Trauma Quotes

For a week, almost without speaking, they went ahead like sleepwalkers through a universe of grief, lighted only by the tenuous reflection of luminous insects, and their lungs were overwhelmed by a suffocating smell of blood.

Unfortunately, some parents simply don't love their children. Probably they don't even love themselves. That may be the heart of their problem. Having parents like this is a terrible burden for any child and can shadow him all through life. It can even destroy him.

I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you're 16 can mirror the one you have when you're 26. Life repeats itself.

I'm scared of myself. I think I'd be a bad driver. I'm scared of cars, period. I've had too many friends killed now, and I've seen too many people killed in my life when I drove across the country when I was 12. I'm sure that has a lot to do with it. If you see a few real dead bodies with brains on the pavement, it does a lot to change your attitude. It means you can get it too. I've had a lot of relatives killed. I've had a lot of dear friends killed. It's stupid. The whole activity is stupid.

I was mentally, emotionally and verbally abused by my father as far back as I can remember until I left home at the age of eighteen

It's still scary every time I go back to the past. Each morning, my heart catches. When I get there, I remember how the light was, where the draft was coming from, what odors were in the air. When I write, I get all the weeping out.

How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart, you begin to understand, there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep...that have taken hold.

After I got shot, you want to know the very first thing that entered my mind? The U.S. Mint. I am coin in the U.S. Army. Now, I have two small holes in me. I'm no longer perfectly culled. Do you want to know the very last thing that entered my mind, You.

The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember - as a sort of introductory overture - by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet.

I want to be braver and more honest about my life. When you're sexually abused, there's a lot of damage.

The healthy man does not torture others - generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

I'm not used to sensitivity any more. When I see people cry when I lose, save your tears. I don't know how to handle people crying any more. I lost my sensitivity like that. Please, you embarrass me when you cry because I don't know what to do when you cry. I don't know what to say.

I have supped full with horrors.

Those who are heartless, once cared too much.

And from that hour his poor maimed spirit, only remembering the place where it had broken its wings, cancelled the dream through which it had since groped, and knew of nothing beyond the Marshalsea.

I did an event in Washington, and it was like we lifted a sea.Immediately after [9/11], there was a stunned shock - kind of this feeling of "What do we do now?" I started performing, and there was a catharsis in the laughing. People started to be able to laugh again. Laughter can be many things - sometimes a medicine, sometimes a weapon, depending on.

Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.

If you don't heal the wounds of your childhood, you bleed into the future.

That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone.

The only lasting trauma is the one we suffer without positive change.

At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn't speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn't speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repitition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.

Are you in pain, Frodo?' said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side. 'Well, yes I am,' said Frodo. 'It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today.' 'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,' said Gandalf. 'I fear it may be so with mine,' said Frodo. 'There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?' Gandalf did not answer.

The bird that hath been limed in a bush, with trembling wings misdoubteth every bush.

I don't have to talk about whether or not I got raped in jail.

Now as he watched Katie toying with a ring that wasn't there, he felt his old investigative instincts kick in. There'd been a husband, he thought; her husband was the missing element. Either she was still married or she wasn't, but he had an undeniable hunch that Katie was still afraid of him.

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child's mind--seven and a half years old--I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years.

Later he had seen the things that he could never think of and later still he had seen much worse.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable.

My English teacher wanted to have sex with me in Junior High. The only problem was, my English teacher was a guy. I smacked him in his face with an eraser, chased him with a stapler and stapled his nuts to a stack of papers.

I was in a terrible mess in my childhood.

People can't seem to get it through their heads that there is never any healing or closure. Ever. There is only a short pause before the next "horrifying" event. People forget there is such a thing as memory, and that when a wound "heals" it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little. What really ought to be said after one of these so-called tragedies is, "Let the scarring begin.

When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.

Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.

My father was a mean, controlling and manipulative person for most of his life. He was unpredictable and unstable. As a result, the atmosphere of our home was super-charged with fear because you never knew if what you did would make him mad or not.

As for the bishop, the sight of the guillotine was a great shock to him, from which he recovered only slowly.