Quotessence
Home / Topics / Ptsd Quotes

Ptsd Quotes

Browse 526 quotes about Ptsd.

Related topics

PeopleSoldierWar

Ptsd Quotes

“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.”

MindBodyFearHealingMental HealthMemoryTerrorTraumaMental IllnessTreatmentPtsdFrozenOverwhelmedFreezeTraumatizedHealing TraumaPosttraumatic Stress DisorderFrozen In TimeFight Flight
Author:Peter A. Levine
Create image

“Once the fear took hold, I was fucked. I'd never known anything like it could exist: all-consuming, ravenous, a whirling black vortex that sucked me under so completely and mercilessly that it truly felt like I was being devoured alive, bones splintered, marrow sucked. After an eternity (lying in bed with my heart jackhammering, adrenaline firing me like a strobe light, feeling the last few threads that held my mind together stretch to a snapping point) something would happen to break the vortex's hold—a nurse coming in so that I had to make mechanical cheerful chitchat, an uncontrollable rush of sleep—and I would clamber up out of it, shaky and weak as a half-drowned animal. But even when the fear receded for a while, it was always there: dark, misshapen, taloned, hanging somewhere above and behind me, waiting for its next moment to drop onto my back and dig in deep.”

FearTraumaPtsdThe Witch Elm
Book:The Witch Elm
Create image

“This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love.”

LoveFearPsychologyTerrorTraumaPtsdDissociation
Book:Denial: A Memoir of Terror
Create image

“I've been on the very top. I've been as happy as a man can be. I've had the greatest joys. The greatest friends. I've had victories and I've had....love. And then...something happens. You lose something or...someone or...and there it is again. I'm there again. Mother's tangled. Father's yelling. I'm ten and I'm on my damn knees. And I'm scared out of my damn mind. And feeling that, I say...I become...something, I do things....I'm not...I am myself. But I'm not what I want to be or what I should be. I'm scared. And I'll do anything to get out of the fright.”

FearTraumaPtsdBatmanComplex TraumaCptsdFight Or FlightTrauma Response
Book:Batman, Vol. 8: Cold Days
Create image

“Until now I didn’t dare say anything like the word ‘home,’ though when I saw this valley, I thought I must stay here. It is too perilous to hope for something as impossible as a home, and we both know it.… There will come a time when it is all shattered—by something we find out that makes us realise we are living in fool’s heaven, or by something—or someone—from outside, bringing our past along to catch us. It’s bound to happen. It’s only a matter of time.… “Can’t seem to forget the time when I was a child that I had my nanny beaten because she—I can’t remember. She never came back. I thought she died of it. She was old. All I remember is my triumph. This was my world and I knew how to manage it. My grandmother gave me a present then…I have it with me still. Brought it to remind myself that I am what I despise. Or have been. That kind of blood doesn’t wash off. “I have wondered why I stay alive. I ran away. I stayed away. I told myself there was nothing I could do. I just survive to spite them, to make them fear something at least. Certainly not because I love myself as they seem to do here, without lives and torture on their conscience. What does it mean to be good? Everywhere I go there is a different answer. * “I am tired of the pain of this. There are people all around me in these mountain towns who have not had a life of such pain. I am starting to hate on account of it. Hate them for their happiness. Hate my family, even my parents, for the kind of world they made and live in. Hate myself, I suppose, too, for being trapped here. In these mountains, in this body, in this life. “I cannot imagine, right now, why I stay alive. I never questioned it in the years of struggle: life justified itself. But now that I am safe and sitting in these gardens, living in these easy households, playing with these carefree children, I cannot bear to live like this. I am a twisted creature without merit.… “But here in the mountains they have names for the things I want to become: happy, secure, gentle, kind, good.… “Can someone so hurt—here they call it ‘abused’—be good?”

FearHealingChildhoodAbuseTraumaPtsd
Book:Black Wine
Create image

“I studied the stable behind him instead. At least it was big, open, the stable hands now off in another wing. I usually had little issue with being inside, which was mostly whenever I was bored enough to visit the horses housed within. Plenty of space to move, to escape. the walls didn't feel too... permanent. Not like the kitchens, which were too low, the walls too thick, the windows not big enough to climb through. Not like the study, with not enough natural light or easy exits. I had a long list in my head of what places I could and couldn't endure at the manor, ranked by precisely how much they made my body luck up and sweat.”

FearTraumaSarah J MaasFeyreFeyre ArcheronTrappedPtsdA Court Of Mist And FuryClaustrophobiaTraumatic
Book:A Court of Mist and Fury
Create image

“It's a curse to have traumas imprinted in our wiring, to accept that what we fear and grieve and impale ourselves upon from day to day defines the way we translate the chemistry of emotions into a fixed identity wired for suffering. It's also a marvelous asset, our malleability. When the imprinting experience is loving, exciting, rich and worthy of our more expansive nature, we align pleasurably with harmony and bliss. But let's face it, we're humans. Disasters entertain our brains far more than comforts, ease and joy ever will. No one straps into the ride for the smoothness of it all going well.”

SufferingBrainHuman NatureAddictionEntertainmentTraumaBlissEmotional IntelligencePtsd
Book:The Look of Amie Martine
Create image

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims. The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom. The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”

MindWisdomTruthHumanityHealingConsciousnessPowerPsychologySocietyCrimeAbuseMurderMemoryTraumaGravesHorribleRecoveryDenialGhostsPtsdRapeRestorationDissociationAtrocitiesUnspeakableSurvivorsVictimsSociety DenialFreudDissociativePosttraumatic Stress DisorderRepressed MemoryPsychological TraumaSigmund FreudTrauma TherapyRecovered MemoryViolations
Book:Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
Create image

“US General Mathew Ridgeway was speaking about “Operation Vulture”. He said, “When the day comes for me to meet my maker and account for my actions, the thing that I would be most proud of is the fact that I fought against and perhaps totally prevented the carrying out of one of the most hare-brained tactical schemes that would have cost the lives of thousands upon thousands of men!” (A Gracious Enemy & After the War Volume Two)”

FightingInspiringMilitaryDeterminationExperienceDifficultyReal LifeUncertaintyPtsdTrue Story
Author:Michael G. Kramer
Create image

“The other two muleteers, addicted to opium, were invariably in a dazed state of mind. They had to smoke the drug every morning in order to rouse themselves sufficiently to tie up the packs. It was evident this morning that we would not be able to start marching before 8 a.m. whereas the stream of refugees invariably got under way at dawn. Captain Gribble”

FightingInspiringMilitaryExperienceDifficultyReal LifeUncertaintyPtsdTrue StoryOpium Addiction
Book:EXTRAORDINARY TRUE STORIES OF SURVIVAL IN BURMA WW2: tens of thousands fled to India from the Japanese Invasion in 1942
Create image

“Lifting from Depression In the state of depression feeling miserable, a statement undermining all the potential harms when self-worth knocking no mercy found, hopelessness shadowing the self-worth finding the false identity, absence from feeling the way to feel. Once depression sinking to the deepest state of oppressing state, risking life to mark the fault answer to end everything. The depressed mood clouding the thinking mind, impairing the judgement looking at life, depressed mood, a desperate cry in mental despair, when the reality of life is much brighter than the state of depressing mood. The reality of life is a hopeful life. False sense of hopelessness, a correctable state of the mind when do you realized this? Disconfirming the strong false belief of hopelessness is a way to go. Depressed state of the mind can be lifted with psychiatric care and psychotherapeutic help. An early call to psychiatrist is the way to help, and the loved ones offer emotional support a good way to help, receiving help the answer to redefining the state of the mind. When adequate help arrives lifting from depression, the depressed dark cloud is lifted from the state of depressed mind and you can clearly see and move forward with what is in front of you. Life backs into the living force, keep on moving at will, living a full life with life moving forward with all at will. by Tina Leung: I Face Forward poem”

Self LoveDepressionLife And LivingMental HealthPtsdSeek HelpSurviving Poem
Book:I Face Forward
Create image

“You’ve got to reach bedrock to become depressed enough before you are forced to accept the reality and enormity of the problem.”

LifeInspirationalFeelingsMotivationalInspirational QuotesLife LessonsMotivationReadingLife QuotesMotivational QuotesSelf HelpLife PhilosophyDepressionLife And LivingSelf ImprovementSelf AwarenessMental HealthMoodMental IllnessRecoveryLife ChangingQuotes To Live ByLife LessonMotivational InspirationalLife ExperienceReading BooksMentalPtsdFeelings And EmotionsBipolarDepression QuotesSchizophreniaSchizophrenicBipolar DisorderFeeling AloneDepression RecoveryQuotes And SayingAlone QuotesRecoverBipolar QuotesQuotes And SayingsRecovery From GriefFeelings Of WeaknessJonathan HarnischAlone QuoteSchizophrenicsSchizoSchizo AffectiveBipolar LifeSchizoaffective
Book:Jonathan Harnisch: An Alibiography
Create image

“Lifting from Depression In the state of depression feeling miserable, a statement undermining all the potential harms when self-worth knocking no mercy found, hopelessness shadowing the self-worth finding the false identity, absence from feeling the way to feel. Once depression sinking to the deepest state of oppressing state, risking life to mark the fault answer to end everything. The depressed mood clouding the thinking mind, impairing the judgement looking at life, depressed mood, a desperate cry in mental despair, when the reality of life is much brighter than the state of depressing mood. The reality of life is a hopeful life. False sense of hopelessness, a correctable state of the mind when do you realized this? Disconfirming the strong false belief of hopelessness is a way to go. Depressed state of the mind can be lifted with psychiatric care and psychotherapeutic help. An early call to psychiatrist is the way to help, and the loved ones offer emotional support a good way to help, receiving help the answer to redefining the state of the mind. When adequate help arrives lifting from depression, the depressed dark cloud lifted from the state of depressed mind and you can clearly see and move forward with what is in front of you. Life backs into the living force, keep on moving at will, living a full life with life moving forward with all at will. by Tina Leung: I Face Forward poem”

HopeSelf LoveDepressionLivingMental HealthPtsdSurvivingLife PoemSeek Help
Book:I Face Forward
Create image

“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.”

LovePainFreedomHealingLiesTraumaPtsdEmotional AbuseValidationChildhood TraumaMarginalizedHealing The Emotional SelfLove HealsCaptiveScreamsSilent PainInvalidateScreams Of Agony
Book:Emerging With Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, And The LOVE that Heals
Create image

“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.”

AbuseMadnessMental HealthMemoryTraumaChild AbusePtsdDissociative Identity DisorderRepressionDissociationAmnesiaChildhood TraumaRitual AbuseMemory LossPost Traumatic Stress DisorderDissociative AmnesiaDissociative DisordersPosttraumatic Stress DisorderRepressing Emotions
Book:Satan's High Priest
Create image

“A woman in combat? Yes. Since when? Since Native American warrior Buffalo Calf Road Woman knocked that prick General George Custer off of his horse. Since Pantea Arteshbod propelled herself to become one of the greatest Persian commanders during the reign of Cyrus the Great. Since Hua Mulan disguised herself as a male to engage in combat and became one of China’s most respected heroines.”

WarHomeSurvivalArmyIraqTraumaVeteranPtsdWomen In Combat
Book:The Desert Warrior
Create image

“I expected to be happy, but let me tell you something. Anticipating happiness and being happy are two entirely different things. I told myself that all I wanted to do was go to the mall. I wanted to look at the pretty girls, ogle the Victoria's Secret billboards, and hit on girls at the Sam Goody record store. I wanted to sit in the food court and gorge on junk food. I wanted to go to Bath and Body Works, stand in the middle of the store, and breathe. I wanted to stand there with my eyes closed and just smell, man. I wanted to lose myself in the total capitalism and consumerism of it all, the pure greediness, the pure indulgence, the pure American-ness of it all. I never made it that far. I didn't even make it out of the airport in Baltimore with all its Cinnabons, Starbucks, Brooks Brothers, and Brookstones before realizing that after where we'd been, after what we'd seen, home would never be home again.”

LoveWarHomeRegretCapitalismGreedPtsdHomecomingDeployment
Book:A Hard And Heavy Thing
Create image

“My wife is alone in our full bed too. Her husband, the father of her children, never came back from Iraq. When I deployed the first time she asked her grandmother for advice. Her grandfather served in Africa and Europe in World War II. Her grandmother would know what to do. “How do I live with him being gone? How do I help him when he comes home?” my wife asked. “He won’t come home,” her grandmother answered. “The war will kill him one way or the other. I hope for you that he dies while he is there. Otherwise the war will kill him at home. With you.” My wife’s grandfather died of a heart attack on the living-room floor, long before she was born. It took a decade or two for World War II to kill him. When would my war kill me?”

MindWarSoulHomeHealthSoldierPtsdHeadDeployment
Book:The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
Create image

“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.”

LifeMindWarSoulHomeMilitaryHealthPtsdHeadHomecomingDeployment
Book:The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows
Create image

“June: National PTSD Awareness Month Suicide is an axe to a tree, a commitment to a delusional freedom, that you have not yet learned to be freed. Living is a passage to an endless potential of tomorrow that your worth is not bounded by the society's narrow values, but you strike with the principles that preserve your worthiness to find your pathway to meet the ultimate goal of happiness.” June 2023 by Tina Leung”

LifeHappinessSelf EsteemSelf LoveMental HealthValuePtsdLiving WellThriving
Book:I Face Forward
Create image

“Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.”

LifeGovernmentTruthAmericaQuotesHopePoliticsGrowthHurtMemoriesJusticeHealingFamilyPowerUnited StatesGrowing UpViolenceCrimeYouthInspireAnxietyLivingSurvivalOvercomingPoliceSafetyQuoteSouthInjusticeCorruptionMemoirFighterHopefulControlSurvivorSouthernChild AbuseUnited States Of AmericaLaw EnforcementPowerlessPtsdDomestic ViolencePoliticiansSexual AbuseFamily RelationshipsRapeFamily DramaSurviveAnxiety DisordersJustice SystemViolence Against WomenArizonaSexual AssaultLawsDomestic AbuseRape CultureSexual ViolenceCrime And PunishmentPhysical AbusePanic AttacksLawmakersSurvivors Of AbuseRed TapePedophileRape SurvivorDomesticPowerful StoryHopeful HeartPanic AttackRape Of A ChildPost Traumatic StressAdvocatesRapedEnable AbuseAnxiety Attack
Book:Debbie.
Create image

“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.”

LifeGovernmentTruthAmericaQuotesHopePoliticsGrowthHurtMemoriesJusticeHealingFamilyPowerUnited StatesGrowing UpViolenceCrimeYouthInspireAnxietyLivingSurvivalOvercomingPoliceSafetyQuoteSouthInjusticeCorruptionMemoirFighterHopefulControlSurvivorSouthernChild AbuseUnited States Of AmericaLaw EnforcementPowerlessPtsdDomestic ViolencePoliticiansSexual AbuseFamily RelationshipsRapeFamily DramaSurviveAnxiety DisordersJustice SystemViolence Against WomenArizonaSexual AssaultLawsDomestic AbuseRape CultureSexual ViolenceCrime And PunishmentPhysical AbusePanic AttacksLawmakersSurvivors Of AbuseRed TapePedophileRape SurvivorDomesticPowerful StoryHopeful HeartPanic AttackRape Of A ChildPost Traumatic StressAdvocatesRapedEnable AbuseAnxiety Attack
Book:Debbie.
Create image

“Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.”

StressTraumaPtsdSense Of SelfPost Traumatic Stress DisorderDangerous WorldPosttraumatic Stress DisorderTraumatic StressLack Of TrustShattered SoulsWork View
Book:Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder For Dummies
Create image

“Religious trauma resides in our bodies and nervous systems in the same way that trauma from war, developmental trauma, or sexualized trauma live inside us. Though the triggers and environment of the original trauma may differ, how religious trauma lives in our bodies, on a physiological level, is the same.”

StressTraumaPtsdDeconstructionCptsdReligious TraumaChronic StressTraumatology
Book:When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion
Create image

“I asked if I could borrow Gilead's but she gave me a funny look. So funny I started laughing uncontrollably. When I couldn't stop myself I clamped my hand over my mouth and went outside. The thing about having a stress reaction is that even when you know you're having a stress reaction that knowledge doesn't seem to do you any good. I found a doorway across the road where a parked police sprinter van blocked the view from the rest of the street. I lent against the door and let myself slipped down until I was sitting with my back to it. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing until the giggles stopped.”

StressPtsdPolice Trauma
Book:Lies Sleeping
Create image

“Malgré les symptômes qui continuaient à la secouer - apathie, tremblements, accès de panique soudains et inexpliqués -, Andréa avait du mal à le croire. Elle n'était pas un soldat. Elle n'avait rien vécu de véritablement traumatique. - Peut-être que si, a insisté le médecin. La répétition de stress de moindre intensité semble avoir les mêmes effets qu'un seul gros traumatisme. C'est comme une boîte où l'on amoncelle des tas d'expériences difficiles, et à un moment, la boîte est pleine et tout déborde.”

QuotesStressQuoteTraumaPtsdCitationPost Traumatic Stress DisorderColtan SongBlack BoneCollectif Black Bone
Book:Coltan Song
Create image