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Trauma Survivors Quotes

Browse 71 quotes about Trauma Survivors.

Trauma Survivors Quotes

“There’s nothing the dead can tell you that the living can’t,” he’d said to me. “World is indifferent to your feelings. World has no responsibility and no reasons why a serial killer can randomly create orphans and then disappear, and no antipathy for assholes who get drunk and kill, then go free a couple of years later. You gotta look for joy, not reasons and explanations.”

“The rationale seems to be that we keep people as victims by validating them, empathizing with them, and fighting alongside them for equality and the dignity they deserve. I don’t think people are kept down by that. I believe what keeps people down is the constant dismissal of their pain, the degradation, the humiliation, the fear of injustice, and the continuous crushing of their will, their faith, and their hope. This type of oppression kills the self-esteem people need to empower themselves, and it's flat-out terrorism.”

“Tying learning to music is so powerful that it has been harnessed as a tool for a variety of therapies. There are some incredible success stories with military veterans with traumatic brain injury, stroke victims, and people with autism.”

“Pleasure fades, gets old, gets thrown out with last year's fad. Fear, guilt, all that stuff stays fresh. Maybe that's why people get so enraged when someone does something to a kid. Hurt a kid and he hurts forever. Maybe an adult can shake it off. Maybe. But with a kid, you hurt them and it turns them, shapes them, becomes part of the deep, underlying software of their lives. No delete.”

“The damage and invisible scars of emotional abuse are very difficult to heal, because memories are imprinted on our minds and hearts and it takes time to be restored. Imprints of past traumas do not mean a person cannot change their future beliefs and behaviors. as people, we do not easily forget. However, as we heal, grieve, and let go, we become clear-minded and focused to live restore and emotionally healthy.”

“It’s going to be hard, I’ll tell you that from the start. However hard you think it’s going to be, I promise you it’ll be worse. And you’re going to think you have to do it alone – but you don’t, and you can’t. People will want to help you. People will want to be there when you’re ready for them. You might not find them right away, but you’ll find them. Wherever you are on that path, wherever you’re headed, just remember that you won’t be walking it forever. And those first steps – first loves, first heartaches, first mistakes, whatever – they don’t have to define all the years of your life. A day will come when you can let it go. You might not think so now, but that day will come. Doesn’t mean you don’t still carry a part of it with you, but you’re going to wake up one day and realize it’s lighter. That day will come, whatever you’re carrying.”

“Trauma survivors who can remove themselves from a toxic environment may have a higher chance of making progress towards recovery. On the other hand, those who stuck in such an environment may find it more difficult to improve their mental health conditions.”

“We cannot separate forgiveness and social inequality in trauma recovery as forgiveness, trauma, and recovery always occur in a social and political context – one that is fraught with inequality.”

“Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion. The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day. Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247 Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997”

“I’m not going to be specific, but I had some early sexual experiences that, as I got older, were really, really difficult to deal with. It wasn’t to do with anything that happened in my family or at home, it was these… different things that happened. So my mental health had come through the negotiation of sex as a teenager and a young man, and romantic relationships.”

“You thought that you knew me so well. But if you did, you’d have known that I never turned away from my trauma. I paid attention. I took it all in. Every single detail. I owned my pain. It wasn’t separate from me. It was me. I was it. The fact that you even thought that you could hurt me, to feed on me, to use me… and believe that that was enough for me to kill you… shows just how little you understand. Every time I gave you my pain, I held back. Each and every time. I held back because I cared. You only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. You want my pain? Take it. Take it all. Take what I have learned to live with all my life. This time I won’t hold back.”

“Self-destructiveness may be a primary form of communication for those who do not yet have ways to tame their excruciating inner conflicts and feelings and who cannot yet turn to others for support.”

“Sadly, psychiatric training still includes far too little on the very serious psychiatric sequelae of childhood trauma, especially CSA [child sexual abuse]. There is inadequate recognition within mental health services of the prevalence and importance of Dissociative Disorders, sufferers of which are frequently misdiagnosed as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), or, in the cases of DID, schizophrenia. This is to some extent understandable as some of the features of DID appear superficially to mimic those of schizophrenia and/or Borderline Personality Disorder.”

“When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.”

“Anger is vital in trauma recovery. It starts by shielding us from those frightening, overwhelming, and devastating emotions that are waiting for us behind that door. We can hold onto that shield until we feel safe enough to open the door and cross the threshold; then, anger turns from a shield to a key.”

“In the same way that the women's movement of the seventies and eighties brought rape and incest into public consciousness, we can do the same with the causes and reality of dissociation and multiplicity.”

“The essence of self-love is that of complete acceptance of your total experience, especially those aspects that feel challenging. Sure, it’s easy to embrace what is beautiful and well behaved, but far more difficult even to tolerate—let alone love—the parts that are messy and painful. Yet, it’s the tarnished, unruly parts that need your acceptance the most in order to change.”

“If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.”

“Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children – LLOYD DEMAUSE The Journal of Psychohistory 21 (4) 1994 "Extending these local figures to a national estimate would easily mean tens of thousands of cult victims per year reporting, plus undoubtedly more who do not report.(2) This needn’t mean, of course, that actual Cult abuse is increasing, only that-as with the increase in all child abuse reports-we have become more open to hearing them. But it seemed unlikely that the surge of cult memories could all be made up by patients or implanted by therapists. Therapists are a timid group at best, and the notion that they suddenly begin implanting false memories in tens of thousands of their clients for no apparent reason strained credulity. Certainly no one has presented a shred of evidence for massive “false memory” implantations.”

“There was something about her playing ... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.” He frowned. “But it’s quite common, isn’t it? What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off. Marriages mangled. Wives left for dead. Children growing up as deformed prisoners of war—all of them walking around with holes where their hearts should be, wondering where they belong, what side they’re fighting for. Extreme wealth, like the kind Cordova married into, only magnifies the size and scope of the fallout.”

“Too often the survivor is seen by [himself or] herself and others as "nuts," "crazy," or "weird." Unless her responses are understood within the context of trauma. A traumatic stress reaction consists of *natural* emotions and behaviors in response to a catastrophe, its immediate aftermath, or memories of it. These reactions can occur anytime after the trauma, even decades later. The coping strategies that victims use can be understood only within the context of the abuse of a child. The importance of context was made very clear many years ago when I was visiting the home of a Holocaust survivor. The woman's home was within the city limits of a large metropolitan area. Every time a police or ambulance siren sounded, she became terrified and ran and hid in a closet or under the bed. To put yourself in a closet at the sound of a far-off siren is strange behavior indeed—outside of the context of possibly being sent to a death camp. Within that context, it makes perfect sense. Unless we as therapists have a good grasp of the context of trauma, we run the risk of misunderstanding the symptoms our clients present and, hence, responding inappropriately or in damaging ways.”

“TRAUMA STEALS YOUR VOICE People get so tired of asking you what's wrong and you've run out of nothings to tell them. You've tried and they've tried, but the words just turn to ashes every time they try to leave your mouth. They start as fire in the pit of your stomach, but come out in a puff of smoke. You are not you anymore. And you don't know how to fix this. The worst part is...you don't even know how to try.”

“Trauma is a thief. It steals our childhoods, years of our adult lives, or even our entire lifetimes. It takes away our ability to feel connected to others, to feel like we belong in the world, and to receive and extend love. It prevents us from growing and thriving. It steals our relationships, work, physical health, families, communities, spirituality, hobbies, passions, and identity. And to add insult to injury, trauma then demands that we grieve these losses in order to heal from them, which can feel overwhelming.”

“Allowing ourselves to let go of the trauma we had to experience does not make the incident irrelevant. What we were put through is inexcusable Letting go means we won’t allow it to hold us hostage any longer.”

“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.”

“It’s often oppressed trauma survivors who have led the most successful social justice movements in American history, survivors who are commonly moved by anger, resentment, and rage – not forgiveness – toward those who are responsible for this oppression and trauma,”