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Trauma Quotes

Browse 1903 quotes about Trauma.

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Trauma Quotes

“People who reported having a terrible traumatic experience and who kept the experience a secret had far more health problems than people who openly talked about their traumas. Why would keeping a secret be so toxic? More importantly, if you asked people to disclose emotionally powerful secrets, would their health improve? The answer, my students and I soon discovered, was yes. We began running experiments where people were asked to write about traumatic experiences for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for three to four consecutive days. Compared to people who were told to write about nonemotional topics, those who wrote about trauma evidenced improved physical health. Later studies found that emotional writing boosted immune function, brought about drops in blood pressure, and reduced feelings of depression and elevated daily moods. Now, over twenty-five years after the first writing experiment, more than two hundred similar writing studies have been conducted all over the world. While the effects are often modest, the mere act of translating emotional upheavals into words is consistently associated with improvements in physical and mental health.”

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Book:The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us
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“We call everything 'trauma' now. We call everything 'toxic.' Someone didn't text you back fast enough? They’re toxic. You had a mildly unpleasant conversation with your boss? You’re traumatized. You are stealing the valor of the damned! You are hijacking the vocabulary of the genuinely broken, the people who have survived actual nightmares. People who have looked the absolute worst of humanity in the face and had to figure out how to keep breathing. And you’re using their vocabulary to describe a mild inconvenience? It makes me sick. It’s an insult to the truly ruined.”

PerspectiveIntegrityTraumaResilienceToxicModern SocietySocial CommentaryReality CheckVictimhoodHard Truths
Book:Notes From Exile: The "Manual for the Broken”
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“The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence. The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015”

WarMilitaryMoralityShameGuiltTraumaMoralsPtsdAlienationSoldiersTraumatic ExperiencesTaintedTraumatizedMoral ResponsibilityOutsiderVeteransPost Traumatic Stress DisorderCombat PtsdAlienatedVeterans Survivor Guilt
Author:David Brooks
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“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”

WarSoulMilitaryMoralityShameGuiltTraumaCombatMoralsChild AbuseWarfarePtsdSexual AbuseRapeSoldiersDepravedMoral ResponsibilityVeteransPost Traumatic Stress DisorderCataclysmCombat PtsdNatural DisastersSurvivor GuiltImmoral ActWar TraumaMoral AtrocitiesSexual Assailed
Author:David Brooks
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“So many of us have histories of trauma that come from generations of people forced from our land, bent and twisted by patriarchy, slavery, and genocide. If we simply fire those unable to carry those histories, those who perpetuate harmful lessons they were forced to learn, we will lose.”

TraumaOppressionRedemptionCancel CultureGenerational TraumaTransformative Justice
Book:Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement
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“There are, within the spheres of all our influences, opportunities to rise to singularly crafted occasions. The nature of these, for each of us, are in direct correlation to how we live our lives, what we value, and who populates our worlds. The potential to advance or squander these opportunities is born of the social and emotional topography of our individual lives. Yours cannot be mine. And mine are meant for me.”

TraumaRedemptionProstitution
Book:Rotten Fruit in an Unkempt Garden: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose
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“The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food, it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace. No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smoldering village. To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside forever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times. You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. And if you refuse? If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted, and the birds are silent. When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.”

WarTraumaThe Passion
Author:janette winterson
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“I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.”

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Book:The Yellow Birds
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“... she shut her heavy eyes. 'Why don't they sign up for training?' He knew who she meant. 'Maybe they're not ready.' 'I thought they'd sign up.' 'Is that what you're upset about?' His question was so gentle, so sad. Nesta opened her eyes. 'Some of them have been here for hundreds of years and still haven't been able to come back from what they endured. So what hope do I have?”

SadDepressionTraumaSarah J MaasHopelessnessComing BackCassianNesta ArcheronNestaA Court Of Silver Flames
Book:A ​Court of Silver Flames
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“From this point forward, as a result of working with these Steps and being committed to honouring our inner being when in need, we are moving away from the illusions and traumas that once trapped us unconsciously in narcissistic abuse – and we are ready to emerge, as a butterfly does from a cocoon, spreading our winds fearlessly and soaring in life as an authentic being.”

IllusionAbuseTraumaFearlessUnconsciousSoarNarcissisticAuthenticTrap
Book:You Can Thrive After Narcissistic Abuse
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“He was beautiful in the way things born to power often are… He rode a silver-grey stallion that looked like it had been bred from starlight and arrogance. True love dies most beautifully in the mouths of poets and liars. She was beautiful in the way teeth are beautiful right before they bite. I am the scream behind the silence. I am the ending that learned how to dance.”

PoetryHealingFeminismEmpowermentTraumaRebellionDark FantasyRomantasyStrenghtFemale Rage
Book:The Serpent's Dance : A Fable for the Girls Who Burned and Didn’t Apologise
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“An educational strategy to help you maintain your clear boundaries is the JADE technique. JADE is an acronym and it stands for: J = Justify: Don’t try to justify yourself to toxic people. It’s unproductive. A = Argue: Do not waste your energy arguing with toxic people. D = Defend: Don’t waste your breath trying to defend yourself to those who don’t care. E = Explain: Never explain yourself, especially to those who discredit you. The goal of the JADE technique is to take back your power. To stand up for yourself without needing to defend or explain yourself. It’s essential to not engage in this ridiculous mind-game with abusive people.”

EmpowermentTraumaBoundariesSelf CareNarcissistToxic PeopleAbuse RecoveryVerbal AbuseJade Technique
Book:Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma
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“Miracles can be found in the most unlikely of places. I found the light not by swimming to the surface, but by letting myself drown in the seas of my deepest fears. Not by eradicating the dark, but by embracing it. I realized that there is no such a thing as darkness, only light and the absence of it. It is there in the light of unconditional love that I finally found the freedom I had been searching for so long.”

SpiritualitySelf LoveEmpowermentMental HealthTraumaAwakeningEmotional AbuseAbuse SurvivorsOvercoming Challenges QuotesEmotional Neglect
Book:Winter Magnolia
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