Quotes About Trauma

Studies on the phenomenon indicate that a person with a high tolerance for pain is likely to also have above-average capacity to cope with the stress of a job layoff or a cancer diagnosis, and this same person is more likely as well to have experienced a moderate amount of psychological trauma in his or her past. It would appear that a certain amount of misfortune is needed to toughen the mind against suffering and hardship, but excessive trauma leaves scar tissue.

In younger years, he'd wonder whether he was more doctor or writer. Since the dark period back home, he questioned if he was really either—witnessing death all around him had robbed him of both.

After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things others people didn't know.

My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles.

Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it.

The first time I had a pap smear done, I was so traumatized, I now take prescription Xanax to avoid having panic attacks when I get pap smears done now. And I'm only 24. How many more am I going to have to have for the rest of my life? What am I going to do when I want to have children and every doctor wants to shove his/her fingers and tools inside me?

I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.

At his last checkup the pediatrician had observed the howling red face and trembling limbs, and said that infants process grief as trauma. Then suggested they try a different formula.

Trauma never went away. You could try to block it, or bury it, or bludgeon it into submission. But something with that much power couldn't really be contained. The best you could hope for was a way to channel it.

sublimation, a primitive part of her mind trying to propitiate her guilt over having failed to protect Nason. Over having inadvertently doomed her. Trauma never went away. You could try to block it, or bury it, or bludgeon it into submission. But something with that much power couldn't really be contained. The best you could hope for was a way to channel it.

you know how our high street banks got started? From the fortunes Mr Lloyd and Mr Barclay made from making Jamaica into a concentration camp for slaves to grow sugar. Then the world sugar price collapsed and we gave them independence and pissed off. Like walking out on this totally traumatised family you've been bashing up for several hundred years.

just a moment his own consciousness had plunged through his daddy's darkness to an incomprehensible word much more frightening than DIVORCE, and that word was SUICIDE.

Until that afternoon in October four years ago, I hadn't known dogs could scream.

Graffiti scratched on a desk of the Barker Street Grammar School in Chamberlain: Carrie White eats shit.

and now he knew what it was like to be on the inside, caught in a web woven from your sickest fears and most traumatic experiences. There was no way to retreat from it, and no way to cut through it

Dr. Martin Seligman in his excellent book, Flourish, calls the practice of instantly finding the benefit in adversity "post-traumatic growth," and he backs it up with rather thrilling and extensive research studies. Our society and media are fixated on post-traumatic stress because of the strong bias toward (and financial interest in) tragedy.

It's highly unpleasant to be gassed, but then it's just as unpleasant to be perforated or shredded by pieces of metal.

Any child soldier has to go through a lot of love, care and understanding to become normal.

Love is the victim's response to the rapist.

I lost my childhood. I didn't play football or video games. Or have birthdays or the love of a family.

WENDY'S BABY girl, screams like she's been stabbed.

Freud believed that much of mental illness was due to repression, which is arguably and reasonably considered a form of self-deception. For him, memories of traumatically troubling events were unconsciously banished to perdition in the unconscious, where they rattled around and caused trouble, like poltergeists in a dungeon.

If someone is badly hurt at some point in life—traumatized—the dominance counter can transform in a manner that makes additional hurt more rather than less likely.

The sexual abuse of children is distressingly common.156 However, it's not as common as poorly trained psychotherapists think, and it also does not always produce terribly damaged adults.157 People vary in their resilience. An event that will wipe one person out can be shrugged off by another. But therapists with a little second-hand knowledge of Freud often axiomatically assume that a distressed adult in their practice must have been subject to childhood sexual abuse.