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Trauma Quotes

Browse 1903 quotes about Trauma.

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Trauma Quotes

“Almost worse than the sorrow of missing her was the fact that Mom's death had revealed everything to be meaningless. So much of what I'd thought was true had turned out to be an illusion. I saw people around me living by these illusions— that love and safety could be counted on, that life had meaning and the future could be controlled— and I did not feel that I could ever again share their suspended disbelief. I was swimming against a strong, cold current: I could see them there, playing on a sunny beach, but I couldn't rejoin them. Continuing the struggle seemed not only incredibly painful but, even worse, pointless.”

LossHealingDepressionTraumaDisillusionmentMeaninglessness Of LifeSuspended DisbeliefThe Struggle Of LivingTrauma And Desolation
Book:After the Eclipse: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Search
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“Sorrow in the Heart of an Apple” I tidied my old sorrow, wrapped it gently in scented cloth, and buried it beneath the apple tree in our village orchard. Seasons rolled by... And I believed it was finished, forgotten, even the burial site lost to memory. Then came harvest. I plucked a red apple— shiny, luscious, radiant with promise. But with the first bite, I tasted it. That same sorrow, aged but unmistakable. It had not only survived— it had multiplied. Now here I am, face to face again, finding it in the heart of every apple.”

LifeLife LessonsLossGriefMemoryTraumaForgettingArabic PoetryArabic LiteratureThe Human Condition
Book:سرطان في كل مكان [Cancer Everywhere]
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“You are- you're everything to me,' he said thickly. 'I need... I need you to be all right. To know they can't get to you- can't hurt you anymore.' 'I know.' Those fingers drifted lower. I swallowed hard and said again, 'I know.' I brushed his hair back from his face. 'But what about you? Who gets to keep you safe?' His mouth tightened. With his powers returned, he didn't need anyone to protect him, shield him. I could almost see invisible hackles raising- not at me, but at the thought of what he'd been mere months ago: prone to Amarantha's whims, his power barely a trickle compared to the cascade now coursing through him. He took a steadying breath, and leaned to kiss my heart, right between my breasts. It was answer enough. 'Soon,' he murmured, and those fingers travelled back to my waist. I almost groaned. 'Soon you'll be my wife, and it'll be fine. We'll leave all this behind us.”

TraumaKissSarah J MaasFeyreFeyre ArcheronA Court Of Mist And FuryTamlinKeep You SafeEverything To MeBe All Right
Book:A Court of Mist and Fury
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“But hypochondria is a plotless story, a deviation from the regular progression of an illness from stage to stage. Without a firm diagnosis for my unreliable symptoms, I am stuck in the first scene of the drama, endlessly looping around the first few lines of dialogue. The compulsion to narrativize this experience is always there, but always thwarted. The comfortable point at which to tell the story never arrives, because everything is always in present tense. No narrative structure can help those who never get to turn the page on the opening line.”

MetaphorIllnessTraumaNarrativeHealth AnxietyIllness As Metaphor
Author:Caroline Crampton
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“I’m stacking days, building a house of cards made from nothing but days. Monday is the Ace of Hearts. Saturday is the Four of Spades. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. Thursday night is, I suspect, the Seven of Diamonds, and it might be heavy enough to bring the whole precarious thing tumbling down around my ears. I would spend an entire hour watching cards fall, because time would stretch, the same way it stretches out to fill in awkward pauses, the way it stretched thin in that thundering moment of a car crash. Or at the edges of a wound.”

MetaphorTrauma
Book:Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan, Volume 2
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“I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away. But the nature of pain is that it changes— it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too. - survivor of child sexual abuse”

SufferingHealingMetaphorTraumaRecoveryChild AbusePtsdEmotional PainChild Sexual AbuseIncestEmotional TurmoilOmplex Ptsd
Book:The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
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“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”

FeelingsHealingBrainPsychologySurvivalEmotionsMetaphorTraumaHealUnconsciousElectricPtsdFrozenOverwhelmedCopyingPsychosisTraumatic ExperiencesFloodingTraumatizedPosttraumatic Stress DisorderTraumaticPosttraumatic StressPtssAnaolgyCircuit Breaker
Book:The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out
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“Trauma. It doesn't eke itself out over time. It doesn't split itself manageably into bite-sized chunks and distribute itself equally throughout your life. Trauma is all or nothing. A tsunami wave of destruction. A tornado of unimaginable awfulness that whooshes into your life - just for one key moment - and wreaks such havoc that, in just an instant, your whole world will never be the same again.”

PainYaTrauma
Book:The Manifesto on How to Be Interesting
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“Concepts like trauma and safety have expanded so far since the 1980s that they are often employed in ways that are no longer grounded in legitimate psychological research. Grossly expanded conceptions of trauma and safety are now used to justify the overprotection of children of all ages-- even college students”

ChildrenStudentsSafetyTraumaJustifications
Book:The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure
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“Others, however, would look over the children as if they were produce. They’d only speak to the nearest officer, never lowering their eyes to the young ones. Instead, they looked down their noses as though to distance themselves. “I’ll take these,” Helen would see them mouth, waving a finger above the small heads. It was a moment the children would have branded on their minds, Helen was sure of it, and the pain of it turned her stomach to lead.”

ChildrenTraumaWorld War IiWorld War 2Foster ChildrenRefugeesJudging OthersWw2EvacuationChild Evacuation
Book:The Ocean's Daughter :
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“While reliving trauma is dramatic, frightening, and potentially self-destructive, over time a lack of presence can be even more damaging. This is a particular problem with traumatized children. The acting-out kids tend to get attention; the blanked-out ones don’t bother anybody and are left to lose their future bit by bit.”

ChildrenPsychologyTraumaDissociationChild PsychologyFight Or FlightChild Trauma
Book:The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers
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“imagine your heart is just a ball you learned to dribble up and down the length of your driveway back home. slow down control it. plant your feet in the soft blue of your mat and release it is hard but slowly you are unlearning the shallow pant of your childhood. extend your body—do not reach for someone but something fixed and fleshless and certain— fold flatten then lift your head like a cobra sure of the sun waiting and ready to caress the chill from its scales. inhale—try not to remember how desperate you’ve been for touch—yes ignore it—that hitch of your heart you got from mornings you woke to find momma hysterical or gone. try to give up the certainty she’d never return recall only the return and not its coldness. imagine her arms wide to receive you imagine you are not a thing that needs escaping. it is hard and though at times you are sure you will always be the abandoned girl trying to abandon herself push up arch deep into your back exhale and remember— when it is too late to pray the end of the flood we pray instead to survive it.”

ChildrenPoetryPoemSurvivalYogaTraumaParents
Author:Brionne Janae
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“Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?”

FireBloodMemoryTraumaAshKnightHoleBeric DondarrionThoros
Book:A Storm of Swords
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“The bodily experience we have taken in from [other people that our body has internalized as 'imported parts'] will affect our muscles, belly and heart brains, autonomic nervous system, eyes, ears and vocal cords when they are active in us. While carrying this much of others can feel like an overwhelming burden, it is also the open door to healing, since their aliveness inside us means they can be touched with the ... care that others might offer us.”

HopeHealingTraumaSelf AcceptancePartsImplicit Memory
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Janna knew - Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn't make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West, Citizen Kane, Sugar Ray Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson miso, miso soup, black bean soup, black sticky soup, black sticky me. Yeah. Inside I was still a fetid and festering corpse covered in sticky blackness, still mired in putrid shame and scorching self-hatred. I could write an 86-page essay comparing the features of Borderline Personality Disorder with those of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I barely knew what day it was, or even what month, never knew where the car was parked when Dusty would come out of the grocery store, couldn't look in the mirror for fear of what—or whom—I'd see. ~ Dr Cameron West describes living with DID whilst studying to be a psychologist.”

PsychologySelf EsteemAbuseShameMental HealthMemoryTraumaMental IllnessSurvivorChild AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderPsychologistDiagnosisDissociationChild Sexual AbuseMultiple Personality DisorderIncestPsychiatricMultiple PersonalitiesMental Health StigmaSplit PersonalityAbusive ParentsPedophilesDidSelf BlameSurvivor Of AbuseChild Range
Book:First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple
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“Gaslighting causes us to doubt our own memories, perceptions, and judgments. It throws us psychologically off balance. It’s like being in the Twilight Zone. If you feel as though your self-esteem, confidence, and dignity has withered under the flame of gaslighting, you are not alone.”

Self EsteemPerceptionTraumaNarcissistDysfunctional FamilyManipulativeGaslightingPsychological AbuseTwilight Zone
Book:Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma
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