Past Trauma Quotes

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn't the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don't go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

Because people's desire to be comfortable supersedes their desire for self knowledge and well being, they avoid any form of discomfort. This is the impulse that drives us to repress undesired emotions, thoughts, and past trauma. ~ Ben Stewart

Intuition is a wonderful gift but it can be both a blessing and a curse. If you can easily tune in to the grief of another, it is very easy to lose your way if you have not yet resolved your own present or past trauma and grief. If you have not healed from your own grief and you turn around and give all you have to give, you will find yourself drowning. Soon there will be nothing left of you. ~ Kate McGahan

As connection to the therapist is established, the therapeutic relationship offers an opportunity for the client to experience a present attachment, but it also brings up transferential tendencies associated with past attach ment relationships (Sable, 2000). Informed by the experience of interperesonal trauma and betrayal, posttraumatic transferential relationships can be exceptionally potent and volatile. In response to the therapist, clients experience fear, anger, mistrust, and suspicion, as well as hope, vulnerability, and yearning, and they are acutely attuned to subtle signals of disinterest or interest, compassion or judgment, abandonment or consistency (Herman 1992; Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995). ~ Pat Ogden

It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light. ~ David Baldacci

Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose color, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses. All that remains are shells with translucent edges. Half-erased brain platelets are a slippery terrain, deceptive. One's mental archive is locked, it languishes in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can't help here. Everything must be thrown away. Everything. And perhaps everyone as well. ~ Daša Drndić

…Josie had never grieved the loss of her own life, her own view of the world, the future she'd envisioned for herself, so many things she had never explored. She'd learned to function again, she'd moved past the worst of the trauma, every day she put one foot in front of the other and lived the new life she'd been given, but she'd never let her mind go back over the time she'd spent imprisoned, used and abused. She'd never sat with the pain of it, the loneliness, the debilitating horror, and the fear. But she did then. She didn't push the memories away as she had been doing for so long. She sat alone with every one and let each in turn be her companion. ~ Mia Sheridan

We don't go back to wallow, we go back to undo the lies that are back there that are holding its captive from living a wondrous and full life. ~ Darlene Ouimet

Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations. ~ Bryant McGill

How can you learn to heal if the past is a place you want to stay in? ~ Beena Khan

In avoiding any situations reminiscent of the past trauma, or any initiative that might involve future planning and risk, traumatized people deprive themselves of those new opportunities for successful coping that might mitigate the effect of the traumatic experience. Thus, constrictive symptoms, though they may represent an attempt to defend against overwhelming emotional states, exact a high price for whatever protection they afford. They narrow and deplete the quality of life and ultimately perpetuate the effects of the traumatic event. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

But you can't escape from shadows or pain. You only find new ones. It's better, I think, not to try to escape them at all but to accept that they will be there, and to remember that good things happen, too, even if you can't always see them. ~ Christina Henry

The culture and heritage should stay intact and be maintained as it provides the individuals with some degree of resiliency. The effects of the trauma is what should be focused on and treated. Improving the quality of life for survivors is the focus of treatment. It is not to erase the past. ~ Thomas Hodge

Maybe I have this fascination with the dark side because I live in the light. I don't have any dysfunction, and I've never experienced trauma. ~ Lisa Unger

However they coped, children are not wrong to have learned to do what they could. ~ Na'ama Yehuda

People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was. ~ Alice Hoffman

Say you're bored. Or you can't sleep. Maybe your mom is yelling at you, or the boy/ girl you like doesn't like you back in the same way, or you're too fat to even consider going to prom. Or the closet person to you since you were babies in the cradle together has killed herself. The usual stuff. Dread not. Don't be depressed. Be a junkie!
You can't count on people to nurture you through the trauma that is existence. But you already knew that.
Start by drawing the shades in your bedroom. Welcome the darkness. Lift the pill from your nightstand, clutch the water glass in your hand. Offer your divine thanks in advance. Be greedy-swallow the pill whole rather than spit it in half to spread the wealth for a later date. Dilution is wasteful. Savor the wholesome wholeness.
Now lay down in bed. Close your eyes.
Wait.
Just a little longer. ~ Rachel Cohn

However, another brain structure, located near the hippocampus, matures quite early and can store the emotional component of trauma, though not the memories themselves. This structure is the almond-shaped amygdala, which also comes in pairs. Very young children who have experienced trauma may have no memory of the trauma, but the trauma is encoded in the amygdala. When ~ Jane Gilgun

Speaking was temporarily beyond him, what with the testicular trauma and ass-stabbing. ~ Glen Duncan

The acknowledgement of having suffered evil is the greatest step forward in mental health. ~ Stefan Molyneux

Trauma can be prevented more easily than it can be healed. ~ Peter A. Levine

Our moral responsibility is not to stop future, but to shape it ... to channel our destiny in humane directions and to ease the trauma of transition. ~ Alvin Toffler

When I was on 'Trauma,' the first order was six, which turned to 12, and then there were rumors of getting cancelled. I'm used to that. ~ Taylor Kinney

No doubt many people have the feeling that to talk about death at all is, in effect, to conjure it up mentally, to bring it closer in such a way that one has to face up to the inevitability of one's own eventual demise. So, to spare ourselves this psychological trauma, we decide just to try to avoid the topic as much as possible. ~ Raymond Moody

The fear of what might happen stops people but the trauma process is so beautiful and transformational.
There is nothing to fear in our emotions, they will not swallow you whole - they will speak to you in profound ways. ~ Adele Theron

The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas. ~ Mark Nepo

Often, when a human suffers through major emotional traumas, a lack of well being follows if their feelings about the trauma are not completely expressed. When the trauma is severe and the suffering is continuous, their animal companion's condition may deteriorate too. ~ Colleen M. Flanagan

I was in San Francisco for 'Trauma' and then got back to town and got situated and started looking at things and passing on things. I think I was around for a month and a half, and there were other projects that were up, but it's all a waiting game. And then, 'The Vampire Diaries' came up, and I was really interested and read for it. ~ Taylor Kinney

She could taste her children on her tongue, the colors they wore. Jacqueline was yellow. Gunnar was blue. Gabriela had always been red. All their weight. Their history inside of her. And she remembered her mother's synesthesia and was startled as guilt crept up her throat. ~ Laura Gentile

Jenny couldn't believe herself a multiple. She was a mother, a nurse, not that screwball who appeared on the screen like some dysfunctional figment of her imagination trying to find a life. Still, she was coming to a realization that accepting who she was would be the jailer's key to liberate her from this cuckoo's nest. ~ Judy Byington

Distraction serves evil more than any other mental state. ~ Stefan Molyneux

I'm back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She's lying on an alter, and they're hurting her. The bastards. They're hurting her. There is blood all over the place. There are candles burning and people chanting." I could hardly believe what I was seeing and I cried out, "What is this? I don't understand. What the hell is this?"
"Ask your unconscious mind to tell you, Suzie," he responded, ever so gently. "Ask."
I did ask. And the answer swept over me with a force so strong that I felt as if I had been knocked backward.
"Lord! Oh, Lord. This is satanic ritual abuse, Francisco. That's what this is! That's what this is!" I screamed. "Satanic ritual abuse. And they're using Little Suzie as part of their goddamned ritual.
p150 ~ Suzie Burke

The fetus is biochemically connected to the mother, and her external, internal, physical, and mental health affect the overall development of the fetus. Stress and depression during pregnancy have been proven to have long-term and even permanent effects on the offspring. Such effects include a vulnerability to chronic anxiety, elevated fear, propensity to addictions, and poor impulse control. ~ Darius Cikanavicius

Last Sunday I went to an art exhibition, among the visitors there was a guy with one leg missing. He had two crutches with which he moved nimbly among the visitors. I looked at him in admiration, wondering how easy it looked. Then it occurred to me that many of us are like that, we have got used to living without pieces of our heart and soul and we go on as if nothing had happened. And, looking at us from the outside, it seems easy. ~ Luigina Sgarro

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle's tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube.
"Fib!" Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her chest. ~ Ruth McLeod-Kearns

They say that love is blind, but it's trauma that's blind. Love sees what is. ~ Neil Strauss

When we run, hide and try to deny our trauma the little boy or girl within comes back to seek validation, healing and peace. ~ Cecibel Contreras

embrace and fully 'excavate' our Shadow, the seeming darkness within. Only by fully honoring all aspects of our journey (every wound, every person, every trauma) can we begin to accept and eventually honor all of who we are." - JOHN POLLARD, ~ Jeff Brown

Sometimes our parents are full of love and sometimes they are full of anger. This love and anger comes not only from them, but from all previous generations. When we can see this, we no longer blame our parents for our suffering. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman - the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles - the work of a shell.
The child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries - something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey - a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil. The child was a deaf mute.
Then he stood motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck. ~ Ambrose Bierce

You will come across few creatures that cannot be successfully defeated by the application of sufficient blunt trauma. ~ Cassandra Clare

The trauma you've experienced and survived is the most powerful part of your life experience. Honor and celebrate your resiliency. ~ Leonie H. Mattison

A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. ~ Slavoj Zizek

Lift your head to me ... '
His is the kiss of a timorous lover. Feel his inhuman lips on the throat, the heat of it. The bite, when it comes, is cold. Begin to sink as the blood flows into his mouth; it is almost soothing. No pain. No pain at all. His teeth grind into the muscles; ecstasy and torment. Life, the very being, is flowing out. Unholy nourishment. Holy nourishment. Drained slowly.
The trauma of it feels like being torn, but it is no more than suddenly having the ability to experience reality in a different way. Waiting for the end ... for what? Cannot foretell. No longer flesh, no longer blood. Soul. Free. ~ Storm Constantine

I have changed my mind on a number of things, including almost everything having to do with Cuba, but the idea that we should be grateful for having been spared, and should shower our gratitude upon the supposed Galahad of Camelot for his gracious lenience in opting not to commit genocide and suicide, seemed a bit creepy. When Kennedy was shot the following year, I knew myself somewhat apart from this supposedly generational trauma in that I felt no particular sense of loss at the passing of such a high-risk narcissist. If I registered any emotion, it was that of mild relief. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Dr. Strange: 'That was--agh--smart of you, Logan.'
Wolverine: 'Yeah? Which part?'
Dr. Strange: 'You knew that severe physical trauma to the host body could--sss--cease a demonic possession.'
Wolverine: 'Oh, uh, sure.'
Spider-Man: 'He didn't know that. He stabbed you just to stab you.'
Dr. Strange: 'Well, *argh* either way. ~ Brian Michael Bendis

One of the top challenges is the fact that you are dealing with survivors. Every time you deal with a documentary film subject it is fraught with obvious minefields but when you are dealing with a population that is severely traumatized and trying to recover from that trauma there is an extra level of vigilance and care and attention that has to be implemented all the time at every level. ~ Amy Ziering

I used to move gracefully. I used to know the word grace to the center of my bones. Now I seek it every day and fall short, inevitably, every day. I lost grace. ~ Katherine Locke