Trauma Quotes - Page 8

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

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.

I have suffered through enough illnesses, trauma and heartbreak to finally understand that life will keep moving forward inexorably, if terribly at times. I am starting to realize that it can be delightful too, if I let it. My love is not diminished if I let go of sorrow. I almost believe that.

Veterans being sent into unjust wars for corporate profit is a perversion of trust, at best. I found the emotional manipulation of both sides, the propaganda at play so incredibly revolting that I couldn't stand to idly wave a flag or flaunt yellow ribbons without asking serious questions regarding motive.

Attachments that are not fostered may lend to the child's inability to properly attach or have no attachment at all.

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is particularly common in survivors of combat, political torture, or natural or transportation disasters.

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

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.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken'. Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause is not faced or not recognised, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. But some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their characters till they become like tempered steel.

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.

Denial forces victims to retreat in lifeless existence, dieing in the shadows of buried trauma and painful memories.

Could feel the reservation wheeling around him, changing shape so that he nearly had to vomit, or hold his arms to his head and scream against it all.

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.

If you spend time with crazy and dangerous people, remember – their personalities are socially transmitted diseases; like water poured into a container, most of us eventually turn into – or remain – whoever we surround ourselves with. We can choose our tribe, but we cannot change that our tribe is our destiny.

Abuse may consist of physical maltreatment or language that is belittling, discriminatory...

She’s thinking about grief and trauma, how they can hide out inside a woman, how they can come back.The playwright follows her eyes, until he sees what she sees.The photographer’s framed image, the orphan girl lit up by the explosion, a girl blowing forward, a girl coming out of fire, a girl who looks as if she might blast right through image and time into the world“I know what’s happened,” the poet says.

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a dayI would be grounded, rooted.Said my head would not keep flying awayto where the darkness lives.The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.You will find a good man soon.”The first psycho therapist told me to spendthree hours each day sitting in a dark closetwith my eyes closed and ears plugged.I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinkingabout how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happinesswhen they care more about what they givethan what they get.The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help meforget what the trauma said.The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cryabout the grief inside your bones.”But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumpedfrom the George Washington Bridgeinto the Hudson River convincedhe was entirely alone.”My bones said, “Write the poems.

God wants you to be delivered from what you have done and from what has been done to you - Both are equally imporant to Him.

i dreamt i crawled on top of you and kissed your hips, one at a time, my lips a smolder. i straddled your waist and pressed both shaking hands against your torso. spongy, like an old tree on the forest floor. i push and your flesh sinks inwardly, collapsing with decay, a soft shushing sound. a yawning hole where your organs should be. maggots used to live here until your own poison killed them off. i laid my cheek into the loam and three little mushrooms brushed over my eyelid. peat, decomposing matter, all of it, whatever you wish to call it, rested in the cavity of your chest. and there i planted seeds in the hopes something good would come out of you.

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life.

In movies, war only looks romantic. “Tell my gal I love her…” close-up shot, and fade out. It doesn’t work as beautifully and neat in real life. Flying chunks of human flesh and screaming orphans really put that Hollywood take into perspective and there is nothing clean or sterile about any of it. When people die, it’s fucking horrible.

I watch what happens below and Iam 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

Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)

After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

A child's attachment process begins within the first year of life...

I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.

DID is about survival! As more people begin to appreciate this concept, individuals with DID will start to feel less as though they have to hide in shame. DID develops as a response to extreme trauma that occurs at an early age and usually over an extended period of time.

The vast majority of people are unthinking prejudice machines.

But in the dark now and no glow showing and no lights and only the wind and the steady pull of the sail he felt that perhaps he was already dead. He put his two hands together and felt the palms. They were not dead and he could bring the pain of life by simply opening and closing them. He leaned his back against the stern and knew he was not dead. His shoulders told him.

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.

All mental unhappiness is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future

A common feature of many theories of trauma is the idea that the causative—the wounding—event is not remembered but relived, as it is in the flashbacks of combat veterans, experienced anew with a visceral immediacy that affords no critical distance. To remember something, you have to consign it to the past—put it behind you—but trauma remains in the present; it fills that present entirely. You are inside it. Your mouth is always filled with the taste of blood. The killers are always crashing through the brush behind you. Some researchers believe that trauma bypasses the normal mechanisms of memory and engraves itself directly on some portion of the brain, like a brand. Cattle are branded to signify that they are someone’s property, and so, too, were slaves. The brand of trauma signifies that henceforth you yourself are property, the property of that which has injured you. The psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi believed that trauma is characterized by the victim’s helpless identification with the perpetrator, and elsewhere in the literature one often comes across the word “possession.” The moment of trauma marks an event horizon after which memory ceases. Or else memory breaks down, so that the victim can reconstruct the event but not the feeling that accompanied it, or alternatively only the feeling.

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

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 cringeLike when my Love cut all her hair.

Did you hear me, Zach? I care about you.” “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay with me that you care about me. But can we please not talk about it? Would that be okay with you?” “Yeah, that would be okay,” he said.

I often wondered how it would be to tramp off into the mountains and keep going until I was exhausted, then simply sink into the snow and fall asleep. Then the wolves could have me.To want to die in the forest and be eaten by wolves: another marker of incipient madness.

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation is a disruption in one or more mental functions. Dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, identity confusion, and identity alterations are core phenomena of dissociative psychopathology which constitute a single dimension characterized by a spectrum of severity.Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience 2014 Dec; 12(3): 171-179The Many Faces of Dissociation: Opportunities for Innovative Research in Psychiatry

I have only known two men's souls in my life, one the devil, the other the the bird's wings which picked me up and carried me back to the freedom of being.

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.

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

Dissociative Identity Disorder is borne out of trauma. Many individuals who survive severe trauma will later experience marked anxiety, which may or may not relate to triggers from the original trauma. Individuals with DID are highly likely to have a great deal of anxiety.

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

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

It was a catch-22: If you didn’t put the trauma behind you, you couldn’t move on. But if you did put the trauma behind you, you willingly gave up your claim to the person you were before it happened.

And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s a memory for them to happen in …

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past:For everything under the sun there is a time.This is the season of your awkward harvesting,When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a placeYou had forgotten you knew from the inside out;And a time when that bitter tree was plantedThat has grown always invisibly beside youAnd whose branches your awakened handsNow long to disentangle from your heart.You are coming to see how your looking often darkenedWhen you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,How deep down your eyes were always owned by somethingThat faced them through a dark fester of thornsConverting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;You could only see what touched you as already torn.Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.And your memory is ready to show you everything,Having waited all these years for you to return and know.Only you know where the casket of pain is interred. You will have to scrape through all the layers of coveringAnd according to your readiness, everything will open. May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guideWho can accompany you through the fear and griefUntil your heart has wept its way to your true self.As your tears fall over that wounded place,May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.May your forgiveness still the hunger of the woundSo that for the first time you can walk away from that place, Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.

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

Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. In my house. My mouth? Chapped lips swollen and bloody? Dream dreaming wide and thunder? My mouth! My God! This is me speaking. Not mouthing. Not typing and twitching. Not writing a suicide note the length of a novel that will never be finished. I hear voices now but I know they are not the voices of fathers or lovers, or mothers or angels or demons, but the sounds of my own private wars echoing the battles of women before me and near me. No wonder I do not make people comfortable. I am a mirror. I have far too many things to say. (p. 237-238)

The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn’t feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.

There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman—the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles—the work of a shell.The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries—something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey—a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck.

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

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.

The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health.

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.

Since the 1980s, therapists have reported encountering clients or patients who had experienced extreme abuses featuring physical, sexual, emotional, spiritual, and cognitive aspects, along with a premeditated structure of torture-enforced lessons. The phenomena was first labeled "ritual abuse," and, later, as our understanding developed, "mind control.

The longer we stay in a violating situation, the more traumatized we become. If we don't act on our own behalf, we will lose spirit, resourcefulness, energy, health, perspective, and resilience. We must take ourselves out of violating situations for the sake of our own wholeness.

There were other strange signals and signs. Another day, suddenly felt an almost overwhelming urge to travel to Balitmore. I wanted to 'kidnap' a helicoper fly it there if I didn't drive the there', she explains. 'I had no idea where I was to go, only that I was certain I would know my destination as I encountered signs and certain landmarks along the way. I was not even certain who I was to meet, or what my mission was, but I felt I must go.' Beginning to heal by this time with Talbon's help, she resisted that urge. Yet she sensed she would be summoned for three more Cat Woman missions: two in 1999 and one in 2000.As for the code words for activating her, those had been erased from Cheryl's conscious memory. Buried deep in her unconscious mind, however, the words, when called up, cause her to react as her programmers want her to. Though she can't remember the activation codes, Cheryl knows her handlers said the same things every time. 'I'm working on unblocking the words in therapy. Once I know what the words are, I can learn how to stop their effect on me. I did it already when I learned the control code. Standing in front of a mirror, I said the control code words over and over until I was completely desensitised to them. That's what I have to do for the activation code words... but I have not been able to recall all of them as yet.' 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 trying consciously or unconsciously to get attention. She'd really processed them out and was done with them. She didn't come up with it 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.