trauma Quotes

“I watched Joe, who laughed like a little boy, but I saw the lines in his face and even the emergence of a few prematurely grey hairs on his head. I realized even while I laughed, that his unhappy childhood had been followed by unhappy, imprisoned teenage years followed by unhappy incarceration through young adulthood. All of the sudden, it occurred to me what a miracle it was that he could still laugh.”

“I pause to look up at this massive school—two blocks square and seven stories high, a place that was meant to nourish us and prepare us for adulthood. But because we dared to challenge the Southern tradition of segregation, this school became, instead, a furnace that consumed our youth and forged us into reluctant warriors.”

“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.”

“Take avoidance to an extreme, and you have denial: a deep burial of the trauma.”

“For the majority of people, once the immediate posttrauma period has passed, memories of the trauma are not much more intrusive or memorable than any other memories. Time really can heal.”

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

“Patients with complex PTSD often come to doctors with vague complaints - intractable insomnia, unrelenting aches and pains, or stubborn depressive symptoms - so the link between their trauma and the present situation is not clearly identifiable.”

“The mental health burden of war that is placed upon civilian survivors is seldom granted the priority and resources it needs.”

“What seems to be clear is that we humans are an accumulation of our traumatic experiences, that each trauma contributes to our biology, and that this biology determines, to some extent, how we respond to further traumatic events as they emerge in our lives.”

″“Traumatic stress cuts to the heart of life, interfering with one’s capacity to love, create, and work - incapacity brought on not by poor lifestyle choices, moral weakness, or character flaws but by a complex interplay among biology, genes, and environment.”

“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.”

“A more realistic approach would be to accept that a significant trauma often leaves a survivor forever changed, and although there should always be hope, the notion that things will go back to ‘normal’ is misleading.”

“I was blessed with another trait I inherited from my mother: her ability to forget the pain in life. I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new.”

“Events such as retirement, a decline in health, and the death of loved ones are all major blows to one’s resilience in dealing with traumatic stress.”

“Some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it.”

“The man’s face and body told the story more eloquently than his words: pain-haunted eyes, shaking hands that could not forget.”

“‘We all bear scars, Dorian. Mine just happen to be more visible than most.’”

“Emotional connection is crucial to healing. In fact, trauma experts overwhelmingly agree that the best predictor of the impact of any trauma is not the severity of the event, but whether we can seek and take comfort from others.”

“The world he thought he knew no longer made sense to him, and he began to change.”

“Mum seemed more and more often to sit gazing out of the window, oblivious to us.”

“Witty closing remarks have been replaced by massive head trauma and severe hemorrhaging.”

“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.″

“Afterward, there was that long, crowded pause in which everyone decides that although they are very shaken, and possibly upside down, they are, to their surprise, still alive.”

“Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past.”

“People change two ways --- with slow persistent pressure, or with a single and sudden traumatic experience.”

“She knows I’m no stranger to trauma. I’ve seen what the world is capable of.”

It allows boys and girls to see each others worlds as in the story, Bill is traumatized to find that he cannot play football because he is a girl.

“Thomas knew what he thought. Those images would never leave—the Gladers would be haunted by the horrible things that had happened in the Maze for the rest of their lives.”

“It is about four people, first among them Alice Kelleher, a clear stand-in for the author.”

“Meanwhile, the rest of the group finds success in their respective fields, with Willem becoming a star of theater and then film. JB finds success as an artist but also becomes addicted to crystal meth.”

“As his loneliness grows more intense, he enters an abusive relationship with fashion executive Caleb, who is disgusted by Jude’s limp and his increasing use of a wheelchair. Jude finally breaks off the relationship after Caleb rapes him.”

“He is only a wreck of himself, and he does not remember anything that has happened to him for a long time past.”

“He gave her in requital of all things else, which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness!—she is my torture, none the less!

“But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.”

“He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse.”

Of penance, I have had enough! Of penitence, there has been none!

He tells you, that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart!

“He must have had some ups and downs in life to make him such a churl. Do you know anything of his history?”

“No,” said Jurgis, “but I’ve been in a railroad wreck and a fight.”

“My father, Pip, he were given to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at my mother, most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did, indeed, ‘xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only to be equalled by the wigor with which he didn’t hammer at his anwil.”

“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.”

No-one dared to remove the apple lodged in Gregor’s flesh, so it remained there as a visible reminder of his injury. He had suffered it there for more than a month, and his condition seemed serious enough to remind even his father that Gregor, despite his current sad and revolting form, was a family member who could not be treated as an enemy.