Quotes About Trauma

The nineteenth century lynching mob cuts off ears, toes, and fingers, strips off flesh, and distributes portions of the body as souvenirs among the crowd.

My parents were born in the 1930s, and they experienced the air raids on Tokyo.

A fourteen year old to steal my virginity on the moor and rape me till I come.

A small girl became increasingly paralysed by her parents' frequently violent rows. Sometimes she would spend hours standing completely still in the toilet, simply because that was where she happened to be when the fight began. Finally, in moments of calm, she would take bottles of milk from the fridge or doorstep and leave them in places where she may later become trapped. Her parents were unable to understand why they found bottles of sour milk in every room in the house.

Amelia Stapleton had frozen herself in a kind artificial girlhood which apparently resonated with the ghost of Georgiana Truelove. In fact, I saw a dreadful symmetry between the two: both of them unable to grow up, both of them preserved like insects in amber at this point of trauma, where their lives ended-Miss Stapleton's only metaphorically, but Georgiana Truelove's with a most dreadful literality.

I have come to understand that the same action of unjustified escalation most often comes from one of two positions: Supremacy, or Trauma. And in realizing this, I am surprised by the similar behaviors expressed by these two divergent experiences.

Perhaps because Supremacy in some produces Trauma in others, they can become mirror images.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state.

Traumatized behavior and Supremacy ideology resemble each other [and] ...produce distorted thinking that seeks unreasonable levels of control over other people and does not tolerate self-criticism or difference.

The traumatized person's sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty and they know it is possible.

A thirteen-year-old girl had got herself pregnant, and had been badly beaten by her labourer father.

Some things are so frightful that a bit of madness is the only sane response. You know that, don't you?

what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life.

Ramon Artagaveytia once survived a sinking ship in 1871. He was so scared from this experience he didn't get on another ship till forty one years later. Unfortunately for him that ship was Titanic.

I haven't seen this much blood since those driver's ed films they showed in high school.

People who need therapy are in Afghanistan. They've seen horrible human cruelty and degradation, but they don't have time or the money for therapy.

It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system.

Early days, I was a bit racked , particularly when I did Hitler, for CBS . That was hellish. That stayed with me for quite a long time.

After that, anytime she caught me near a kitchen she'd start in on me. So I have an automatic sphincter clench any time I reach for a pan. (Devyn)

If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.

To the rear, sir—he's lost his leg!

I couldn't feel anything either, shock alone possessing me, depriving me of any emotional meaning.

Of course during all this, the children are once again abandoned, left to look after each other, with no one around to help translate the horror of the afternoon.