Quotes About Trauma

I'm not concerned about any terrible things you might have done," he said quietly. "I'm concerned about the terrible things that happened to you.

Was this what having an identity felt like? Was this being someone? Feeling like there was a core of who you were beyond which you could not be altered? Feeling . . . continuity. Feeling like you existed as a real, solid thing, apart from your trauma.

Amazing how one's organic memory could cling so tightly to the worst moments of a life, and lose everything that surrounded them.

The expectation of an injury can hurt as much as the injury itself.

The worst stressors—exposure to violence, trauma, abuse, and mental illness—are shaped by a surprising factor: the level of income inequality in a region. For example, countries with the biggest gap between their richest citizens and their poorest have the worst health and the most violence.

I momenti più crudeli vengono offuscati e distorti dal ripetersi dell'atto di ricordare, che per lei comportava il non ricordare esattamente come si era sentita perché il trauma era ormai assorbito: anch'esso era diventato un ricordo, privo della capacità che aveva di aggredirla all'improvviso.

Uncle Nick was very sick—so sick—and he was very sad. So he chose to end his life with a gun." Once the trauma of the event passed, I made sure my son understood our family history and what options were available for those struggling with depression. Silence and mental illness are not a very effective combination.

My dad was a man of his generation—the Greatest Generation, as it is called, because theirs was the one that grew up in the Depression and fought the Nazis in World War II. But theirs was also the generation of men who never talked about the war, never processed the trauma, kept that stiff upper lip that men were supposed to keep. Which my father did. He also kept his emotional distance from his four daughters.

I wish it had never happened because then I wouldn't think about it as I'm falling asleep.

Get up." Those were the first words I ever heard. Open my eyes, see a girl, black and blue all over, dried blood along her thighs. Red brown stains smeared across the hairless juncture between. "Get up and take a bath, Alice," the man in the blue shirt said, and Alice did. I did. That's how I was born. Naked, hairless, covered in blood like all babies. Named, bathed and then taken out into the world.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, if the soaps aren't any good, I'll watch movies about angry, scared women who fight back or teenage girls who suffer but then overcome. There are always shower scenes in them, shots of the women scrubbing their abuse or grief away. I don't understand this. You can't make yourself clean like that, and fresh-scrubbed skin only invites attention.

Ray has never come out and said it, but I know from years of listening to him dream that his mother did to him what he does to me. Held him down, rubbed him raw, broke him open. In them, he cries and begs her not to touch him, that he doesn't want to go inside her, that he is a good boy, he really is. I let Ray have his nightmares, watch him thrash and listen to his voice squeak with fear. I lie there and watch him and wish he was trapped back there, with her and had never broken free.

William's life rumbled over, like a train on loose tracks: the images from Dachau that would not leave his brain after he had gone there with me so many years ago. He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been

There was the sense of a war having occurred. One that was not yet over.

He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been deeply haunted by his father's role in it. Unspeakably frightened. It had unmoored him.

Feeling is the antithesis of pain...the more pain one feels, the less pain one suffers.

Ahora sabemos que el trauma del nacimiento en realidad está codificado y almacenado en el sistema nervioso.

Things could crawl at you out of the dark and hurt you again and again. The past did not always stay dead.

I will never forget the haunting scream of that child as she watched her father being brutally beaten.

The scars you can't see are the hardest to heal.

No soldier ever really survives a war.

My parents had this relationship that was really terrifying. I mean, the level of hatred that they had, and the level of physical abuse - my mother would beat up my father, basically - and I think I was drawn to images on television that were bright and reflective.

The symptomatology of PTSD. In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one's past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition.

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.