Quotes About Trauma

You are not responsible for what was done to you as a defenseless child.

I estimate the number [of incest victims] to be somewhere between ten and twenty million Americans...

The shock of a sudden death, Joan Didion attests, is "obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.

For in the sequel to Gilead (which is really a prequel), later-life lovers must contend with the aftershocks of trauma. Love that arrives late can come after great pain, as Shakespeare knew. Yet that pain may not arrest or numb but burn or blister a later-life lover, making her wince at the touch of the hand she wants to hold. Our

The emotional toll itself was exhausting. Her dreams were haunted by visions of the rape and its aftermath, the violation of everything that made her human.

Based on the reading she'd done about rape trauma, Margie knew she wasn't crazy, but suffering from PTSD.

The expected mental health consequences of forcing a woman to carry her rapist's baby to term, and having to raise it despite an uncertain future, were well documented. Could be, she'd end up crazy after all.

He had firsthand knowledge of getting punched in the face, and it was an experience he didn't want to repeat.

Her father evicts Vina from her body when he makes her body a bad place to be. He is killing Vina in those minutes, and he believes he has this right. Emily Birch is now deep inside the Second South. Her family helped make it, and her father has maintained it. He is it, and she is him.

In other words, if I say that you abused, neglected, bullied, or traumatized me, then you did. As Haslam writes, evaluations about whether emotional abuse, trauma, or neglect occurred are today based on the child's perception of that behavior, even if that behavior would look benign to an outside observer or exist independently of the parent's intentions or emotions. It's what I feel that matters.

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.

They seemed to arrive at some form of friendship. Maybe they were like a couple of weary soldiers who went through a war together, side by side in the trenches, and having no inclination to relive the old battles found a certain comfort in the simple knowledge that they'd been young together and present at the same terrible moments of bloodshed. Even though, in their case the injury sustained there was my mother's t the hands of my father.

Le hacía acordar y le hacía doler todavía, sin embargo se sentía tan golpeado que casi podía recordar los golpes que vendrían. Su miedo era el recuerdo del dolor futuro. Eso.

Trauma robs the victim of a sense of power and control; the guiding principle of recovery is to restore power and control. The first task of recovery is to establish the survivor's safety. This task takes precedence over all others, for no therapeutic workman possibly succeed if safety has not been adequately secured…

MOST PEOPLE have no knowledge or understanding of the psychological changes of captivity. Social judgment of chronically traumatized people therefore tends to be extremely harsh.

Survivors feel unsafe in their bodies. Their emotions and their thinking feel out of control. They also feel unsafe in relation to other people.

In order to gain their freedom, survivors may have to give up almost everything else. Battered women may lose their homes, their friends, and their livelihood. Survivors of childhood abuse may lose their families. Political refugees may lose their homes and their homeland. Rarely are the dimensions of this sacrifice fully recognized.

To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.

Working with victimized people requires a committed moral stance. The therapist is called upon to bear witness to a crime. She must affirm a position of solidarity with the victim. This does not mean a simplistic notion that the victim can do no wrong; rather, it involves an understanding of the fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience and the need for a resolution that restores some sense of justice.

Dissociation appears to be... the internal mechanism by which terrorized people are silenced.

THE ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.

Repetition is the mute language of the abused child.

People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory and fragmented manner.

Denying the reality of my experience—that was the most harmful. Not being able to trust anyone was the most serious effect. . . . I know I acted in ways that were despicable. But I wasn't crazy. Some people go around acting like that because they feel hopeless. Finally I found a few people along the way who have been able to feel OK about me even though I had severe problems. Good therapists were those who really validated my experience.