Quotessence
Home / Topics / Trauma Quotes

Trauma Quotes

Browse 1903 quotes about Trauma.

Related topics

PeopleThinkingIfsWayChildhoodWorldHelpingKnowsChildrenSelfFeelingsHas BeensNeedsPainPersonsWarWellsDealsEmotionalFeelsHealingVictimWritingYearsCausesFactsPastRealSufferingTryingBelieveBodyChildhood TraumaDifferentKindPsychologicalArtGriefHumansLongMovingOvercomingSituationStoriesWoundsBrainEffectsHappenedLossMayMindProcessRememberSeemsSometimesStillsTerm

Trauma Quotes

“The hands on Eddie's childhood glass then were hard and calloused and red with anger, and he went through his younger years whacked, lashed, and beaten. This was the second damage done, the one after neglect. The damage of violence. It got so that Eddie could tell by the thump of the footsteps coming down the hall how hard he was going to get it.”

ViolenceChildhoodYouthAbuseTraumaChildhood TraumaBad Parents
Book:The Five People You Meet In Heaven
Create image

“As children, we tolerate working conditions that we'd find intolerable as adults: the constant exposure of our attainment to a hostile audience; the motivation by threat instead of encouragement (and big threats, too: if you don't do this, you'll ruin your whole future life . . .); the social world in which you're mocked and teased, your most embarrassing desires exposed, your new-formed body held up for the kind of scrutiny that would destroy an adult. Often, during childhood, this comes with physical threats, too—being pushed and shoved on the playground, punched and kicked. The eternal menace that something more savage is waiting around the corner on your way home. Imagine how that would feel to you as an adult: that perpetual threat to your bodily integrity and your mental wellbeing. We would never stand for it, but we did as children because it was expected of us and we didn't know any better.”

ChildhoodConfidenceTraumaSelf WorthBullyingSelf Advocacy
Book:Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Create image

“I liked a girl, but never knew what to say. I won awards, longing for your "hooray." I was in a play doing whatever wildness suited. I did the same drugs mom said you did. It was always momma and me. You loved the racetracks for decades, but left me at three. All my friends were fatted with a love to claim, And the only thing you ever gave me was your name.”

ChildhoodTraumaGamblingFatherhoodMasculinityDrug AddictionSingle ParentingGrowing Up Without A Father
Book:Can I Tell You Something?
Create image

“Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents' pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence.”

RelationshipsChildhoodTraumaInsanityStory Of My Life
Book:A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
Create image

“If a mother cannot meet her baby’s impulses and needs, [quoting Donald Winnicott] ‘the baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.’ Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust it its caregiver’s needs, means the child perceives that ‘something is wrong’ with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies, the seat of pleasure, purpose, and direction.”

PsychologyChildhoodParentingTrauma
Book:The Body Keeps the Score / Trauma and Recovery / Hidden Healing Powers
Create image

“I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex.”

GriefChildhoodDepressionAddictionTrauma
Book:Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After
Create image

“We all fulfill our quota of misfortune at some point in our life. This is what I believed as a ten-year-old. It was a belief system of my own creation, part of a silent theory based on fairness and balance. I believed that some reached their quota early and advanced to a life of access and abundance, while others had beginnings filled with open doors and opportunities until they were met with their share of misfortune.”

BeliefChildhoodTraumaMythMisfortune
Author:Janet Mock
Create image

“Kaffman (2009) described childhood victimization as a "silent epidemic", and Finkelhor, Turner, Ormrod, and Hamby (2010) reported that children are the most traumatized class of humans around the globe. The findings of these researchers are at odds with the view that children have protected status in most families, societies, and cultures. Instead, Finkelhor reports that children are prime targets and highly vulnerable, due principally to their small size, their physical and emotional immaturity with its associated lack of control, power and resources; and their related dependency on caregivers. They are subjected to many forms of exploitation on an ongoing basis, imposed on them by individuals with greater power, strength, knowledge, and resources, many of whom are, paradoxically and tragically, responsible for their care and welfare. These traumas are interpersonal in nature and involve personal transgression, violation and exploitation of the child by those who rely on the child's lesser physical abilities, innocence, and immaturity to intimidate, bully, confuse, blackmail, exploit, or otherwise coerce. In the worst-case scenario, a parent or other significant caregiver directly and repeatedly abuses a child or does not respond to or protect a child or other vulnerable individual who is being abused and mistreated and isolates the child from others through threats or with direct violence. Consequently, such an abusive, nonprotective, or malevolently exploitative circumstance (Chefetz has coined the term "attack-ment" to describe these dynamics) has a profound impact on victim's ability to trust others. It also affects the victim's identity and self-concept, usually in negative ways that include self-hatred, low self-worth, and lack of self-confidence. As a result, both relationships, and the individual's sense of self and internal states (feelings, thoughts, and perceptions) can become sources of fear, despair, rage, or other extreme dysphoria or numbed and dissociated reactions. This state of alienation from self and others is further exacerbated when the occurrence of abuse or other victimization involves betrayal and is repeated and becomes chronic, in the process leading the victim to remain in a state of either hyperarousal/anticipation/hypervigilance or hypoarousal/numbing (or to alternate between these two states) and to develop strong protective mechanisms, such as dissociation, in order to endure recurrences. When these additional victimizations recur, they unfortunately tend to escalate in severity and intrusiveness over time, causing additional traumatization (Duckworth & Follette, 2011). In many cases of child maltreatment, emotional or psychological coercion and the use of the adult's authority and dominant power rather than physical force or violence is the fulcrum and weapon used against the child; however, force and violence are common in some settings and in some forms of abuse (sometimes in conjunction with extreme isolation and drugging of the child), as they are used to further control or terrorize the victim into submission. The use of force and violence is more commonplace and prevalent in some families, communities, religions, cultural/ethnic groups, and societies based on the views and values about adult prerogatives with children that are espoused. They may also be based on the sociopathy of the perpetrators.”

ChildhoodTraumaChildhood AbuseVictimizationDevelopmental Trauma
Book:Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach
Create image

“But resiliency only means that a thing retains its shape. That it doesn’t break, or lose its ability to function. It doesn’t mean a child forgets the time she shared in the backyard with her mother gardening, or the fun they had together watching Bedknobs and Broomsticks at the Astro. It just means she learns to bear it. The mechanism that allowed Lisa Sample to keep her head above water in the wake of her mother’s departure has not been described or cataloged by scientists. It’s efficient, and flexible, and probably transferable from one person to another should they catch the scent on each other. But the rest of the details about it aren’t observable from the outside. You have to be closer than you really want to get to see how it works.”

ChildhoodTraumaResilience
Book:Universal Harvester
Create image

“It was too quiet for hope, and then too loud for safety. She thought of the people she had lost, of the affection, the smiles, the belonging she could never again take for granted. It was the end of a life, and as she stood there, shivering in the brief night-time chill, it dawned on her that it was the end of her childhood.”

LossChildhoodMemoryTraumaSeparationPakistanForbidden LovePartitionIndian Independence MovementPunjab
Book:Where the River Parts
Create image

“Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of our own toys. When you get whacked by your own paddleball paddle or you have to watch your sister getting spanked with a badminton racquet that she asked Santa Claus (AKA Grandma) to bring, you don't feel much like playing with those things ever again.”

ChildhoodTraumaChild AbusePhysical AbuseBad MotheringPaperboy
Book:Paperboy: A Dysfunctional Novel
Create image

“One often reads of elite athletes for whom their chosen sport is their life. Not simply a livelihood or a hobby, but an obsession that informs every aspect of their mental, physical, emotional and philosophical being. I am similarly consumed with sex. Far from just the act of sex, it is its possibilities that dictate my thoughts and motives. Sex is the distillation of my own essence, it is the prism through which my life is processed.”

SexTraumaSexualitySexual Trauma
Author:Vanessa de Largie
Create image

“Your knuckles hurt from knocking, so now you're slamming the side of your balled up fist on the wood door which rattles dangerously in its frame. You hope the neighbors can't hear as you beat on the door. It’s late, after midnight again, and recently, (you can't recall when) one of the neighbors complained about the noise. She stood outside the door as you lay on the living room floor and joined at the hip. She began yelling profanities through the thin wood. She was sick of listening to you two going at it all the time. You were a couple of “disgusting animals” in her estimation and she was going to call the police if you didn't keep it down from now on. You smile vaguely at the memory while your fist continues to pound the door. You recall how you both started coming simultaneously within only seconds of her banging on the door, how the startling intrusion made the pleasure even more thrilling, forbidden and intense.”

LoveSexDarkComedyTraumaChild Sex AbuseDomestic Noir
Book:Talionic Night in Portland: A Love Story
Create image

“While you sleep, you are oppressed by dark meandering dreams. They’re characterized by an oppressive feeling of endless overcast shadow. The world is encased in dim blue darkness, and white ash is drifting everywhere. You find yourself in an abandoned tennis court that has gone to seed. The birds have stopped singing, the robins have disappeared and you become one of only thousands of people left. More than half of humanity has died of disease, pestilence, and military genocide. Fat golden rats scurry here and there among severed heads lying all around the tennis court in varying stages of putrid decay. As you walk out of the exit, you see piles of dead soldiers in rotting heaps, victims of mass poisoning by rebel civilians smart enough to fool them with Kool Aid on a hot day. Men, women and children lie everywhere, their empty bodies’ ravaged, their desiccated purple tongues, stick limbs and empty eye sockets all that’s left of them. They were the fortunate ones, shot through the head, the illiterate civilians whose organs were harvested for the criminal elite. The elite live high up in the hills with their armed guards inside abandoned mansions with no electricity or running water. Harvested as replacement organs for the sick or as dinner for those who used to enjoy beef liver, the elite are the only ones with handguns and rifles and everyone else is at their mercy hiding in the abandoned buildings all through downtown and the industrial area of NW Portland.”

LoveSexAbuseTraumaChild Sexual AbuseHealing The PastDomestic Noir
Book:Talionic Night in Portland: A Love Story
Create image

“As his boots walked towards the old station, he felt as though he were hallucinating. Scary apprehension increased the beat of his heart and the sweat upon his forehead was cold. The reality of where he stood created a sinking feeling inside of him. An old man everyone called Uncle Tucker once owned this place. His sole existence behind the counter all of the time, day and night. He could have been a creature out of a fairy tale, with his long white beard and equally long white hair. Merlin. The overalls and the ball cap perched upon his head, along with the half-smoked cigar with an endless burning orb positioned in his mouth. It made him a fixture in time. He wondered if Tucker would still be alive. Tucker with his endless stories of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and flower children. A man that never left a country thousands of miles away where bicycles filled the capital. A man who never left those fields where killing occurred.”

AgeTimeAgingTraumaPtsdVietnam WarThe PastFlashbacks
Book:The Delta Highway
Create image

“This vacillation between assertion and denial in discussions about organised abuse can be understood as functional, in that it serves to contain the traumatic kernel at the heart of allegations of organised abuse. In his influential ‘just world’ theory, Lerner (1980) argued that emotional wellbeing is predicated on the assumption that the world is an orderly, predictable and just place in which people get what they deserve. Whilst such assumptions are objectively false, Lerner argued that individuals have considerable investment in maintaining them since they are conducive to feelings of self—efficacy and trust in others. When they encounter evidence contradicting the view that the world is just, individuals are motivated to defend this belief either by helping the victim (and thus restoring a sense of justice) or by persuading themselves that no injustice has occurred. Lerner (1980) focused on the ways in which the ‘just world’ fallacy motivates victim-blaming, but there are other defences available to bystanders who seek to dispel troubling knowledge. Organised abuse highlights the severity of sexual violence in the lives of some children and the desire of some adults to inflict considerable, and sometimes irreversible, harm upon the powerless. Such knowledge is so toxic to common presumptions about the orderly nature of society, and the generally benevolent motivations of others, that it seems as though a defensive scaffold of disbelief, minimisation and scorn has been erected to inhibit a full understanding of organised abuse. Despite these efforts, there has been a recent resurgence of interest in organised abuse and particularly ritualistic abuse (eg Sachs and Galton 2008, Epstein et al. 2011, Miller 2012).”

LawUnderstandingJusticeMediaCrimeTrustHorrorAuthorityEvidenceVictimSocial JusticeBlameMental HealthInjusticeMemoryTraumaKarmaDebateInnocenceDenialToxicChild AbuseInvestigationFairnessBeliefsCultTestimonyMisunderstandingSexual AbuseScornDefenceDisbeliefTherapistsHysteriaWorld ViewLegalRitual AbuseAttackSociety DenialProsecutionSexual ViolenceSatanic Ritual AbuseCover UpPedophileVictim BlamingChild ProtectionAccusationsRecovered MemoriesTraumaticOrganized AbusePaedophilesOrganised AbuseCoverupMoral PanicCult AbuseMillerSocial WorkersPedophile RingsConfabulationChild SexEpsteinJust WorldRitualised AbuseDiscreditingSense Of SafetyMiscarriages Of JusticeGaltonMinimisationSachsSafe WorldSelf Efficiacy
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
Create image

“Some readers may find it a curious or even unscientific endeavour to craft a criminological model of organised abuse based on the testimony of survivors. One of the standard objections to qualitative research is that participants may lie or fantasise in interview, it has been suggested that adults who report severe child sexual abuse are particularly prone to such confabulation. Whilst all forms of research, whether qualitative or quantitative, may be impacted upon by memory error or false reporting. there is no evidence that qualitative research is particularly vulnerable to this, nor is there any evidence that a fantasy— or lie—prone individual would be particularly likely to volunteer for research into child sexual abuse. Research has consistently found that child abuse histories, including severe and sadistic abuse, are accurate and can be corroborated (Ross 2009, Otnow et al. 1997, Chu et al. 1999). Survivors of child abuse may struggle with amnesia and other forms of memory disturbance but the notion that they are particularly prone to suggestion and confabulation has yet to find a scientific basis. It is interesting to note that questions about the veracity of eyewitness evidence appear to be asked far more frequently in relation to sexual abuse and rape than in relation to other crimes. The research on which this book is based has been conducted with an ethical commitment to taking the lives and voices of survivors of organised abuse seriously.”

LawUnderstandingJusticeFantasyMediaCrimeTrustHorrorAuthorityEvidenceVictimSocial JusticeBlameMental HealthInjusticeMemoryTraumaKarmaDebateInnocenceDenialToxicChild AbuseInvestigationFairnessBeliefsCultLieTestimonyMisunderstandingSexual AbuseScornDefenceDisbeliefTherapistsHysteriaAmnesiaWorld ViewLegalRitual AbuseAttackSociety DenialProsecutionSexual ViolenceSatanic Ritual AbuseCover UpPedophileVictim BlamingChild ProtectionAccusationsRecovered MemoriesTraumaticOrganized AbusePaedophilesOrganised AbuseCoverupMoral PanicCult AbuseMillerRossSocial WorkersPedophile RingsConfabulationChild SexEpsteinJust WorldRitualised AbuseDiscreditingSense Of SafetyMiscarriages Of JusticeEye WitnessGaltonMinimisationSachsSafe WorldSelf EfficiacyChuMemory Error
Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
Create image

“I spent many years trying to make up reasons about why I had the flashbacks, memories, continuous nightmares. When I finally decided to quit trying to hide from truth, I began to heal.”

RealityTruthHealingAbuseTraumaHealSurvivorChild AbusePtsdNightmaresFacing The TruthFacing RealityFlashbacksHiding From The Past
Book:Amongst Ourselves: A Self-Help Guide to Living with Dissociative Identity Disorder
Create image