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Trauma Quotes

Browse 1903 quotes about Trauma.

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Trauma Quotes

“After all, the media was flooded with stories about people suffering from post-traumatic stress; his behavior had seemed understandable. It wasn't until the Paris riots that she realized how much he'd changed, as though some dark seed buried inside him had found the ideal conditions for growth. And after he left, she was forced to recognize how she'd changed as well, her determined cheerfulness and willful ignorance, her ability to read the newspaper and then push the unpleasantness from her mind (how typical, how bourgeoisie, how very American, she thought now), as though the world wasn't shifting very much at all, as though everything wasn't disintegrating beneath them.”

ChangeMediaIgnoranceNewsStressTraumaIgnoring
Book:What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us
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“Wir leiden als Erwachsene nicht ursächlich unter dem, was uns in der Vergangenheit passiert ist. Wenn das so wäre, dann gäbe es überhaupt keine Lösung und keine Chance auf Heilung. Wir leiden heute darunter, dass wir das Bindungsszenario der Vergangenheit in jedem Moment mit den Menschen in unserer Umgebung unbewusst neu erschaffen. Damit erzeugen wir den körperlichen Stress aus der Kindheit immer wieder aufs Neue.”

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Book:Der Vagusschlüssel zur Traumaheilung
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“In order to “protect” ourselves by keeping our lives small and shutting out intimacies, we could actually be hurting ourselves, missing out on a transformative experience of the heart, and sabotaging our small but crucial contribution to making peace.”

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Book:Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
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“For me, hearing a relational history at the beginning of our work helps me form pictures of some encounters that bought pain and others that offered empathic support. Early in life, who comforted this person? Who kept her safe? Who was distant? Who needed her to regulate them? Who felt dangerous? Who bought confusion or chaos? Who criticized and who was accepting? We might quickly discover that one person brought contradictory experiences - the confusing one also comforted, or the dangerous one at home was a primary support of safety in the outside world. All this helps us begin to feel into the qualities of relatedness our person has taken in.”

HopeHealingRelationshipTraumaAttachmentImplicit Memory
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Out of nowhere, one of the twins grabbed my cap while the other delivered a blow to my head. She slapped the taste right out of my mouth. I couldn’t even feel my tongue. I spun around to face my bullies. The twins had become triplets. I couldn’t remember ever trying to drink three glasses of anything and this wouldn’t be the day to try.”

TruthLife LessonsHopeUnderstandingStruggleChaosTraumaTrue StoryDeeper Understanding
Book:Surviving Chaos: How I Found Peace at A Beach Bar
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“Some people with DID present their narratives of sadistic abuse in a quite matter-of-fact way, without perceptible affect. This may sometimes be done as a way of protecting themselves, and the listener, from the emotional impact of their experience. We have found that people describing trauma in a flat way, without feeling, are usually those who have been more chronically abused, while those with affect still have a sense of self that can observe the tragedy of betrayal and have feelings about it. In some cases, this deadpan presentation can also be the result of cult training and brainwashing. Unfortunately, when a patient describes a traumatic experience without showing any apparent emotion, it can make the listener doubt whether the patient is telling the truth. (page 119, Chapter 9, Some clinical implications of believing or not believing the patient)”

FeelingsTruthDoubtAbuseTragedyVictimTraumaBetrayalProtectionChild AbuseCultDissociative Identity DisorderDisbeliefNumbMultiple Personality DisorderBrainwashingRitual AbuseAffectTraumaticCult AbuseEmotionlessSadistic AbuseSurvivor Of Abuse
Book:Forensic Aspects of Dissociative Identity Disorder
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“In various paradigms of practice, we have called these protectors "defenses" or "resistances", as though they were objects that needed to be moved out of the way. This is understandable, because we see that these parts of ourselves sometimes cause injury if we view them only from the outer perspective, without opening to the ways they are sheltering our inner world.”

HopeUnderstandingHealingCompassionEmpathyMental HealthTrauma
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“In 2017, I was invited to lead a mindfulness workshop and guide a live meditation on Mingus Mountain, Arizona, to over 100 men and women at a recovery retreat. On the eve of my workshop, I had the opportunity to join in a men's twelve-step meeting, which took place by the campfire in Prescott National Park Forest, with at least 40 men recovering from childhood grief and trauma. The meeting grounded us in what was a large retreat with many unfamiliar faces. I was the only mixed-race Brit, surrounded by mostly white middle-class American men (baby boomers and Generation X), yet our common bond of validating each other's wounds in recovery utterly transcended any differences of nationality, race and heritage. We shared our pain and hope in a non-shaming environment, listening and allowing every man to have his say without interruption. At the end of the meeting we stood up in a large circle and recited the serenity prayer: "God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage to change the one I can, and the wisdom to know that one is me". After the meeting closed, I felt that I belonged and I was enthusiastic about the retreat, even though I was thousands of miles away from England.”

LoveGriefCompassionMindfulnessTraumaDrug AddictionChristopher DinesDrug Addiction Recovery12 Step RecoverySerenity Prayer
Book:Drug Addiction Recovery: The Mindful Way
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“The surgical resident interested in learning trauma will bypass a residency at a quiet community hospital for a residency at a fast-paced Level 1 trauma center treating a high volume of trauma patients. A Level 1 trauma center residency is far more rigorous—and not particularly glamorous—but the intensive culture of a dedicated trauma center will cultivate the decisive judgment and action required of a surgeon specializing in trauma. By choice or by chance, we must actively test our limits to know our capabilities.”

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Book:Relevance: Matter More
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“It's funny how, sometimes, the mind won't let the body remember what's been done to it. It chooses, at will, to take the abusive memory and bury it. As if to nurture away the pain by making us forget it's there. Not remembering trauma doesn't mean we're left without its effect. It still comes up and out, at a certain smell, sound, sight, touch, question, tone, location, person, people, personality. Waiting to be noticed and brought to the light. Letting it, and peeking into where it's from, is the path to making sense of ourselves and finding the particular healing we've been kept from having.”

MindHealingTrauma
Book:Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been
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“Pavlov was fascinated with “ideas of the opposite.” Call it a cluster of cells, somewhere on the cortex of the brain. Helping to distinguish pleasure from pain, light from dark, dominance from submission…. But when, somehow—starve them, traumatize, shock, castrate them, send them over into one of the transmarginal phases, past borders of their waking selves, past “equivalent” and “paradoxical” phases—you weaken this idea of the opposite, and here all at once is the paranoid patient who would be master, yet now feels himself a slave… who would be loved, but suffers his world’s indifference, and, “I think,” Pavlov writing to Janet, “it is precisely the ultraparadoxical phase which is the base of the weakening of the idea of the opposite in our patients.” Our madmen, our paranoid, maniac, schizoid, morally imbecile—”

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Book:Gravity’s Rainbow
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“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
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“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.”

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Book:When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion
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“Researchers have shown that the flooding of stress hormones resulting from a traumatic separation from your parents at a young age kills off so many dendrites and neurons in the brain that it results in permanent psychological and physical changes. One psychiatrist I went to told me that my brain looked like a tree without branches. So I just think about all the children who have been separated from their parents, and there's a lot of us, past and present, and some under more traumatic circumstances than others--like those who are in internment camps right now--and I just imagine us as an army of mutants. We’ve all been touched by this monster, and our brains are forever changed, and we all have trees without branches in there, and what will happen to us? Who will we become? Who will take care of us?”

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Book:The Undocumented Americans
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“Studies on the phenomenon indicate that a person with a high tolerance for pain is likely to also have above-average capacity to cope with the stress of a job layoff or a cancer diagnosis, and this same person is more likely as well to have experienced a moderate amount of psychological trauma in his or her past. It would appear that a certain amount of misfortune is needed to toughen the mind against suffering and hardship, but excessive trauma leaves scar tissue.”

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Book:How Bad Do You Want It? Mastering the Psychology of Mind over Muscle
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“A study from New York's Mount Sinai Hospital found that genetic changes stemming from the trauma suffered by Holocaust survivors were capable of being passed on to their children. Our genes change all the time when chemical tags attach themselves to the DNA and turn genes on or off. The study found that some of these tags--found in the genes of those survivors -- were also found in their children. The changes led to an increased incidence of stress disorders. This passing down of environmentally altered genes is called *epigenetic inheritance.*”

StressTraumaGenesGeneticsHolocaust Survivors
Book:Aftershocks
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“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.”

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Book:Coltan Song
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“Bij traumatische stoornissen en zelfs bij stressgerelateerde ziektes is sprake van een ontbrekende inbeelding (vandaar het onbewuste karakter ervan), waarbij de patiënt niet in staat is onderliggende spanningen te verwoorden. Precies daarom zoeken die spanningen een andere uitlaatklep, bijvoorbeeld in conversiesymptomen. Ze kunnen ook aan de basis liggen van verscheidene ziektebeelden die op het eerste gezicht geen psychologische grond hebben.”

StressTraumaPsychologieInbeeldingSpanningBewustzijnConversieUitlaatklep
Book:Intimiteit
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“A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and despondency. I must reach an accord with pain, suffering, and anguish, or forevermore be tortured by reality while constantly seeking to escape from the inescapable agony of being.”

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Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Chemistry is not destiny, certainly. But these scientists have demonstrated that the most reliable way to produce an adult who is brave and curious and kind and prudent is to ensure that when he is an infant, his hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functions well. And how do you do that? It is not magic. First, as much as possible, you protect him from serious trauma and chronic stress; then, even more important, you provide him with a secure, nurturing relationship with at least one parent and ideally two. That's not the whole secret of success, but it is a big, big part of it.”

StressTraumaAttachmentAceBrain Chemistry
Book:How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character
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“There are two types of memory frequently experienced by individuals who have had overwhelming trauma that has been suppressed psychologically or chemically. The first is general memory, experienced as an adult, in which there is a natural recall of early events. The other is the memory that is often associated with post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSS). The person suddenly smells, sees and feels as though he or she is actually living the event that took place months or years earlier. Many soldiers who survived horrifying combat experiences have PTSS. This has frequently been discussed in terms of Vietnam veterans who suddenly mentally find themselves in the jungle, hiding from the enemy or assaulting people they see as a threat. The fact that they have not been in Vietnam for decades and that they are experiencing the flashbacks in shopping malls, at home or at work does not change what they are mentally reliving. But PTSS has existed for centuries and has affected men, women and children in the midst of all wars, horrifying natural disasters and other traumatic experiences. This includes physical and sexual abuse when growing up. the PTSS Cheryl was experiencing more and more frequently, in which she found herself seeing, feeling and re-experiencing events from her childhood and adolescence had become overwhelming. She knew she needed to get help.”

HorrorAbuseStressMental HealthMemoryTraumaChild AbusePtsdOverwhelmedSexual AbuseRapeSoldiersSexual AssaultTraumaticFlashbacksPtss
Book:Secret Weapons: How Two Sisters Were Brainwashed to Kill for Their Country
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“Lewis's mental map of reality had difficulty accommodating the trauma of the Great War. Like so many, he found the settled way of looking at the world, taken for granted by many in the Edwardian age, to have been shattered by the most brutal and devastating war yet known." (51) Part (McGrath suggests) of Lewis's well-documented search for truth and meaning, that search that ultimately led him to Christianity, emerges from the desire to make sense of his traumatic experience in ways that satisfied him spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually.”

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Book:C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
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