Trauma quotes

Page 1

◆ There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

- Laurell K. Hamilton100

◆ Clench clench these strong teeth in this strong mouth. My mouth. Of my body. In my house. My mouth? Chapped lips swollen and bloody? Dream dreaming wide and thunder? My mouth! My God! This is me speaking. Not mouthing. Not typing and twitching. Not writing a suicide note the length of a novel that will never be finished. I hear voices now but I know they are not the voices of fathers or lovers, or mothers or angels or demons, but the sounds of my own private wars echoing the battles of women before me and near me. No wonder I do not make people comfortable. I am a mirror. I have far too many things to say. (p. 237-238)

- Camilla Gibb99

◆ The process of dissociation is an elegant mechanism built into the human psychological system as a form of escape from (sometimes literally) going crazy. The problem with checking out so thoroughly is that it can leave us feeling dead inside, with little or no ability to feel our feelings in our bodies. The process of repair demands a re-association with the body, a commitment to dive into the body and feel today what we couldn't feel yesterday because it was too dangerous.

- Alexandra Katehakis99

◆ Mental anguish always results from the avoidance of legitimate suffering.

- Stefan Molyneux99

◆ The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It's so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.

- Rasmenia Massoud99

◆ DID is about survival! As more people begin to appreciate this concept, individuals with DID will start to feel less as though they have to hide in shame. DID develops as a response to extreme trauma that occurs at an early age and usually over an extended period of time.

- Deborah Bray Haddock99

◆ I refuse to let the standards of evil people chip away at my capacity for integrity.

- Stefan Molyneux99

◆ This book is a memoir - not of specific life events, but of the processes of dissociation, and of re-enlivening emotions that are shameful to admit or even to feel. It is an account of the altered states that trauma induces, which make it possible to survive a life-threatening event but impair the capacity to feel fear, and worse still, impair the ability to love. (292)

- Jessica Stern99

◆ Debriefing-style counseling after a trauma often aggravates a victim's stress-related symptoms, for example, and 4 in 10 bereaved people do better without grief therapy.

- Winifred Gallagher99

◆ Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor tell you the color of that woman's hair. Who knighted me, old friend? What were my favorite foods? It all fades. Sometimes I think I was born on the bloody grass in that grove of ash, with the taste of fire in my mouth and a hole in my chest. Are you my mother, Thoros?

- George R.R. Martin99

◆ There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

- Brian Evenson99

◆ When you judge other people without wanting to know the true story behind their actions, is usually when there is something inside of you that is so broken that if you found out what you believed about them was a lie, you wouldn't want to accept it or make amends.

- Shannon L. Alder99

◆ Resiliency is the essence of a global positive framework...

- Asa Don Brown99

◆ How resilient was the body, to return to its prior form so quickly! Yet the mind was formed of a less pliable substance. The emptiness in her thoughts would not be so easily filled. Instead there was a hollowness among them-a place she had reserved for future joys which now would never arrive.

- Galen Beckett99

◆ Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific...

- Asa Don Brown99