Quotes About Trauma

It's stunning, how a great trauma can also be so ordinary.

Trauma, which is stored differently in the brain than memory, seeps out of us as warnings of worse to come.

Have you ever seen a battlefield?" Monk asked him. "I have, once. I've never known such horror in my life, but Hester knew what to do. Forget your preconceptions, Rathbone; this will be reality.

But even those people, cops, lawyers, doctors, learned what they learned from the aftermath. They weren't there when the killer tore at his victim; they didn't smell the scent of evil; they didn't hear the cries to heaven for something, someone, to intervene.

You did mess them up!' And she had her hairbrush in her hand because I guess she'd been doing her hair and she started hitting me in the head with it, slam on one side of my head, slam on the other side, and I was ducking away and shielding my head—" "Yes, well," Willa said, "it's true she could be—" "You know what's the saddest thing about kids whose mothers are mean to them? It's that even so, their

Because that's what people need after traumas, apparently - lots of long conversations about the effects of trauma.

With the younger girls it was worse. After having them like that, tied up like iguanas, they did vulgar things to them. They stood in line for their turn, as though they were possessed by the devil, and they violated them, you know, in their private parts. One man after another raped them.

The physical shock took away the pain of being.

Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like a profanity.

Studies from around the world show that recovery from war—from any trauma—is heavily influenced by the society one belongs to, and there are societies that make that process relatively easy. Modern society does not seem to be one of them.

The much-discussed estimate of twenty-two vets a day committing suicide in the United States is deceptive: it was only in 2008 that - for the first time in decades- the suicide rate among veterans surpassed the civilian rate in America, and though each death is enormously tragic, the majority of those veterans were over the age of fifty. Many were Vietnam vets and, generally speaking, the more time that passes after a trauma, the less likely a suicide is to have anything to do with it.

Northern European societies are among the few where people sleep alone or with a partner in a private room, and that may have significant implications for mental health in general and for PTSD in particular. Virtually all mammals seem to benefit from companionship; even lab rats recover more quickly from trauma if they are caged with other rats rather than alone. In humans, lack of social support has been found to be twice as reliable at predicting PTSD as the severity of the trauma itself.

If contemporary America doesn't develop ways to publicly confront the emotional consequences of war, those consequences will continue to burn a hole through the vets themselves. I

after war, country after country, century after century. As awkward as it is to say, part of the trauma of war seems to be giving it up. "For the first time in [our] lives… we were in a tribal sort of situation where we could help each other without fear

Multiple studies, including a 2007 analysis from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, found that a person's chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war. Statistically, the 20 percent of people who fail to overcome trauma tend to be those who are already burdened by psychological issues, either because they inherited them or because they suffered abuse as children.

Killing seems to traumatize people regardless of the danger they're in or the perceived righteousness of their cause. Pilots of unmanned drones, who watch their missiles kill human beings by remote camera, have been calculated to have the same PTSD rates as pilots who fly actual combat missions in war zones.

Since only 10 percent of our armed forces experience actual combat, the majority of vets claiming to suffer from PTSD seem to have been affected by something other than direct exposure to danger.

If I'd talked to anybody, instead of just passing judgment on myself, knowing that I was evil, because I was heir to every evil thing that had been visited upon me.

The idea that traumatic residues—or unresolved stories—can be inherited is groundbreaking.

I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

So I wonder: Will a person who has drowned, Or almost drowned, always feel Like they're drowning, Even after they've been saved?

But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.

When people consider the meaning of genocide, they might only think of corpses being pushed into mass graves. But a person can be genocided - can have every connection to his past severed - and live to be an old man whose ribcage is a haunted house around his heart.

Being colonized automatically makes you bipolar.