Best 646 quotes in «trauma quotes» category

Don't be scared of scars. They just tell stories that are hard to hear.

Do we as a society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma. And the answer is that we plainly do. There are times and places however when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences. ... [Dr. Freireich] understood from his own childhood experiences that it is possible to emerge from even the darkest hell healed and restored.

Each child, woman, and man should know a limit of containment. Nobody should be asked to hold more.

Dr. Talbon was struck by another very important thing. It all hung together. The stories Cheryl told — even though it was upsetting to think people could do stuff like that — they were not disjointed They were not repetitive in terms of "I've heard this before". It was not just she'd someone trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with them again [after telling the story once and dealing with it]. Once it was done, it was done. And I think that was probably the biggest factor for me in her believability. I got no sense that she was using these stories to make herself a really interesting person to me so I'd really want to work with her, or something. Or that she was just living in this stuff like it was her life. Once she dealt with it and processed it, it was gone. We just went on to other things. 'Throughout the whole thing, emotionally Cheryl was getting her life together. Parts of her were integrating where she could say,"I have a sense that some particular alter has folded in with some basic alter", and she didn't bring it up again. She didn't say that this alter has reappeared to cause more problems. That just didn't happen. The therapist had learned from training and experience that when real integration occurs, it is permanent and the patient moves on.

Dr. Peter Levine, who has worked with trauma survivors for twenty-five years, says the single most important factor he has learned in uncovering the mystery of human trauma is what happens during and after the freezing response. He describes an impala being chased by a cheetah. The second the cheetah pounces on the young impala, the animal goes limp. The impala isn’t playing dead, she has “instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she does immediately thereafter is vitally important. She shakes and quivers every part of her body, clearing the traumatic energy she has accumulated.

Each flower is a secret language. When I wear a combination of flowers together, it's like I'm writing my own secret code that no one else can understand unless they know my language.

Early relational trauma results from the fact that we are often given more to experience in this life than we can bear to experience consciously. This problem has been around since the beginning of time, but it is especially acute in early childhood where, because of the immaturity of the psyche and/or brain, we are ill-equipped to metabolize our experience. An infant or young child who is abused, violated or seriously neglected by a caretaking adult is overwhelmed by intolerable affects that are impossible for it to metabolize, much less understand or even think about.

Elke tegenspoed laat een litteken achter, al verbergen we onze wonden in een poging ze te vergeten. De wanhoop en de waanzin van het leven laten ons dingen doen die we niet van onszelf hadden kunnen denken.

...el trauma que el niño sufre no es la agresión exterior, sino la huella psíquica que queda de la agresión; lo importante no es la naturaleza del impacto, sino la señal que deja, impresa sobre la superficie del yo".

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted body image and feelings of body shame. For some women, eating disorders are related to the loss of control over their bodies during the sexual abuse and serve as a means of feeling in control of their bodies now. Eating disorders can also be indicative of the developmental stage and age at which the sexual abuse began. Women with anorexia and bulimia report that they were sexually abused either at the age of puberty or during puberty, when their bodies were beginning to develop and they felt a great deal of body shame from the abuse. By contrast, women with compulsive eating report that the sexual abuse occurred before the age of puberty; they used food for comfort.

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

Estefania was an observant mother, but not for the sake of her children.

Er bestaat geen vacuüm in je hart, als je je hart sluit voor liefde, neemt iets anders plaats op de troon van liefde.

Even if Kevin is no longer in Beartown, they still have to reclaim the things he stole. Twilight. Solitude. The courage to wear earbuds when it's dark, the freedom to not look over your shoulder the whole time.

Even though she looks the same as she always has, and the world goes on the way it always has, she isn’t the same on the inside. It’s as though she’s been paused on a single day, a single moment, as though she is stale, slowly rotting on the inside. It scares her, this standstill. There are days she wishes she’d corrode faster, until nothing is left. Those days are the worst, yet still somehow better than the ones in which she wants everything to go back to the way it was.

En los momentos más terribles de la vida solemos caer en una suerte de irresponsabilidad protectora y en vez de pensar en lo que nos ocurre dirigimos la atención a trivialidades.

Estefania tried to deracinate the hostile voices that pottered around her mind, yet she felt threatened and paranoid, lamenting the state she had put herself in.

Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of the most unequal relationships imaginable. It is no accident that incest occurs most often precisely in the relationship where the female is most powerless. The actual sexual encounter may be brutal or tender, painful or pleasurable; but it is always, inevitably, destructive to the child. The father, in effect, forces the daughter to pay with her body for affection and care which should be freely given. p4

Every painful memory you have which keeps recurring is simply your unconscious mind trying to protect you by reminding you of experiences which caused you pain and which it does not wish you to experience in the future. This is a protection mechanism which keeps you alive. Fortunately it is possible to preserve the learnings of the memory and turn off the disturbing memory itself. When one does that they are no longer the slave to their past memories but enjoy a mastery of their life and ability to live and respond authentically in the present.

Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.

Feelings are feelings, no matter when they happen. Our bodies don't stop being ours just because worse things happen to other people.

Feelings are not to be suppressed or fixed — they’re to be acknowledged.

First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.

Finally, if you resolve that the trouble you're enduring now is indeed significant and will matter in a year, then consider what the experience can teach you. Focusing on the lessons you can learn from a stress, irritant, or ordeal will help soften its blow. The lessons that those realities impart could be patience, perseverance, loyalty, or courage. Or perhaps you're learning open-mindedness, forgiveness, generosity, or self-control. Psychologists call this posttraumatic growth, and it's one of the vital tools used by happy, resilient people in facing the inevitable perils and hardships of life.

Flashlight beams danced crazily

For Alice, falling in love was nothing else but feeling her insides set on fire. The feeling consumed her, as if she'd somehow always known him and had been searching for him just as long.

For Alice, falling in love was noting else but feeling her insides set on fire. The feeling consumed her, as if she'd somehow always known him and had been searching for him just as long. Here he was.

For anyone who wonders what it's like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it's like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It's having outbursts of anger for what seems like no apparent reason, for even the smallest of offenses. It's forgetting how to be your once cheerful, perky self, and having to relearn basic social skills when mingling with new people (especially if those people are ignorant, or just plain terrible at showing sympathy). It takes a while to re-learn all those basic skills. Maybe...it's possible. Maybe you have to want your life back first, before it can start repairing itself But then you also have to accept that the mending process may take the rest of your life. I don't think there's a set time limit for it.

Get acquainted with your shadow, or find yourself surprised when a crisis emerges.

Forgetting is easier than having to remember for as long as it takes not to hurt anymore.

For in other ways a woman is full of fear, defenseless, dreads the sight of cold steel; but, when once she is wronged in the matter of love, no other soul can hold so many thoughts of blood.

Freud had a word for such reenactments: ‘The compulsion to repeat.

Everyone around me was allowed, permitted to fall apart; yet I had to think twice. I couldn't bear to take another dip into an ocean of solitude for another taste of ostracization. I felt I would die.

Grief is not an enlightenment program for a select few. No one needs intense, life-changing, loss to become whoever they are "meant" to be. The universe is not causal in that way: you need to become something, so life gives you this horrible experience in order to make it happen.

Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.

Grief is times bailiff sent to evict you from your old life. Its black warrant demands of you hard labour. There can be no escape of reprieve. You must toil laying down the foundation stones of acceptance, stone by stone, until you have paved your way to your new life.

Grandiosity is when we are wrapped up in winning life's false contest. This happens only when we live to impress the abusive parents in our heads, not when we are soberly and philosophically working to advance civilization.

Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.

Have courage, take heart.

He’d heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it firsthand.

He asks, in a softer voice, "Does your arm still hurt?" You touch it with your hand. The big ache is gone, leaving only the little, underneath ache that will gather and swell against the bone. The blood leaks out of the vein where he grabbed you. But you say, "It's better now.

He was not a prisoner of those memories. He was their warden.

He would not live the life of his daughter by falling apart and not giving her anything but anticipated grief and collateral heartache. He wanted to imprint paternal love on her body. Maybe she would be strong and regenerated enough to stay, and maybe his intense affection would work its magic.

Hiding my pain and acting strong, afraid to cry and show my tears, I struggle with all this years later.

[H]is flames were devouring her past.

His expression mirrored what I felt—the black-hole suck of exhaustion that strikes after a trauma. When everything has changed and your messed-up brain is flying around the stars—then your body and all its needs imposes itself, cutting you off from madness.

His wife killed him. Too simple. His childhood, his mother, his father, his siblings? Even if the scars of childhood heal, you never grow out of being vulnerable. Age is no shield against trauma.

Home.” This was my mantra, my four-letter savior.

How can he call it all fun? Does all this. all this trauma and torture that he made me go through means nothing? What if he had to go through the same, what then? What if his legs would be itching right now from all the pain that they spent being dragged?

Hanya mereka yang mengenal trauma, mereka yang pernah dicakar sejarah, tahu benar bagaimana menerima kedahsyatan dan keterbatasan yang bernama manusia