Best 358 quotes in «ptsd quotes» category

What happened?” Albert asked. Taylor looked at Sam. Sam said nothing. He stared. First at his own light, hovering in the air. Then at Taylor. He looked pale and almost frail. Like he was suddenly a much, much older person. “Kid was whipped,” Taylor said. “It looked like what happened to Sam.” Sam lowered his head and wrapped his hands behind his neck. He seemed to be trying to hold on to his head, pressing it hard like it might explode.

What if I lose what little control I have left? I may live in a prison now, but at least I know my way around it.

What's different about you? Why does it make you a pussy if you get help, but not the rest of the team? Oh, I get it. You're the Cobra. You get within striking distance of the enemy, and it's over. But if it all goes sideways and the wrong men die, you don't need help like the rest of us mere mortals.

What was it like? Hell if I know. But next time someone asks.... I'll answer crooked, and I'll answer long. And when they get confused or angry, I'll smile. Finally, I'll think. Someone who understands.

What we tell ourselves, will ourselves to believe, the circumstances we create, the decisions we make, are indicative, I believe, of our hearts.

When death settles in, it evicts the soul and devours the flesh, and reduces a whole life to nothing but dry bones and a mere smudge of bio matter.

When experiences or emotions become too overwhlming, the mind clevely encapsulates the material and stores it for safe-keeping. Many people respond this way in the face of trauma, but the additional step that occurs in this process, in the case of DID, is the formation of distinct ego states that carry the experience.

When he first said my diagnosis, I couldn't believe it. There must be another PTSD than post-traumatic stress disorder, I thought. I have only heard of war veterans who have served on the front lines and seen the horrors of battle being diagnosed with PTSD. I am a Beverly Hills housewife, not a soldier. I can't have PTSD. Well, I was wrong. Housewives can get PTSD, too, and yours, truly did.

When I have flash backs from PTSD I wish my mind came with a delete key.

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says.

When it comes to mental illness most of the diagnoses are similar or the same yet they can never display how we individually go through our pain.

When I'm triggered, I think, "This will last forever" or "What if this lasts forever?" I get thoughts about how I should give up, run away, hide, protect myself. These thoughts, I cannot change. What I can change is how I respond to them. Will I unconditionally believe these ideas, or will I accept them as side effects of the temporary experience of pain? Will I act on each thought that arises in the burning fire, or will I hold myself gently and say, "It'll be okay. I know it hurts. I love you"? My power lies in these choices.

While a psychiatric diagnosis can serve a purpose in treatment plans, it should not become a tool to discredit a person's disclosure of abuse.

when I was a kid I use to put a puzzle together over and over until I got really good at it so one day I turned all the pieces upside down and built it, then I understood the true nature of the puzzle

When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.

When we deployed, in our heads, the towel we left hanging next to the shower to dry, would still be hanging there when we got back. Well, it won’t be. If it is, some important questions need to be asked.

When you have mental illness it's common to be shunned by your family or friends it wouldn't happen if they knew the pain you were in.

Whether it’s an Iraqi widow mourning her dead loved ones standing helplessly in the rubble of her former home or a dying soldier in an Iraqi city street asking, “Why, God? Why is this happening? Where are you?” I can’t help but wonder the same. You realize that there is no justice, no karmic retribution swift enough, and that happy endings are a terrible, terrible lie. We are all subject to the same blind boot stomp and our luck is merely where we happen to be standing when death inevitably comes roaring down upon us.

Who supports the troops? The troops support the troops.

Why didn't I report it? Because when you are sexually assaulted by a relative, it's terribly complicated. Initially, I felt shock, numb, and powerless. Keep in mind, sexual assault is an act of violence; not sex. In addition, sexual assault is about power. It's common for victims to feel helpless.

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.

With even the slightest upset, detachment soon followed. I didn’t lose sleep over men, and I was too restless to be tied down. The grass didn’t even have time to grow around my feet before I was planning my next escape – whether it was to another state or out of someone’s life.

Worry only about what you control. The rest is war.

Years ago I had realized I was blaming myself for it. People and doctors would tell me it wasn't my fault, but I couldn't “BELIEVE” it! Then I was talking to my friend Kieran and he explained to me in a way that I could PERCEIVE that I was not at fault. No one else could ever do that before, though many tried. Many, many people had tried to tell me it wasn't my fault, but I was convinced it was my fault because I was trying to cheer up my dad.

Years ago, I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no flashbacks. I wouldn't wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn't smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn't come, and I am no longer waiting for it. A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don't always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses.

Yes, she fears the cuffs, the cross and the whip, but she will get past this. Such problems, even with time, do not go away on their own. They must be addressed. André Chevalier

Without trauma-informed treatment, traumatized clients may not respond optimally and they may even be re-traumatized by the mental health system if they are labeled as “treatment resistant” because the treatment does not address the core issue of trauma; some may be misunderstood as fabricating or exaggerating their trauma history or symptoms.

You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are wounded and in need of healing.

You know, it set you at war with yourself.

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.

You know how cats are. They'll heal themselves if you keep them locked up. In a couple of months his bones mended. But the fear didn't; it stayed in that cat's bones. He wasn't cocky no more. Now he jumps when I go by him with the wheelbarrow. Fear like that stays inside you forever if you don't find a way to get rid of it.

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.

You play those dimples like an exquisite orchestra, Mr. Boomer.

you'll never see my books on Vanity Fair I'm not the type of author they would want there

Your first sign something may be amiss comes quickly, the moment you get off the plane at the airport in Baltimore. After months of deprivation, American excess is overwhelming. Crowds of self-important bustling businessmen. Shrill and impatient advertising that saturates your eyes and ears. Five choices of restaurant, with a hundred menu items each, only a half-minute walk away at all times. In the land you just left, dinners are uniformly brown and served on trays when served at all. I was disoriented by the choice, the lights, the infinite variety of gummy candy that filled an entire wall of the convenience store, a gluttonous buffet repeated every four gates. The simple pleasure of a cup of coffee after a good night’s sleep, sleep you haven’t had since you received your deployment orders, seems overly simple when reunited with such a vast volume of overindulgent options. But the shock wears off, more quickly for some, but eventually for most. Fast food and alcohol are seductive, and I didn’t fight too hard. Your old routine is easy to fall back into, preferences and tastes return. It’s not hard to be a fussy, overstuffed American. After a couple of months, home is no longer foreign, and you are free to resume your old life. I thought I did. Resume my old life, that is. I was wrong.

I am also deeply concerned with the widespread, often undiagnosed, incidents of PTSD and the alarming suicide rates amongst our returning soldiers.

Across the road, at the edge of the yellow beach, an especially large wave rises to the sky, gathering strength and power, until it can't bear the strain any longer and dives for shore in a long, elegant undulation, from north to south. An instant later, the boom reaches us, like the firing of a seventy-five-millimeter artillery shell -- a sound I know all too well. My nerves flinch obediently.

I had experience with PTSD myself; probably that's why I felt so close to the soldiers and the testimony. Also, because I had experienced this myself, I wanted to make a really physical and carnal film.

Since PTSD is being exposed to death and the death of someone close, I felt really close to [the soldiers].

Abuse really is its own alphabet. Those who have not gone through it cannot understand it fully. The echos of violence hang in subconscious long after the threat is gone.

When my own son is going through what he goes through, coming back, I can certainly relate with other families, who kind of fill these ramifications of some PTSD.

According to Hoge and colleagues (2007), the key to reducing stigma is to present mental health care as a routine aspect of health care, similar to getting a check up or an X-ray. Soldiers need to understand that stress reactions-difficulty sleeping, reliving incidents in your mind, and emotional detachment-are common and expected after combat... The soldier should be told that wherever they go, they should remember that what they're feeling is "normal and it's nothing to be ashamed of.

A child's (or an adult's) nervous system may detect danger or a threat to life when the child enters a new environment or meets a strange person. Cognitively, there is no reason for them to be frightened. But often, even if they understand this, their bodies betray them. Sometimes this betrayal is private; only they are aware that their hearts are beating fast and contracting with such force that they start to sway. For others, the responses are more overt. They may tremble. Their faces may flush, or perspiration may pour from their hands and forehead. Still others may become pale and dizzy and feel precipitously faint.

Acknowledgement of the prevalence and impact of trauma challenges psychological theories that localize dysfunction within the individual while ignoring the contribution of social forces on adjustment (Brett, 1996; Ross, 2000).

Admitting the need for help may also compound the survivor's sense of defeat. The therapists Inger Agger and Soren Jensen, who work with political refugees, describe the case of K, a torture survivor with severe post-traumatic symptoms who adamantly insisted that he had no psychological problems: "K...did not understand why he was to talk with a therapist. His problems were medical: the reason why he did not sleep at night was due to the pain in his legs and feet. He was asked by the therapist...about his political background, and K told him that he was a Marxist and that he had read about Freud and he did not believe in any of that stuff: how could his pain go away by talking to a therapist?

Adversity has the remarkable ability of introducing the real you to yourself.

...a freeze response (dissociation, collapse, numbing, paralysis, deadness) during the incident that threatened your life or limb. Sometimes it's difficult for people to understand that this is really survival response...

After returning home from the Vietnam War in 1967, animals became his refuge from the stresses and horrors of war. Animals had also helped him stay sober for thirty-eight years. When he first met Michael at AA, he told him, "Anyone who's on the down-and-out heals himself with animals.

Alterations in regulation of affect (emotion) and impulse: Almost all people who are seriously traumatized have problems in tolerating and regulating their emotions and surges or impulses. However, those with complex PTSD and dissociative disorders tend to have more difficulties than those with PTSD because disruptions in early development have inhibited their ability to regulate themselves. The fact that you have a dissociative organization of your personality makes you highly vulnerable to rapid and unexpected changes in emotions and sudden impulses. Various parts of the personality intrude on each other either through passive influence or switching when your under stress, resulting in dysregulation. Merely having an emotion, such as anger, may evoke other parts of you to feel fear or shame, and to engage in impulsive behaviors to stop avoid the feelings.

Alone with thoughts of what should have long been forgotten, I let myself be carried away into the silent screams of delirium.