Quotes About Trauma

I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it... Never.

The automobile crash was... devastating in ways that I still cannot really bear to think about... It took me many years to recover. In some ways, I never have.

When you get hit in the head, you don't recover from that.

My mother had people lay hands on me to cast demons out of me when I was 8. Then two or three times when I was in college.

I hated myself. I hated people who made war. I hated people who were normal. I envied them. I wish I would be normal.

I mean I could not trust men again. I hated men. I hated humanity. How on earth can people sell each other?

The thing about abuse is it's just a cycle of hatred. The person who is gonna abuse you has been abused, and he continues that same cycle of hatred.

Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.

Wars are hard to look at head-on.

I had been, you know, held in the closet for two months and, you know, abused in all manner of ways. I was very good at doing what I was told.

I've seen the hell these people go through.

I remember my mother taking me as a very little kid to the roof of our home in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to look at the bombs exploding in the distance. She didn't want us to be scared by the booms and the strange flashes of light. It was her way of helping us to understand what was happening.

With 'Hereditary', I wanted to make a film about what bothers me about life.

I came from a tough childhood. There was a lot of stuff that I'd actually forgotten or that I'd blocked or hidden away until I started addressing it.

Tengo mujer y tres hijos. El mayor de ellos no tiene todavía seis años. Podéis coger a los cuatro y cortarles el cuerpo delante de mí y yo lo contemplaré sin rechistar. Pero no me llevéis a la habitación 101

At the heart of Vonnegut's voice is a humility my earnest young self didn't feel comfortable with: In it, I heard evidence of real humiliation. War really was hell, with hell being the place where whatever you normally counted on or leaned on was taken from you, absolutely. Bill Pilgrim is a skinny virginal dork, and when he gets to war, war leaps on his skinny dorkitude and devastates him unglamorously, and haunts him ever after.

There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground.

When I'm photographing, I think - like any rescue worker who deals with tragedy - you have to have some protective barrier around your heart so you can do your job. You tend to have a delayed reaction to things. I feel things more deeply after I put the camera down.

Open adoption, when it works, is fabulous. But when it goes wrong, it's so traumatizing for everybody.

My birth was managed so rottenly that my mother had eventually to have a hysterectomy, after which she was ill off & on till she dies for obscure reasons when I was just 7.

I find the English amazing how they got over 7/7. There were no multiple memorials with people sobbing as they would have been in America. There, they are constantly scaring people, but at the same time, people think nothing of going to see a therapist.

Social media is so immediate and in your face that I know many people have been helped and many people who have been traumatised by their entire timeline filled with 'me too.'

To be honest, I don't feel like I am able to say that I had a childhood, not in a way normal kids my age had. I had something that was specific to Bosnia in '90s, something I call a period of survival.

I was attacked by a dog when I was a toddler, and my injuries were so bad, I spent quite a bit of my childhood in and out of hospital. Books were absolutely my salvation during those years.