Quotes About Trauma

All family life is organized around the most damaged person in it.

We may say that the patient does not remember anything at all of what he has forgotten and repressed, but rather acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without of course being aware of the fact that he is repeating it.

Les souvenirs pénibles s'effacent difficilement, reviennent sans cesse, quoi qu'on fasse pour les étouffer, et vous torturent sans répit.

The details of the process by which repression changes a possibility of pleasure into a source of 'pain' are not yet fully understood, or are not yet capable of clear presentation, but it is certain that all neurotic 'pain' is of this kind, is pleasure which cannot be experienced as such.

Um trauma teria de ser definido como um acréscimo da excitação no sistema nervoso, que este é incapaz de fazer dissipar-se adequadamente pela reação motora. Um ataque histérico talvez deva ser considerado como uma tentativa de completar a reação ao trauma.

In the traumatic neuroses there are two outstanding features which might serve as clues for further reflection: first that the chief causal factor seemed to lie in the element of surprise, in the fright; and secondly that an injury or wound sustained at the same time generally tended to prevent the occurrence of the neurosis.

The stronger the constitutional factor, the more readily will a trauma lead to a fixation and leave behind a developmental disturbance; the stronger the trauma, the more certainly will its injurious effects become manifest even when the instinctual situation is normal.

We assume, in other words, that an anxiety-state is the reproduction of some experience which contained the necessary conditions for such an increase of excitation and a discharge along particular paths, and that from this circumstance the unpleasure of anxiety receives its specific character. In man, birth provides a prototypic experience of this kind, and we are therefore inclined to regard anxiety-states as a reproduction of the trauma of birth.

But the affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration.

As the neurosis proceeds, we often find that the endeavour to undo a traumatic experience is a motive of first-rate importance in the formation of symptoms.

Terror does things to you. It hardens a part of you. I have heard people call others hard-hearted, but it's not your heart that turns to stone when something awful happens. It's your gut, where all real feelings come from. That was froze up inside me and I didn't long to thaw it.

My highs can be very high, but my lows are often still very low. I have never forgotten the feeling of the railings under my hands. The cold metal, the rush of traffic, the lorry horn. It is always within me. Always part of me. I was a slip away from tragedy. I know I am still.

I feel scalded inside. Like, third-degree burns. But no one can see them. (Fliss talking about her divorce.)

Commit cruelty on a person long enough and the mind begins to go.

He has the thousand-yard stare.

the stabbing daggers, stab of memory raking me insane.

In early 1993, when I was 12, I was separated from my family as the Sierra Leone civil war, which began two years earlier, came into my life.

The single worst moment of my life... was the moment I was born.

Symptoms like anxiety, depression, aggression, alcohol or drug use, are responses to physical and emotional pain that has its roots in traumatic experiences from childhood and later in life.

It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

I had a period in my life when I was eight or nine when I was so scared of dying that I wouldn't go out of our house for a whole year.

When you were out in the bush and someone screamed, it was easy to tell the difference between someone who was scared and someone who'd been hit bad. There's both pain and terror in the scream when someone gets hit. Suddenly I heard someone screaming that way, and, God, it sounded so fucking horrible, and I couldn't figure out who it was. Then, and instant later, my mind caught up with my body, and I realized the scream was coming from me.

The Arab Spring has been a dismal failure. All indications are that what comes next will be significantly worse than what existed before, in Tunisia and everywhere else, and the traumatic events up to now have already caused untold havoc and violence and made the lives of innocent ordinary people even more miserable than they already were. Socially and economically, the Arab Spring has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen, and Syria by decades.

Rather like "Orwellian", the term "Kafkaesque" has come to be used, often enough by those who have not read a word of Kafka , to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night….