Best 646 quotes in «trauma quotes» category

It wasn't until I began to see my own trauma as a creation myth that I could truthfully begin to heal. A myth is only a myth after all. It is not set in stone. It was truth, but shouldn't be truth forever...The myth can change.

It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety. She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.

It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light.

I’ve seen daggers pierce the chest, Children dying in the road, Crawling things hooked and baited, Rapists bound and then castrated, Villains singed in public square. Yet none these sights did make me cringe Like when my Love cut all her hair.

I want to just go back to being the person I was before, but you can't stop being the person you've become. You just have to keep going forward.

I used to move gracefully. I used to know the word grace to the center of my bones. Now I seek it every day and fall short, inevitably, every day. I lost grace.

Looking at your own experience of abuse, many factors can influence the degree of traumatic impact you experience. Howe we handle stress in our lives varies; some of us have learned better coping strategies than others. The severity, intensity, frequency, and length of time the abusive episodes have lasted all strongly impact your response as well. Other powerful influences include the length of time your personal traumatic reaction lasts after your partner's abuse stops and your history, before you ever met your partner.

Loss has no friend, no allies, no benefit to the human spirit.

Love is the reason we grieve darling...and love is what will bring you back," Lindsay Gibson, Just Be

Maar voor diegenen onder ons die door het leven verwond zijn en wier littekens nog niet zijn geheeld, kan het pijnlijk en angstwekkend zijn om zich naar hun binnenste te keren. In zo'n geval is de toegang tot onze innerlijke bron van coherentie geblokkeerd. Zoiets gebeurt meestal als gevolg van een trauma waarbij de emoties zo overweldigend waren dat het emotionele brein en dus het hart niet meer functioneren zoals daarvoor. Dan zijn ze geen kompas meer, maar als een vlag in een wervelwind. Dan is er een andere manier om evenwicht te hervinden, een even verbazingwekkende als effectieve methode, die zijn oorsprong vindt in het mechanisme van de droom: de neuro-emotionele integratie door oogbewegingen.

Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while other are too numb to absorb new experiences – or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves.

Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn't be scared’... Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear.

Maybe it was our shared trauma, or maybe it was a combination of things, but I felt warmth emenate from my heart and spread throughout my chest.

I used to think that if I told someone about this, afterward I would have to run away from that person and never see them again.

I wanted to peel myself off of me.

I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads, all similar, at least as far as my brain was concerned, and so, lumped together as one. But nobody can handle a lifetime of experience in one moment. That's why depression crushes you.

I was walking along one day and smacked into this wall called hope deferred and depression and...grief. And it wouldn't budge. After some time, I realized this darkness I'd found myself in was called grief. I'd been through so much trauma, everything about me- including my body, emotions and soul, was shutting down and going into preservation mode. I entered a season where the battle caught up with me and I realized just how badly I'd been beaten and torn up, inside and out.

I watch what happens below and I am grateful that I can smell my smell, smell my smell and live while below me it happens, it happens that night bright as day, but I cannot name it, those things that happened while I watched, and I cannot speak something that was never in words, speak of things I cannot imagine, could never have seen even as I saw it, and I hide and am grateful for my smell crouched like an animal in that dark hot space

I wish I could wake up tomorrow with a mind that does not constantly remind me of the pain of yesterday.

Maybe tranquility is the dirt under my nails. I know it's there but I never feel like digging it out.

Memory has ambushed her again, slamming down a wall between her and the present moment. Sometimes it comes in order, like a story, sometimes in flashes, like a series of snapshots. Sometimes it comes in a split second, cutting through the middle of another thought. It grabs her and won't let her pay attention to what is being said around her. Other times it just settles softly down on her like a pillow, cutting off air.

Memory is narrative. It is not truth. It is the worst witness.

Memory is dynamic, it's alive.

Men we have never met took our son. They took him without our express permission. They tortured him then they … killed him. And there is no understanding it. There is no meaning. No coming to terms with it. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not ever. We will wake up every day for the rest of our lives and we will breathe razor blades and we will swim through bleach. And there is no escape from this. There is no comfort. There is just … blades and bleach. Until we die.

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.

Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.

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

Maybe sometimes it really could be as easy as leaving everything behind to begin again.

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.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 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].