childhood trauma Quotes

“Honey, you’re a survivor. No shame in that. Your daddy hurt you something fierce. Life hurt you. Lies are one of the easiest places for survivors to run. They give you a sense of safety, a place where you have to depend only on yourself. But it’s a dark place, isn’t it?”

“My childhood had gone by without my knowing, and it seemed as if my heart had frozen. I knew that day and night came and went because of the presence of the moon and the sun, but I had no idea whether it was a Sunday or a Friday.”

“The right question is whether we as society need people who have emerged from some kind of trauma - and the answer is that we plainly do. This is not a pleasant fact to contemplate. For every remote miss who becomes stronger, there are countless near misses who are crushed by what they have been through. There are times and places, however, when all of us depend on people who have been hardened by their experiences.”

“Traumatic stress can spread to anyone with whom the sufferers share their lives. Trauma begets trauma.”

“Perhaps the most compelling evidence to illustrate the phenomenon of reenactment comes from the childhood sexual abuse literature. Being a victim of child sex abuse is a potent risk factor for future sexual revictimization.”

“The personality formed in an environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative.”

“It is hard to break the cycle of victimization and reenactment if the survivor comes from a dysfunctional family not equipped to deal with her plight, if she does not have access to financial or educational resources that could empower her, or if she belongs to a culture that blames her.”

“If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.”

“Adverse childhood experiences are the main determinant of the health and social well-being of the nation.”

“Many people wake up in middle age with the realization that in their youthful romances and early marriages, they were drawn to precisely the kinds of partners they were trying to avoid. All too often we marry stand-ins for our alchoholic fathers, shadowy replacements for our angry mothers, surrogates with whom we try to work out our unfinished childhood dramas.”

“Arcadio was a solitary and frightened child during the insomnia plague, in the midst of Úrsula’s utilitarian fervor, during the delirium of José Arcadio Buendía, the hermetism of Aureliano, and the mortal rivalry between Amaranta and Rebeca. Aureliano had taught him to read and write, thinking about other things, as he would have done with a stranger.”

“My belly ached again, as if I were still at sea and the waves were throwing me off balance.”

“Sara, do this and Sara, do that. Sara, bring me this. Pick up that. Sara, come here. Sara, go there. Commands that she would never hear again, and that she would not miss.”

“To her mind, meanness was incompatible with purity, and meanness was the one word that, since her early childhood, she had always associated with her mother.”

“When they buried mama, they threw dirt on the last person who’s going to exploit me.”

“Her father, a mason, had died in a fall from some scaffolding. Then her mother died, her sisters scattered, and a farmer took her in and employed her, small as she was, to look after the cows in the fields. She would shiver in her rags, drink pond water lying flat on her stomach, and be beaten for the slightest reason, and was finally thrown out over a theft of thirty sols which she had not committed.”

“All at once she felt weak, and the misery of her childhood, the disappointment of her first love, her nephew’s departure, the death of Virginie, all swept over her like a wave, rising into her throat, choking her.”

“It was bad enough being teased, but sometimes he really scared me when he’d say things like: ‘This boy can’t be a son of ours, look at that face. I’ll bet they switched babies on us in the hospital. Why don’t we take him back and swap him for the right one.’ I was only six, and I really thought I was going to get dropped off at the hospital. ”

“Maniac told him the story of his parents’ death. He told about his problem with the trestle, how he had learned to avoid it. “And then, all of a sudden, there I was, on the platform, looking out at it, closer to it than I ever was before, up on the same level. I always saw it from below before. Now I was up there, too, where they were, looking down, and it was more real than ever. The nightmare was worse than ever. I saw the trolley coming ... I saw it...f-falling...them...them...” They walked in silence past the silo-shaped cage of the broken-winged golden eagle. Mars Bar swallowed hard. His voice was hoarse. ‘I knew you wasn’t scared.″

″...since he left Stone Mountain, he won’t wear anything orange. He won’t let anyone stand behind him. He won’t let anyone touch him. He won’t go into rooms that are too small. And he won’t eat canned peaches.”

“After his mother left home, Haroun found that he couldn’t keep his mind on anything for very long, or, to be precise, for more than eleven minutes at a time. Rashid took him to a movie to cheer him up, but after exactly eleven minutes Haroun’s attention wandered, and when the film ended he had no idea how it all turned out, and had to ask Rashid if the good guys won in the end.”

“I ought to tell you at the beginning that I am not quite normal, having had a violent experience at the age of nine. I will make this clear at once because I have noticed that if things seep out slowly through a book the reader is apt to feel let down or tricked in some way when he eventually gets the point.”

″-you may be gone, but I still have a stomachache.”

I, being only a little child, was terrified by this undaunted courage, which appeared to me both ferocious and senseless, and I recoiled with horror from the idea of the frightful death amidst fire and flames which probably awaited us.

“It is not easy for even you.” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that is soft and soothing. I had. You did not gradually open your round childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up in the night. I did.”

“I know nothing of his life. It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so unknown to me, except as the miserable wretch who terrified me two days in my childhood!”