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Coping Quotes

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Coping Quotes

“The real strength of refugee families seems to have emerged from the women who, in some cases, experienced an odd sense of liberation. Women who had never before cooked took it up with enthusiasm, consulting books they had used previously only to instruct servants.... They went out of the house to find jobs. Men, usually untrained for any career other than the military, emasculated by the loss of power as well as the loss of wealth, were more reluctant to accept the fact that the golden years they had known were gone forever. The Romanovs themselves reflected this widespread pattern among emigrés: strong women taking charge in an often desperate situation.”

“I had always been in love with someone. It was the only thing that made it feasible to live that way, getting up at six and remaining conscious until late at night. It was like religion for medieval people. It gave you energy to face injustice, powerlessness, and drudgery. The guys I was in love with always ignored me, but were never unkind. There was something abstract and gentle about the feeling of being ignored, a feeling of being spared, an impossibility of anything happening, which was consonant with my understanding of love. In theory, of course, I knew love could be reciprocated. It was something that happened, often, to other people. But I was unlike other people in so many ways.”

“Working on my book about refugees, I learned a great deal about trauma and recover, and with the help of the people I spoke with developed what I called "a healing package of treatments." These treatments could be medical interventions from Western doctors, traditional medicines from the refugee's culture of origin, or basic pleasures. For example, a common healing package for a refugee family included going to city parks, cooking foods from their homelands, and meeting people who spoke their language. All of us can create our own healing packages by thinking about that which makes us feel healthy, calm, and happy. We can write our own prescriptions for health that include nutrition and exercise, relationships, things we enjoy, and gratitude.”

“Don't sell these people short," I said to her. "They've all been through a lot. Take Mrs. Chou, for example, the lady who lives in back of you. She's been married four times. Her present husband and the three before him were in the same squadron - they were all good friends to begin with. When one died the next took over, and so on, one by one. Sort of an understanding, you see, so that there would always be someone to take care of her. And Mrs. Hsu across the street from you, her husband used to be her younger brother-in-law. The Hsu brothers were both in the Thirteenth Group. The older brother got killed, and the younger brother took his place. To the children by her first husband he's Uncle, and at the same time he's Papa; for a long time they just didn't know what to call him." "But how can they still talk and laugh like that?" Verdancy looked at me in bewilderment. "My dear girl?" I laughed. "If they don't laugh, what do you expect them to do, cry? If they wanted to cry, they wouldn't have waited till now.”

“The Buryats and other Mongols believe that representation contains the power of the represented. Representation can ignite an object’s influence and must therefore be controlled in its extent and frequency… [T]hey describe their oppressors’ institutions of power soberly while fetishizing their shamanic deities, such as Hoimorin Högshin, through layers of material and verbal representations: figurines, accessories, clothing, poetic evocations, and actions of swaddling and cradling—and, specific to this discussion, by attributing to her the power to punish. As Taussig (1993:105) discusses… to represent something in detail is to display its power and authority… It is through a detailed representation of their own spiritual world that the Buryats have resisted their oppressors. The harsher the Buryats’ experience of oppression, the greater they seem to have made their supernatural entities. This makes sense if we stick to a rational calculation that the Buryats took the powers of their oppressors and attributed them to their own deities, making the latter correspondingly powerful. By attributing the characteristic of a dominant figure to Hoimorin Högshin, they shifted the power of the oppressor to their own supernatural world… By transferring the specific power of the colonial into their own deity, the Buryats also transform their own relationship with the colonial power. Hoimorin Högshin takes over the role of a brutal punisher, as if she were on the side of the oppressors, albeit temporarily. This temporarily renders the oppressors obsolete… [T]he Buryats fold Russian colonial power into Hoimorin Högshin and symbolically transform the Russians’ oppressive powers into their own. The Russian colonial power is limited to jails and police; it is not a part of the supernatural… By keeping the representation of their colonizers at a minimum, the Buryats prevent their “legitimation and hegemony in the form of a fetish” (Mbembe 1992:4), which protects them from internalizing the oppression and making it deeper, more subconscious, and more naturalized.”

“You can’t be beaten by something you laugh at.”

“The act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to symptoms and their antecedents and consequences makes the symptoms more an objective target for thoughtful observation than an intolerable source of subjective anxiety, dysphoria, and frustration. In ACT, the act of accepting the symptoms as an expectable feature of a disorder or illness, has been shown to be associated with relief rather than increased distress (Hayes et al., 2006). From a traumatic stress perspective, any symptom can be reframed as an understandable, albeit unpleasant and difficult to cope with, reaction or survival skill (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). In this way, monitoring symptoms and their environmental or experiential/body state "triggers" can enhance client's willingness and ability to reflectively observe them without feeling overwhelmed, terrified, or powerless. This is not only beneficial for personal and life stabilization but is also essential to the successful processing of traumatic events and reactions that occur in the next phase of therapy (Ford & Russo, 2006).”

“I've been a little selfish, I think, telling Leo about Bobby, just because it was a way of helping me to keep his memory fresh. Trouble is, no one lets me talk about him. Frank can't often bear it because he's so steeped in guilt he manages to carry on only by acting as if Bobby never existed. I worry for Frank. Where will it end, all this unresolved grief that has no place to go? His way of coping is to work himself into the ground so that he falls into an exhausted sleep each night, ready to start over again at sunrise.”

“In humans as well, it is because your loved one existed that certain neurons fire together and certain proteins are folded in your brain in particular ways. It is because your loved one lived, and because you loved each other, that means when the person is no longer in the outer world, they still physically exist—in the wiring of the neurons of your brain.”

“The dirty secret she’d learned about grief was that nobody wanted to hear about your loss a week after the funeral. People you’d once considered friends would turn their heads in church or cross to another side of a shopping mall to avoid the contamination of your suffering. “You might imagine I’m coping day by day,” she murmured. “But it’s more a case of hour by hour, and during my worst times, minute by minute.”

“I'd thought that to heal my great hurt, I should flee to the wild. It was what people did. The nature books I'd read told me so. So many of them had been quests inspired by grief or sadness. Some had fixed themselves to the stars of elusive animals. Some sought snow geese. Others snow leopards. Others cleaved to the earth, walked trails, mountains, coasts and glens. Some sought wildness at a distance, others close to home... Now I knew this for what it was: a beguiling but dangerous lie. I was furious with myself and my own unconscious certainty that this was the cure I needed. Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing.”

“A memory unearthed itself: the way his wife had looked in the weeks following the news, the way she looked at things but never really saw them. The way she always seemed to be staring at something he couldn’t make out. The broken-down pits of her eyes, high on painkillers, opiates, staring at the wall, silent tears streaking drug-slacked cheeks. Maybe that had finished them off even before the divorce papers. Neither of them could live with what happened and neither wanted to watch the other one die so slowly.”

“Normal is boring, Bee. It’s not something I’d wish for you.” He crossed the room to me, bringing one hand up to gently trace the line of my jaw. “Grief is a kick in the chest. It steals your breath, hits you so hard you think you’ll never stand back up again. And its not just because you’re grieving death or heartbreak or loss – you’re grieving change. You’re grieving the life that might have been, if it hadn’t all gotten fucked up along the way.” His other hand joined the one holding my jaw, so he was cupping my face in his hands. I closed my eyes and turned my cheek to rest in one of his palms. “You could spend forever thinking about the things you’ll never experience with your mother – infinity contemplating the memories she won’t ever be a part of. But at some point, you have to let the life you should’ve had go, and start living the one you’ve got,” Finn whispered. Tears spilled out from under my lashes and he caught them with his fingertips before they could fall. Ignoring the fact that I was a paint-splattered mess, he cradled me against his chest and his lips came to rest in my hair, bringing me comfort as I trembled in his arms. “Let go, Bee,” he whispered. And I did.”

“The Lord has put more hardships atop the shoulders of my neighbors — more than I can even fathom coping with. I will strive to find a way to turn pity into admiration, for what use is it to send pity back at the world. Admiration and awe are much more helpful, especially when I find myself feeling like a victim for being stuck in traffic or losing my favorite sweater. Perspective is a blessing.”

“It wasn't supposed to. It was just supposed to stop you from hurting yourself.” “It helps—” “No it doesn't. It just pushes it away temporarily. Just like the booze.” “But I need—” “You need to let yourself feel. Feel it, own it. Then move on.” “You make it sound so easy.” Bitterness drips from each syllable. “It’s not. It’s the fucking hardest thing a person can do.” I smooth a damp strand out of her face and away from my mouth. “It’s the hardest fucking thing. It’s why we drink and do drugs and fight. It’s why I play music and build engines.”

“At the center of this reaction is a region of the brain called the amygdala, our internal alarm system. When faced with the unknown, the amygdala triggers stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol - heart pounding, senses on edge, stomach uneasy - great for real danger but breeding anxiety when the ‘threat’ is only abstract.”

“At the center of this reaction is a region of the brain called the amygdala, our internal alarm system. When faced with the unknown, the amygdala triggers stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol—heart pounding, senses on edge, stomach uneasy, mom's spaghetti—great for real danger but breeding anxiety when the ‘threat’ is only abstract.”