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Trauma Quotes

Browse 1903 quotes about Trauma.

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Trauma Quotes

“Attitude Is Everything We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations. The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances? When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.”

SufferingAttitudeResponsibilityShameGuiltMental HealthTraumaBetrayalPositive AttitudeIntolerancePtsdStigmaEmotional PainInsidiousVictimsBelief In SelfVictimhoodTraumatizedDemoralizingVictim BlamingBad AdviceTraumaticInvalidationStigmatizationHalf TruthsTraumatizationUnsupportiveLoss Of BeliefBlind To BetrayalFalse Perspective
Author:Sandra Lee Dennis
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“He loves me so he hurts me To try and make me good. It doesn't work. I'm just too bad And don't do what I should. My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell — and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed — and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together — so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years.”

PainSufferingAbuseVictimMemoryTraumaSurvivorChild AbuseGroomingAbusedTraumatic
Book:Groomed
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“I consulted a trauma expert who travels to communities devastated by natural disasters. When she meets with suffering people, she often asks this question, “Where are you feeling the pain in your body?” She wants to know if they want to talk about their emotions or if they need to talk about what’s happening physically to them. I used this advice when I recently met with a grieving friend. I wasn’t sure what to ask her, so I sat with her, cried, and then asked, “How are you feeling the grieving in your body?” She loved the question. Nobody had ever asked her this, and she wanted to talk about all the trembling and nausea she was feeling.”

SufferingConversationTraumaQuestionsPhysical Body
Book:The Six Conversations: Pathways to Connecting Again in an Age of Isolation and Incivility
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“It doesn’t matter if someone drowns in a bathtub, a swimming pool, a lake, or an ocean. It doesn’t matter if someone drowns in five feet of water or a hundred. Drowning is drowning. Regardless of depth or source, your lungs still fill with water which prevents you from breathing, which prevents oxygen from being delivered to your heart, which causes you to panic and to die. No one in this world who drowns, drowns more or less than anyone else.”

PainSufferingDepthTraumaDrowningHurtingComparing Yourself To Others
Book:Heaven and Hurricanes
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“Atsushi hated pain. But pain had been an intimate part of his life for as long as he could remember. The pain of being stabbed, the pain from being punched, the pain of his hands numbing in the cold, pain inside his head, the pain of hunger—suffering clung to Atsushi like clothing, shaping him. Pain made Atsushi feel like himself. He didn’t know any other way to experience this feeling. After joining the detective agency, the nature of the pain changed, he got hurt less often, and he stopped feeling miserable. Instead, the crushing pressure of necessity tore at Atsushi’s flesh. It split open his shoulder, pierced his chest, and snapped off his leg. The agony was so unbearable that it was as if he could feel his soul leaving his body, but even then, he fought through the pain because it was worth it. He knew he could stubbornly resist the pain no matter how bad it got. There’s a beast inside me, thought Atsushi. And that’s not a metaphor. There’s a literal beast inside me. Right now, he’s howling and wildly feasting as he rampages. For some reason or another, he seems to have the power to negate wounds. Not the power to heal them or to recover but to negate. The reason he’s able to do this isn’t totally unrelated to my birth, probably. It’s not unrelated to the suffering I’ve had to bear all these years. The beast—the tiger—is a manifestation of something within me. I still don’t know what that something is, but if he commands me to stand, then I can’t not stand—just like if he negates my wounds, then my wounds have no choice but to disappear.”

PainSufferingTraumaMutilationOpposite Of Healing
Book:文豪ストレイドッグス 55Minutes [Bungō Stray Dogs 55 Minutes]
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“As Rebeca reveals what scraps of story she does have to Luca, he starts to understand that this is the one thing all migrants have in common, this is the solidarity that exists among them, though they all come from different places and different circumstances, some urban, some rural, some middle-class, some poor, some well educated, some illiterate, Salvadoran, Honduran, Guatemalan, Mexican, Indian, each of them carries some story of suffering on top of that train and into el norte beyond. Some, like Rebeca, share their stories carefully, selectively, finding a faithful ear and then chanting their words like prayers. Other migrants are like blown-open grenades, telling their anguish compulsively to everyone they meet, dispensing their pain like shrapnel so they might one day wake to find their burdens have grown lighter. Luca wonders what it would feel like to blow up like that. But for now he remains undetonated, his horrors sealed tightly inside, his pin fixed snugly in place.”

StoriesSufferingVoiceGriefTraumaStorytellingPtsdMigrantsProcessing EmotionsMigrant Story
Book:American Dirt
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“If we care to know how deep the suffering of Christ goes—and how vast and even violent is the restoration process through Christ’s suffering—then we had better start with knowing the dark, cruel reality of the fallen world. If we care to embrace hope despite what encompasses us, the impossibility of life and the inevitability of death, then we must embrace a vision that will endure beyond our failures. We should not journey toward a world in which”solutions” to the “problems” are sought, but a world that acknowledges the possibility of the existence of grace beyond even the greatest of traumas, the Ground-Zero realities of our lives.”

SufferingGraceTrauma
Book:Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering
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“During the worst of it, onlookers who have learned my story often comment to me that, “All the hardships you suffered were part of a divine plan for your life because something good came from each bad thing.” As though a divine presence decided to teach me these great lessons through pain. I am affronted by such a suggestion because it robs me of my accomplishment by removing the element of transcendence. I don’t believe we learn anything from suffering. If human beings inherently learned through suffering, we would be a population of enlightened beings and we’re not. We learn from suffering if and only if we manage to transcend our suffering to find meaning in what is otherwise senseless. This process of transcendence is a profoundly human one that imparts the deepest—most lasting—sense of achievement.”

SufferingNatureHealingDepressionSuicideMental HealthTraumaPtsdTranscendentMiscarriage
Book:To Lose the Madness: Field Notes on Trauma, Loss and Radical Authenticity
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“The character of the disillusioned warrior soothed by the simplicity and silence of nature is an archetype of this war-driven, industrialized era. It is the story arc that traces the trail of the once-idealistic-now-misanthropic protagonist led astray by progressing culture who ultimately finds themselves and a long-sought truce with their demons in the honesty of the landscape, be it alone or among a native people with a more rightly-aligned set of values. …There is some element of hope for the hopeless found in these stories that speak to the profound depths of our weariness and sparks in even the most disillusioned soul the hope of peace and a quiet life of meaning.”

WarSufferingNatureHealingDepressionSuicideMental HealthTraumaPtsdTranscendent
Book:To Lose the Madness: Field Notes on Trauma, Loss and Radical Authenticity
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“The reparative turn, as applied to art, is in many ways a continuation of the orthopedic aesthetic, with the difference being that the twentieth-century model imagined the audience as numb, constricted, and in need of being awakened and freed (hence, an aesthetics of shock), whereas the twenty-first-century model presumes the audience to be damaged, in need of healing, aid, and protection (hence, an aesthetics of care).”

ArtCareArtistFreedomAudienceImpactTraumaShockMessageReparation
Book:On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
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“Truth is in our blood. It is the essennce of our being. It is the best part of us, the core of what makes us human. It is our soul, our fundamental genetic beauty, and our spirit. We were created perfect, and despite the inevitability that we loose some of that perfection when we mature and develop in the midst of others who are wounded, we always retain the capacity to become perfect once again. The soul may be buried deeply, but as long as our hearts beat there remains hope.”

TruthTrauma
Book:Toward truth: A psychological guide to enlightenment
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“I couldn't under stand anything I saw in the picture at all. How could the players care, after the way they had humiliated themselves (and, of course, me) seven days - seven days - before? Why would any fan who had suffered at Wembley the way I had suffered stand up to cheer a nothing goal in a nothing match? I used to stare at this photo for minutes at a time, trying to detect somewhere within it any evidence of the trauma of the previous week, some hint of grief or of mourning, but there was none: apparently everyone had forgotten except me.”

GriefTraumaRecoveryForgettingPhotoMystification
Book:Fever Pitch
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“Stop it!’ The girl jumped out of her chair, ‘Stop torturing me! Stop pretending you didn’t know each other, you planned all this, and then you waited for a wet day and then he was going to come in and then there is this story, and then he’d send the photos off, stop it! Leave me alone!’ She rushed to the door and tore it open and vanished down the hotel stairs.”

LovePainTraumaSuspenseIsolationUnusualParanoiaPsychicHeart BreakingExorcism
Book:A MAN WHO SEEMED REAL: A story of love, lies, fear and kindness
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“Talking about painful events doesn’t necessarily establish community – often quite the contrary. Families and organizations may reject members who air the dirty laundry; friends and family can lost patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt. This is one reason why trauma victims often withdraw and why their stories become rote narratives, edited into a form least likely to provoke rejection.”

PainCommunityGriefSupportTrauma
Book:The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
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“Sometimes as a family we don’t like to talk about it because all this stuff is going through our heads about what could have happened to him. It upsets us because we didn’t want him to suffer. We just want to be told, you know, he died…”

PainLostFamilyPoliceTraumaTalesConfusionHeart WrenchingInvestigationsTrue Stories
Book:Vanished: True Stories from Families of Australian Missing Persons
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“Yes, it was an "accident" - though I think of it as an incident, because I think things happen for a reason - but whatever I call it, I'm still aware I caused it. It wasn't on purpose, and I don't think it was reckless, but I have to live with not applying the hand brake on the snowcat, I have to face up tot the fact that "Not today, motherfucker" turned into all this. I know what I did to Alex; I'm deeply conscious of what I did to my family. I know I fucked up a New Year's promise to the kids; I know the trauma I put upon people. I love them so much, care about them so much, and I know I did something so bad to them - they, in turn, feel terrible because of something that happened to me. I was trying to save Alex, but still I created a disaster for them, and I broke their hearts.”

LovePainGuiltTraumaConsequences
Book:My Next Breath
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