Ptsd Quotes - Page 3

Amnesia was a soldier's best friend, and luckily, it could be taught. Missing limbs still ache, but missing memories never do.

Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I'm trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I'm doing is fine to tell people.

In 2006, there is no army of recovered memory therapists, and Dr McNally’s assumptions about patients with PTSD and those working in this field are troubling. Owing to past debates, those working in the PTSD field are perhaps more knowledgeable than others about malingered, factitious, and iatrogenic variants.Why, then, does Dr McNally attack PTSD as a valid diagnosis, demean those working in the field, and suggest that sufferers are mostly malingered or iatrogenic, while giving little or no consideration is given to such variants of other psychiatric conditions? Perhaps the trauma field has been “so often embroiled in serious controversy” (4, p 816) for the same reason Dr McNally and others have trouble imagining the traumatization of a Vietnam War cook or clerk. One theory suggests that there is a conscious decision on the part of some individuals to deny trauma and its impact. Another suggests that some individuals may use dissociation or repression to block from consciousness what is quite obvious to those who listen to real-life patients."Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences.

The blade sings to me. Faintly, so soft against my ears, its voice calms my worries and tells me that one touch will take it all away. It tells me that I just need to slide a long horizontal cut, and make a clean slice. It tells me the words that I have been begging to hear: this will make it ok.

The second factor helping to bring the dissociative disorders back into the mainstream was the Vietnam War. For sociological reasons originating outside psychology and psychiatry, the Vietnam War and the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that arose from it were not forgotten when the veterans returned home, as had been the case in the two world wars and the Korean War. The realization that real, severe trauma could have serious long-term psychopathological consequences was forced on society as a whole by Vietnam. Once this principle was accepted, it as a short leap to the conclusion that severe childhood trauma might have serious sequelae lasting into adulthood.

There were times when he felt as if he were being literally torn in two. Times when he raged at the injustice of what was happening to him, times when he was overwhelmed with guilt. There was no right and wrong anymore, which had been one of clear-cut lines for so long, was now so blurred that he was careening around like a compass struggling to find true north.

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

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

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.

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...

The Bad-Moon Girls appear on days when Dad doesn't know what he is thinking, or even if he is thinking. Those days can weigh less than air or more than an ocean. He has blank thoughts without feelings, followed by heavy feelings without thoughts. Time means nothing. A minute ticks by in the same rhythm as an entire day. He can look at one thing for an hour without moving. He can see me or Victor without knowing we are in the room, peering at us as if we are underwater, moving in warped slow motion.After the nothingness, he wades through a stagnant lake with the moon reflected in it, waiting for the daylight to rinse it away. He almost drowns while time ticks on. The sky is filled with black milk. No stars. Two days can pass before he surfaces.Dad's brain-switch, the focusing thing the rest of us switch on to make things look better, is a bit buggered. Those are his words, not mine.The Bad-Moon Girls whisper evil in Dad's ear, the sort of women who would set their own mother on fire if there were no other way to light their cigarettes. The trouble is, they can follow. Just as we were setting off to Clacton last autumn, they hunted him down.

The study of psychological trauma has repeatedly led into realms of the unthinkable and foundered on fundamental questions of belief.

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.

I want to give a name to my would-be killer. What should I call him? Something that will ease his presence in my mind, make him look foolish, like he is of no threat and never was, which is in fact the truth. I don't want his real name, which is meaningless to me, but instead something I control, something I own, some way to own that piano-idiot who attacked me.

Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be held indefinitely. In the absence of effective restorative experiences, the reactions to trauma will find expression. As the child gets older, he will turn the rage in upon himself or act it out on others, else it all will turn into madness.

I have suffered pains and torture of all natures. I have heard many say, "I am a survivor." I am not in a boat in a sea of torture awaiting to be rescued. I am a Conqueror, I am a Victor...I am one with myself.I AM FREE!

Been under treatment for PTSD and bipolar since 1992. I’m not ashamed of my illness. I’ve been shunned by many and I feel for those shunned, too.

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

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.

People with Complex PTSD suffer from more severe and frequent dissociation symptoms, as well as memory and attention problems, than those with simple PTSD. In addition to amnesia due to the activity of various parts of the self, people may experience difficulties with concentration, attention, other memory problems and general spaciness. These symptoms often accompany dissociation of the personality, but they are also common in people who do not have dissociative disorders. For example everyone can be spacey, absorbed in an activity, or miss an exit on the highway. When various parts of the personality are active, by definition, a person experiences some kind of abrupt change in attention and consciousness.

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves.

Something I'm not ready to name works itself under the grip of Charlies death and loosens it, and keeps the nightmare at bay when I fall back asleep.

Here, from her ashes you lay. A broken girl so lost in despondency that you know that even if she does find her way out of this labyrinth in hell, that she will never see, feel, taste, or touch life the same again.

The unique stigma of PTSD. The stigma of PTSD remains one of the most formidable barriers to effective care.

I am stupid, am I not? What more can I want? If you ask them who is brave--who is true--who is just--who is it they would trust with their lives?--they would say, Tuan Jim. And yet they can never know the real, real truth....

We don't go back to wallow, we go back to undo the lies that are back there that are holding its captive from living a wondrous and full life.

Rose lived the same life I did, but she doesn’t have PTSD. No bad dreams, no missing memories. Sometimes I’m jealous that she seems to deal with everything better than I do. But then I’ll catch her with this hollow look in her eyes and think maybe she just disguises everything for my benefit.Maybe she’s broken on the inside too.

A nightmare has taken hold of my body. Lunacy has dug its way inside my mind.

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.

BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies. The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.

Aside from clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, I have not met one person in war who thoroughly enjoyed killing. If someone ended up bragging over a kill, it was safe to assume that their story was mere fabrication or that they were one bad day away from an inpatient psychiatric ward. No matter how much someone may appear to deserve to be killed, something dies within us when we kill. It's contradictory, the antithesis of our species survival instinct.

Lose yourself in the music, not the fog

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit."If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

What do I want now? I want to be treated with the respect I deserve in the current VA system and not be retraumatized. I want the men who did this to me to be punished and if that isn't possible, I want reassurance what happened to me will never ever happen to another woman in the Armed services. I want some restitution of the damage I have.

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away.But the nature of pain is that it changes— it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too.- survivor of child sexual abuse

Lewis's mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known." (51) Part (McGrath suggests) of Lewis's well-documented search for truth and meaning, that search that ultimately led him to Christianity, emerges from the desire to make sense of his traumatic experience in ways that satisfied him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.

Am I awake or dreaming? It doesn’t matter anymore. When I close my eyes I dream of death and war. When I open my eyes I see death and war.

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.

Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness.

What is…” She flipped through a few pages, looked up into his eyes. “Is this…?” “My journal,” he said, reaching out to glide a knuckle down her cheek. Her skin was so damn soft. She was a contradiction in terms to him, and one that he found endlessly fascinating: a woman with the inner strength to rival any Spec Ops member he’d ever known, yet she had such a kind, soft heart beneath that hard-won armor. Resilient. Independent yet willing to compromise. Formidable in her confidence and strength of will, yet gentle and loving. He loved her so hard it hurt. “I bought it the night after you stayed at my place,” he continued. “I knew if I was going to have a real shot with you going forward then I needed to get my shit together once and for all. You said the writing thing really helped you so I called my counselor and talked to her about it. She thought it would be good for me too. So I wrote in it every day since. I’ve been working hard at it.” Taya leafed through the pages until she came to the end and looked back up into his eyes. “It’s full.” “Yeah. Guess I had a lot to say.” The tenderness in her eyes slayed him. “Nathan, I’m so proud of you.” Her pride in him made him feel twenty feet tall. He let out a relieved breath. “I want to read it to you. That’s my next step, if you’re okay with it.” “Of course it’s okay. I’d love for you to read it to me, as long as you feel comfortable doing it.” “That’s the thing, I am. And I wouldn’t be with anyone else except you. You make me feel…whole.” He didn’t know how else to say it, how else to explain himself, except he needed her to know he was trying like hell to deal with his issues. “I know I’ve got a long way to go before I get to the same place you’re at, but I’m willing to put in the work to get there. I feel safe with you and I’m ready to move forward, let go of all the stuff that happened before. Like you said, I’m doing it for me. I’m sick of my past having any kind of hold over me. So I’m going to do whatever it takes to make peace with it.” Her answering smile lit up her whole face, made her gray eyes sparkle like gems. “Then I’ll gladly listen to whatever you want to say.” Warmth kindled in his chest. She did that; warmed him from the inside out, just by being her. “Good, because I love you.” She froze, her eyes widening slightly. He nodded, laughed at her shocked expression. “Yep, I love you. That’s what I came here to say. I love you and I’m a better man because of it, but not as good a man as I’ll be down the road if you stand by me.” Her eyes filled with tears and she flung her arms around him. “I love you too,” she blurted out against his neck. “So, so much. And of course I’ll stand by you.” Nate felt like his heart might burst. He hugged her hard. “Would you move to Virginia with me? When your dad’s strong enough. I know you need to be here for a while longer, but after that, I want you in my bed every night so I can wake up beside you each morning.” She gave a soggy laugh, her face still buried in his neck. “There you go again with the romance.” “Oh, baby, have I got plans for you.” He stroked a hand over her back, fascinated by the combination of softness and strength that was uniquely her. Then his stomach rumbled, making her smile. He was starving, hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. “Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have any bacon in the house, would you? Because I’d kill for a BLT right now.

A moving target is harder to kill, and I didn't stop running, maneuvering, until I reached home base, where I could breathe between death-defying sprints. I just need to make it home alive, and this will all be over, I told myself. Home.

Many call it the 1000 yard stare and can't realize the pain when PTSD takes us there

Changes in the Perception of Self:People who have been traumatized in childhood are often troubled by guilt, shame, and negative feelings about themselves, such as the belief they are unlikable, unlovable, stupid, inept, dirty, worthless, lazy, and so forth. In Complex Dissociative disorders there are typically particular parts that contain these negative feelings about the self while other parts may evaluate themselves quite differently. Alterations among parts thus may result in rather rapid and distinct changes in self perception.

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.

As a civilian, I know nothing about combat, the Marine Corps experience or modern man's struggle adjusting to peace after war. I only know what's been shared with me; confidences I would never betray, nor use as details in a novel.

John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.

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.

In response to threat and injury, animals, including humans, execute biologically based, non-conscious action patterns that prepare them to meet the threat and defend themselves. The very structure of trauma, including activation, dissociation and freezing are based on the evolution of survival behaviors. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from a "library" of possible responses. We orient, dodge, duck, stiffen, brace, retract, fight, flee, freeze, collapse, etc. All of these coordinated responses are somatically based- they are things that the body does to protect and defend itself. It is when these orienting and defending responses are overwhelmed that we see trauma.The bodies of traumatized people portray "snapshots" of their unsuccessful attempts to defend themselves in the face of threat and injury. Trauma is a highly activated incomplete biological response to threat, frozen in time. For example, when we prepare to fight or to flee, muscles throughout our entire body are tensed in specific patterns of high energy readiness. When we are unable to complete the appropriate actions, we fail to discharge the tremendous energy generated by our survival preparations. This energy becomes fixed in specific patterns of neuromuscular readiness. The person then stays in a state of acute and then chronic arousal and dysfunction in the central nervous system. Traumatized people are not suffering from a disease in the normal sense of the word- they have become stuck in an aroused state. It is difficult if not impossible to function normally under these circumstances.

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.

Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework...

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

Secure attachment has been linked to a child's ability to successfully recover and prove resilient in the presence of a traumatic event.

In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.

we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)

There are two things a combat deployment offers which all of us strongly desire. The first, being purpose. Every morning we woke up and knew why we were there. It is immediate and unavoidable. Although, it is extreme and unpleasant, there is a comfort in that purpose. The second, is simplicity. We have one goal. There are relatively simple rules on how to accomplish it, and we understand that just about everything will go wrong. Pretty simple.

Changes in Meaning:Finally, chronically traumatized people lose faith that good things can happen and people can be kind and trustworthy. They feel hopeless, often believing that the future will be as bad as the past, or that they will not live long enough to experience a good future. People who have a dissociative disorder may have different meanings in various dissociative parts. Some parts may be relatively balanced in their worldview, others may be despairing, believing the world to be a completely negative, dangerous place, while other parts might maintain an unrealistic optimistic outlook on life

The medical professionals should fight PTSD at every cost for those living in pain and the battles they've lost.