Quotes About Trauma

I was mugged when I was 12. I had a portable radio, and I ran into this building and these two guys came in and hit me, busted me up and took the radio. After that I was very paranoid and I started taking kung fu and karate. But I didn't want to fight.

When my parents were arrested, I was a year old. And like so many children with incarcerated parents, I experienced a range of traumas connected to the separation. I was angry. I was ashamed. I had developmental delays, behavioral problems.

My father told me abuse is generational.

Sept. 11 jolted America out of its second gilded age.

Of all my childhood memories, I don't have any good ones.

My dad was abusive. And so he would say, 'You're my favorite.' Being a favorite of an abusive parent is not really a good thing, necessarily.

Kahlo's paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion. Through the language of her innovative art Kahlo gives voice to silenced, unresolved traumata. She thus obliterates the barrier between the individual experiencing pain and the viewer, and evokes empathy for our shared human fragility.

Kahlo's paintings offer a visual vocabulary with which trauma and pain can be transmitted or communicated with dignity and compassion.

I believe the things that happened to me as a child scarred me terribly, and I wish somebody would have helped me with some of the things that happened.

Nine years old, I became the victim of war. I didn't like that picture at all. I felt like, why he took my picture, when I was agony, naked, so ugly? I wished that picture wasn't taken.

I can cite a few cases of where people have tampered around with magic and witchcraft that they've been very severely frightened and traumatised by some of the outcomes. I mean we are playing with fire, and I had to say that.

It doesn't take a bruise or a broken bone for a child to be a victim of domestic violence. Kids who witness domestic violence are victims, too.

When I was first lady, I worked to call attention to the plight of refugees fleeing Cambodia for Thailand, I visited Thailand and witnessed firsthand the trauma of parents and children separated by circumstance beyond their control.

When you grow up with a significant amount of trauma, you are realizing it as you get older, and you're realizing the ways you can recover from that trauma. The things that I have witnessed and that I have been through, it's going to take a lifetime to undo.

The stories my pupils told me were astonishing. One told how he had witnessed his cousin being shot in the back five times; another how his parents had died of AIDS. Another said that he'd probably been to more funerals than parties in his young life. For me - someone who had had an idyllic, happy childhood - this was staggering.

I left Somalia when I was seven years old, but I witnessed a whole year in a war.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.

I cried after I woke up from surgery and saw that my finger was gone. I was looking at my hand, going, 'Where the hell is my finger at?'

I will continue to need operations and therapy for life. For acid attack survivors, the aftermath is a life sentence.

Jayalalithaa was brutalised from the age of 16 in the cinema world. She therefore bears a psychotic pleasure in humiliating people as she was humiliated. She was deadened to normal human emotions.

If bad things happen to you as a kid, it's hard for you to succeed as an adult.

Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.

I saw a clown knock the head off another clown and I thought it was the real thing. It scared me so much, I made my mother take me home and I've dodged circuses ever since.