Best 646 quotes in «trauma quotes» category

Mind control is built on lies and manipulation of attachment needs. Valerie Sinason, (Forward)

Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back.

Minute by minute, a day passed.

Most dissociative parts influence your experience from the inside rather than exert complete control, that is, through passive influence. * In fact, many parts never take complete control of a person, but are only experienced internally. * Frequent switching may be a sign of severe stress and inner conflict in most individuals.

Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current.

My childhood would help me survive; in turn, surviving would erase my childhood.

My God, what have they done to you? This isn't a man, it's a broken kite.

My only inheritance from you was your torment

My own mother was evacuated at the age of five during World War Two and my father was a young man working as an ARP warden. This novel is purely fictitious, but I wanted to explore the traumas that many ordinary people of the war generation suffered, experiences which would be quite unimaginable to many of us today and then to contrast them with the issues we all face in the modern day.

My parents also had a tough time recognizing me at first. because my eyes were black and swollen shut and I had two tubes coming out of my head.

My outer shell may reveal trauma, but my inner self, my soul, sings for my Savior--for what He did not withhold, for the grit through which my story shines, for my "all-rightness" despite what was clearly not right . . . over and over again.

My sister don't talk much. When she does, it's only to me, in moth-winged whispers, and only when we're alone.

My traumatic experience was life changing

Not yet do you feel it. Wait for the future.

—¿Nada de playa entonces? Negué y respondí: —La playa me pegó de pequeña

Nobody said that that admission, that truth, settled something within them—not a reassurance of purpose, but a profound, faraway recognition, something so deeply buried inside them that the only thing they felt was that tiny fragment of themselves, calmly and easily, open up.

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

no-one would want to go through a traumatic experience but when you’ve survived something life-shattering and risen above it, you achieve a kind of serenity.

No, Sky. You didn't tell her everything…you told you everything. Those things happened to you, not to someone else. They happened to Hope. They happened to Sky. They happened to the best friend that I loved all those years ago, and they happened to the best friend I love who’s looking back at me right now.

Not one person on earth is immune to crime and trauma.

Naturally the descendants of survivors meet regularly with phenomena in the course of their lives which, for the parents, are in associative connection with the suppressed fearful memories. These phenomena are carriers of grave memories for the survivor parent. The heightened emotional tension, hyperactivity of the parents and grandparents when the child eats or excretes draws the child's attention to the fact that behind these phenomena lies some unknown, painful, shameful secret.

No matter how much you cry, the tears will dry. No matter how many nightmares, flashbacks, visions, or terrors you endure, they will pass. To weather these in order to find your true self and the happiness you deserve, that is not a risk. To waste the time you have in this body, never showing your soul to yourself or anyone else, living in fearful misery – that is really the most dangerous thing you can do.

No one is ever going to understand. If it ever comes out, everyone’s just going to think I’m crazy. That I’m young and I don’t know what I’m talking about. That I’m a victim and my feelings are all a result of my trauma. I think that’s what hurts the most. I lived through all of it. I saw and felt and experienced more in one Summer than I think most people experience their entire lives, but in the end? I’m just a girl who no one will ever understand. There’s so much about me that will never be the same.

No one ever told me how sorrow traumatizes your heart, making you think it will never beat exactly the same way again. No one ever told me how grief feels like a wet sock in my mouth. One I’m forced to breathe through, thinking that with each breath I’ll come up short and suffocate.

No puedes dejar que el miedo se enquiste.

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].

No whim of fate, no Freudian trauma, no loss of a loved one will be as devastating to the human spirit as some prolonged ambivalent relationship that leaves us forever unable to say goodbye.

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? “Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic,” Bonanno told me, in December. “To call something a ‘traumatic event’ belies that fact.” He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate. The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning—perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community—then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn’t inherent in the event; it resides in the event’s psychological construal. It’s for this reason, Bonanno told me, that “stressful” or “traumatic” events in and of themselves don’t have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. “The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning,” he said. “It’s only predictive if there’s a negative response.” In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn’t guarantee that you’ll suffer going forward. What matters is whether that adversity becomes traumatizing.

Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I'd never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked. After an eternity (lying in bed with my heart jackhammering, adrenaline firing me like a strobe light, feeling the last few threads that held my mind together stretch to a snapping point) something would happen to break the vortex's hold—a nurse coming in so that I had to make mechanical cheerful chitchat, an uncontrollable rush of sleep—and I would clamber up out of it, shaky and weak as a half-drowned animal. But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.

One in four girls will experience sexual abuse by the time she is sixteen, and 48 percent of all rapes involve a young woman under the age of eighteen. It’s not surprising then, that in a society where sexual abuse of young women is rampant, many women never share their stories. They remain hidden and invisible.

One of Coin's men lays a hand on my arm. Its not an aggressive move, really, but after the arena's I react defensively to any unfamiliar touch. I jerk my arm free and take off running down the halls. My mind does a quick inventory of my odd little hiding places and i wind up in the supply closet, curled up against a crate of chalk.

One of life's greatest blessings, Lita had once realized, goes completely unnoticed until it's gone. It is forgetting. Forgetting a terrible memory so completely that you forget there was anything to forget in the first place. It's just gone. Vanished. That is, until it comes back. And the memories always come back, one way or another, but most especially in dreams.

One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic and above all survivors…we’re not that way from perversity, and we cannot just let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.

One hundred twenty-nine women with documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked about abuse history. Seventeen years following the initial report of the abuse, 80 of the women recalled the victimization. One in 10 women (16% of those who recalled the abuse) reported that at some time in the past they had forgotten about the abuse. Those with a prior period of forgetting--the women with "recovered memories"--were younger at the time of abuse and were less likely to have received support from their mothers than the women who reported that they had always remembered their victimization. The women who had recovered memories and those who had always remembered had the same number of discrepancies when their accounts of the abuse were compared to the reports from the early 1970s. Recovered memories of abuse in women with documented child sexual victimization histories. Journal of Traumatic Stress. 1995 Oct;8(4):649-73.

One of the main problems for anyone working in health care, social work or addiction treatment is the struggle to hold on to some version of a safe world for ourselves when we are seeing the evidence and hearing the stories of trauma that offer other important and disturbing information: that the world, for very many people, is not a safe place.

Only a self capable of being jolted out of its mundane complacency is up to the task of both hearing what repair demands and helping to invent new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends.

Only Yeong-hye, docile and naive, had been unable to deflect their father's temper or put up any form of resistance. Instead, she had merely absorbed all her suffering inside her, deep into the marrow of her bones. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind's extreme dissociation is that each ego state is totally without knowledge of the other. Because of this, the researchers for the CIA and the Department of Defense believed they could take a personality, train him or her to be a killer and no other ego stares would be aware of the violence that was taking place. The personality running the body would be genuinely unaware of the deaths another personality was causing. Even torture could not expose the with, because the personality experiencing the torture would have no awareness of the information being sought. Earlier, such knowledge was gained from therapists working with adults who had multiple personalities. The earliest pioneers in the field, such as Dr. Ralph Alison, a psychiatrist then living in Santa Cruz, California, were helping victims of severe early childhood trauma. Because there were no protocols for treatment, the pioneers made careful notes, publishing their discoveries so other therapists would understand how to help these rare cases. By 1965, the information was fairly extensive, including the knowledge that only unusually intelligent children become multiple personalities and that sexual trauma endured by a restrained child under the age of seven is the most common way to induce hysteric dissociation.

Our baby was laid on the cool metal, on his side, six inches long, eyes closed, mouth open slightly, thin arms and legs, little red fingers and toes. You looked without blinking. I wanted to put my hands over your eyes, to block what you were seeing, to stop the gasps that you expelled.

Our brokenness summons light into the deepest crevices in our hearts.

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations.

Our favorite film is Vertigo. Amy Eleni and I must watch it seventeen or eighteen times a year, and with each viewing our raptness grows looser and looser; we don't need the visuals anymore--one or the other of us can go into the kitchen halfway through and call out the dialogue while making up two cups of Horlicks. From the minute you see empty, beautiful, blond Madeleine Elster, you know she is doomed because she exists in a way that Scottie, the male lead, just doesn't. You know that Madeleine is in big trouble, because she's a vast wound in a landscape where wounds aren't allowed to stay open--people have to shut up and heal up. She's in trouble because the film works to a plan that makes trauma speak itself out, speak itself to excess until it dies; this film at the peak of its slyness, when people sweat and lick their lips excessively and pound their chests and grab their hair and twist their heads from side to side, performing this unspeakable torment.

Our inner experience is that which we think, feel, remember, perceive, sense, decide, plan and predict. These experiences are actually mental actions, or mental activity (Van der Hart et al., 2006). Mental activity, in which we engage all the time, may or may not be accompanied by behavioral actions. It is essential that you become aware of, learn to tolerate and regulate, and even change major mental actions that affect your current life, such as negative beliefs, and feelings or reactions to the past the interfere with the present. However, it is impossible to change inner experiences if you are avoiding them because you are afraid, ashamed or disgusted by them. Serious avoidance of you inner experiences is called experiential avoidance (Hayes, Wilson, Gifford, & Follettte, 1996), or the phobia of inner experience (Steele, Van der Hart, & Nijenhuis, 2005; Van der Hart et al., 2006).

Our REM sleep in 90-minute bursts, in a 24 hour cycle "digests" trauma that is experienced on a daily basis. In dreaming, the brain compares the trauma with early memory traces of similar experience, and files the memories of the day's events according to an affect-based associative system for further use and potential survival value. Comforting figures may appear in the dream to give care, advice, counsel, and relief, if necessary. The nightly dream process helps the dreamer receive positive resolution of his or her experience, and the dreamer moves on to the next day's activities restored, refreshed, and prepared for survival-based action.

O what will she do, a soul bitten into with wrong?

Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world...

Pain & suffering requires time, awareness, and an intentional practice of self-love to disentangle.

Papa Jack whispered, ‘But not the same. Never the same. It all does something to you. The little things as well as the big. You might go to sleep one person and wake so slightly different, and all because of a dream you had. You can’t hope to go back. Men lose themselves trying it.

Pain is inevitable... Suffering is optional. We will all have to endure trauma and challenges. What matters is how we move forward afterward. Do we keep carrying the trauma and its causes in our mind? Or can we find a way to let go of them, to end our own suffering?...This is where mindfulness can help us.

Part of the process in healing from trauma, like recovering from addiction, is developing connection and support with others.