullet in the left shoulder, he began to stagger toward the man who shot him, reaching out with his hands. He remembered the look in the soldier's eyes. 'He was about to cry,' Taimour said three years later.

Since his return from Afghanistan, he'd been unable to shake off the effects of spending almost a year in a war zone. They clung to him like a spiderweb, so fine as to be invisible, yet as tenacious as steel and, so far, impossible to escape.

And all the while, I was thinking, This cannot be happening. Not to me. I, Lilly Martin, cannot be cowering in a corner of my own bedroom trying to protect myself from my husband. "This happens to people you read about in the newspaper, I thought. Poor or ignorant or otherwise disadvantaged people who grew up in violent homes and continue the cycle.

You really don't understand what it's like to have bad parents, do you?

Porque las guerras no se ganan ni se pierden, solamente se sufren. Y todo el que ha estado en una guerra, así salga ileso, es un herido de guerra.

No estaba herida. Sólo gritaba de dolor. El fiscal se sentó entre una anciana mamacha que lloraba en quechua y un policía con un corte en la mano que goteaba sangre. Abril Rojo

I didn't want to talk about what happened, so it seemed safest not to talk at all.

What if even if I had told, or did tell, nobody believed me? Or even worse, blamed me for it?

Life was going on. I didn't even have a scar, this time, to remind me of what happened. But sometimes, when I glanced sideways at Rogerson in the car, or right before I fell asleep at night, I would have a sudden flash of his face again, how it had literally changed right before my eyes. And even as life settled back to normal, and we never discussed it, there was a part of me waiting, always braced and ready for him to do it again.

First these people murdered you, then they forced you to brood over their crimes.

Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.

Us, on the other hand, they can't kill. But we have to live with the memory of what they do. And really, it's what they do to us that's worse.

These people had been at war for nearly two decades. It was only natural that they would be completely inured to its savageries by now

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

grave emotional injury might somehow have triggered a physical response, so that

Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one's view of them.

Anyone who spent time in a courtroom emerged with scars. The only variables were quantity and depth.

Justice being served or not, being a victim carries a life sentence.

My mother's father drank and her mother was an unhappy, neurotic woman, and I think she has lived all her life afraid of anyone who drinks for fear something like that might happen to her.

The best day of my life happened when I was five and almost died at Disney World. I'm sixteen now, so you can imagine that's left me with quite a few days of major suckage.

Avoiding a bathtub because your parents tried to kill you in one isn't the same as avoiding your entire life by becoming a wolf.