Psychological Trauma Quotes

Traumatic events challenge an individual's view of the world as a just, safe and predictable place. Traumas that are caused by human behavior. . . commonly have more psychological impact than those caused by nature. ~ American Psychological Association

I danced in the flames and pranced on the shames of those whose names I could not reveal. I have been told, exhaustingly by a genus of psychiatry, that to forget allegedly means to heal but if only such a thought became real. To die when compared to living has, at times, seemed like the lesser evil. ~ The Raveness

The internal system of an abuse victim differs from the non-abuse system with regard to the consistent absence of the effective leadership, the extreme rules under which the parts function, and the absenve of any consistent balance or harmony. Typically, the parts operate around outdated assumptions and beliefs derived from the childhood abuse, believing, for example, that it is still extremely dangerous to reveal secrets about childhood experiences which were endured. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

The ease with which prostitution is presented as an acceptable choice for women dismisses the psychological trauma that actually seems to be not the occasional, but the inevitable, result of selling sex. ~ Natasha Walter

It wasn't personal - more of a "been there, done that, got my lifetime supply of psychological trauma" kind of thing. ~ Joanna Wylde

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

Fear (...) that has no relation to capabilities or even to reality is epidemic among women today. Fear of being independent (that could mean we'd end up alone and uncared for); fear of being dependent (that could mean we'd be swallowed by some dominating "other"); fear of being competent and good at what we do (that could mean we'd have to keep on being good at what we do); fear of being incompetent (that could mean we'd have to keep on feeling shlumpy, depressed, and second class).
(...)
Phobia has so thoroughly infiltrated the feminine experience it is like a secret plague. It has been built up over long years by social conditioning and is all the more insidious for being so thoroughly acculturated we do not even recognize what has happened to us.
Women will not become free until they stop being afraid. We will not begin to experience real change in our lives, real emancipation, until we begin the process - almost a de-brainwashing - of working through the anxieties that prevent us from feeling competent and whole. ~ Colette Dowling

suffer lasting psychological trauma. Still, I don't think it's a good idea to subject her to an interrogation tonight." "Not an interrogation, ~ Dean Koontz

There's a reason they call childbirth labor. Making a healthy baby takes effort: It requires foresight and self-denial and courage. It's expensive and demanding and tiring. You have to learn new things, change many habits, possibly deal with complicated medical situations, make difficult decisions, and undergo stressful ordeals. I had a wisdom tooth pulled without Novocaine while I was pregnant - it hurt a lot and seemed to go on forever. The kindness of the very young dental assistant, holding back my hair as I spat blood into a bowl, will stay with me for the rest of my life. Pregnant women do such things, and much harder things, all the time. For example, they give birth, which is somewhere on the scale between painful and excruciating. Or they have a cesarean, as I did, which is major surgery. None of this is without risk of death or damage or trauma, including psychological trauma. To force girls and women to undergo all this against their will is to annihilate their humanity. When they undertake it by choice, we should all be grateful. ~ Katha Pollitt

Where the hell were you two?"

Sloane and Dex produced a candy bar from their front breast pockets in unison, answering simultaneously, "Lunchroom."

Ash looked genuinely horrified. "You two are spending way too much time together. Seriously, that was creepy as fuck." He snatched their candy bars.

"For the psychological trauma you've just inflicted. ~ Charlie Cochet

While we avoid taking credit for success, women leap at the opportunity to take responsibility for failure. Men tend to externalize the reasons for their failure, putting it off on something or someone else. Not so women, who absorb blame as if they were born to be societys doormats. (Some women like to speak of their willingness to take blame as if it were a form of altruism. It isn't. Women take the blame because they find it scary to confront those who are actually culpable of wrongdoing.) ~ Colette Dowling

God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trusted Isaac up on top of the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two assymetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders.' Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions. ~ Richard Dawkins

Water-boarding can result in damage to the lungs and the brain, as well as long-term psychological trauma. ~ Graydon Carter

What if an EO isn't a product of just any trauma? What if their bodies are reacting to the greatest physical and psychological trauma possible? Death. Think about it, the kind of transformation we're talking about wouldn't be possible with a physiological reaction alone, or a psychological reaction alone. It would require a huge influx of adrenaline, of fear, awareness. We talk about the power of will, we talk about mind over matter, but it's not one over the other, it's both at once. The mind and the body both respond to imminent death, and in those cases where both are strong enough - and both would have to be strong, I'm talking about genetic predisposition and will to survive - I think you might have a recipe for an EO. ~ Victoria Schwab

Because of that, he didn't know how to love someone who actually loved him. He had learned a twisted, tormented kind of love filled with pain and exploitation. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

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

There are probably a few things worse than climbing into a hole that is actually underneath a creepy basement, but at that moment, it was hard to think of any of them.
I was only a few steps down the ladder before I was plunged into darkness. The dim light in the cellar wasn't strong enough to penetrate the gloom. I was also pretty sure that the tunnel was narrower now, and as I took another step down, both my shoulders brushed the walls.
The metallic taste of fear flooded my mouth as my suddenly sweaty hands slid on the iron rungs.
"Mercer?" Archer called from above me. "You okay?"
I rested my forehead on the back of my hands, and tried to keep the panic out of my voice as I replied, "Yeah, fine. Why do you ask?"
"Because you're gasping."
Oh. Now that he mentioned it, my breath was heaving in and out of my lungs pretty quickly. I made an effort to slow it down as he asked, "Is it the dark, or-" He grunted a little and shifted. Dirt rained down on me, and I shut my eyes.
"Both," I choked out. "Apparently I'm claustrophobic now. That's, uh, new. Probably a side effect of fleeing a burning building through an underground tunnel." I took another shaky breath. "Yay for psychological trauma."
"Come back up," Archer said automatically, and I kind of loved him for that.
"No," I said, willing my feet to keep moving. "We're trying to save the world here, Cross. No time for panic attacks. ~ Rachel Hawkins

One feels, in this possessive relationship, enriched, creative, and active; one feels one's own little flame of being is increased by another and so in order not to lose this source of completeness one fears the loss of the other, and so possessive fears come into being with all their resulting problems. Thus in this relationship of psychological dependence, there must always be conscious or unconscious fear, suspicion, which often lies hidden in pleasant-sounding words..

Though one is dependent on another, there is yet the desire to be inviolate, to be whole. The complex problem in relationship is how to love without dependence, without friction and conflict; how to conquer the desire to isolate oneself, to withdraw from the cause of conflict. If we depend for our happiness on another, on society, or on environment, they become essential to us; we cling to them and any alteration of these we violently oppose because we depend upon them for our psychological security and comfort. Though, intellectually, we may perceive that life is a continual process of flux, mutation, necessitating constant change, yet emotionally or sentimentally we cling to the established and comforting values; hence there is a constant battle between change and the desire for permanency. Is it possible to put an end to this conflict? ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it. ~ Jessica Stern

Human beings," said the Ship's Confessor, "cannot designate a 'current best candidate' without psychological consequences. Human rationalists learn to discuss an issue as thoroughly as possible before suggesting any solutions. For humans, solutions are sticky in a way that would require detailed cognitive science to explain. We would not be able to search freely through the solution space, but would be helplessly attracted toward the 'current best' point, once we named it. Also, any endorsement whatever of a solution that has negative moral features, will cause a human to feel shame - and 'best candidate' would feel like an endorsement. To avoid feeling that shame, humans must avoid saying which of two bad alternatives is better than the other. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

The wounded mind must be reset like a fractured bone. It cannot heal itself without spiritual realignment. ~ Anthon St. Maarten

We are more than our trauma
We are not our diagnosis
We are more than the worst things
that have ever happened to us ~ Janelle Maree

The physical board had a huge psychological effect compared to anything we got from the electronic tracking tool we used at Microsoft. By attending the standup each day, team members were exposed to a sort of time-lapse photography of the flow of work across the board. Blocked work items were marked with pink tickets, and the team became much more focused on issue resolution and maintaining flow. Productivity jumped dramatically. ~ David J. Anderson

Just because it is not physical, it does not mean it is not abuse. Verbal and Psychological abuses are real things; their effect on the mind of the victim is perhaps more damaging on the mind of the abused than the open wounds that can be seen in physical abuse ~ Arti Honrao

Prison, illness, abuse, drugs, abandonment, deportation: all traumas have their literature. But this crucial and fundamental trauma -- the very definition of femininity, "the body that can be taken by force and must remain defenseless" -- was not part of literature. Not a single woman who has been through the process of rape has taken to words to craft a novel out of her experience. No guide, no companionship. Rape wasn't allowed into the symbolic realm. ~ Virginie Despentes

Is the whole world doomed to emotional trauma? ~ Helen Fielding

He loves me so he hurts me
To try and make me good.
It doesn't work. I'm just too bad
And don't do what I should.

My memory has so many different sections and, like all survivors, there are so many compartments with so many triggers. I'll remember a smell which reminds me of a man which reminds me of a place which reminds me of another man who I think was with a woman who had a certain smell - and I'm back to square one. This is the case for most survivors, I believe. When we try to put together our pasts, the triggers are many and varied, the memories are disjointed - and why wouldn't they be? We were children. Even someone with an idyllic childhood who is only trying to remember the lovely things which happened to them will scratch their head and wonder who gave them that doll and was it for Christmas or their third birthday? Did they have a party when they were four or five? When did they go on a plane for the first time? You see, even happy memories are hard to piece together - so imagine how hard it is to collate all of the trauma, to pull together all of the things I've been trying to push away for so many years. ~ Laurie Matthew

Compartmentalization is an unconscious psychological defense mechanism employed to avoid cognitive dissonance. ~ Zack Love

Do not apologise, I needed that lesson.
Without it, I wouldn't be free from you. ~ Nikki Rowe

The powers, aspirations, and mission of man are such as to raise the study of his origin and nature, inevitably and by the very necessity of the case, from the mere physiological to the psychological stage of scientific operations. ~ Richard Owen

I think the one thing this picture shows that's new is the psychological disproportion of the kids' demands on the parents. Parents are often at fault, but the kids have some work to do, too. ~ James Dean

His eyesight was possessed by the colours of trauma, cracking and bubbling like an old Super Eight film to remind him of his near-death drowning some two months ago in that very moment when he needed to act. ~ Luke Taylor

Please don't worry. It's a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she's a coffee table edition ... ~ Alan Moore

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.
Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me. ~ Frances Mayes

I began writing my nonfiction memoir to explain why women, "don't just leave."
My exciting, narrative-driven memoir aspires to to save others from needless unhappiness: surviving isn't enough.Trauma can be overcome and joy recaptured.The book is written in a fresh, lively voice with lots of humor. The chapters of me growing up in the 50's and 60's and my college years at Penn State provide an intimate, historical trip through some of the most fascinating times in modern history. This is also a family saga depicting mental illness and shows how this could have happened to me: My husband and I were the dance. ~ Cassi Janzek

Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis. ~ Carl Jung

The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological-social-psychological-economic system . We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch. ~ Donella Meadows

In my films quite often, paranoia usually leads to the truth so it is kind of a psychological state of mind to think that what you fear may come true, and those are the types of stories that I like to tell. ~ Larry Fessenden

Any radical change or trauma always makes for interesting subject matter, but then all stories deal, to some extent, with the disjuncture between past and present. ~ Damon Galgut

It's apparent that we can't proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego's condition. Let's call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies. ~ Richard Rosen

I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to. ~ Newt Gingrich

Over the years our mother has beaten us with belts, shoes, rulers, extension cords, hair brushes, a wooden spoon, a fly swatter, a toilet brush, wire coat hangers, wooden coat hangers and sometimes one of our own toys. When you get whacked by your own paddleball paddle or you have to watch your sister getting spanked with a badminton racquet that she asked Santa Claus (AKA Grandma) to bring, you don't feel much like playing with those things ever again. ~ Bob Thurber

Similar to religious fundamentalism, unrestrained intellect can make a person blind to the psychological necessities of others, for physical necessities are much easier to notice than those of the psyche. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Is it logical that two people can disagree and that both can be right? It's not logical: it's psychological. And it's very real. ~ Stephen R. Covey

The right to express out thoughts, however, means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own; freedom from external authority is a lasting gain only if the inner psychological conditions are such that we are able to establish our own individuality. ~ Erich Fromm

Indeed, a symptom of post-Holocaust trauma is that normative assumptions about the human species are questioned more than ever. Can human nature still be trusted? The breach of civilized values was too great - and in a nation that had produced so many significant philosophers, scientists, scholars, and artists. The intellectual shock - a secondary trauma, as it were - is not only that it happened but also that it happened with only scattered pockets of resistance and even a degree of cooperation among the cultured classes. ~ Jeffrey C. Alexander

If you alter your behaviour because you are frightened of how your partner will react, you are being abused. ~ Sandra Horley

They always want us to tell stories with action and psychological drama but there are other very interesting directions we can take in time, space, and memory. Emotions, recollections, surprises. ~ Agnes Varda

There is psychological pleasure in this takeoff, too, for the swiftness of the plane's ascent is an exemplary symbol of transformation. The display of power can inspire us to imagine analogous, decisive shifts in our own lives, to imagine that we, too, might one day surge above much that now looms over us. P. 38-39 ~ Alain De Botton

Consumption is a universal phenomenon. All humans consume varieties of products, many of which beyond actual necessity, because it activates the brain's reward center. And the more a certain product activates the reward center with its unique characteristics or its predominant social stature, the more that product gets chiseled into the long-term memory of the consumer, making it a fundamental part of the individual's psychological well being. Thus the human mind grows a deep psychological bond with a product. And this bond can grow so strong in time that it would defend itself from all sorts of criticisms. It is the brain's way to maintain its internal purely individualistic well being. Hence, a strong psychological bond between the mind and a product slowly not only becomes invincible to criticisms, but also, develops its own cognitive immune system against such criticisms. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then. ~ Lewis Carroll

Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy. ~ Nigel Hamilton

A huge majority of parents use some form of physical or verbal aggression against children. Since women remain the primary caretakers of children, the facts confirm the reality that given a hierarchal system in a culture of domination which empowers females (like the parent-child relationship) all too often they use coercive force to maintain dominance. In a culture of domination everyone is socialized to see violence as an acceptable means of social control. Dominant parties maintain power by the threat (acted upon or not) that abusive punishment, physical or psychological, will be used whenever the hierarchal structures in place are threatened, whether that be in male-female relationships, or parent and child bonds. ~ Bell Hooks

I think I'm built like a painter. I have friends who are painters and they reflect a similar psychological attitude towards their work. They don't know what's coming next, they just wait for the message, for orders to come and then off they go on their next project. ~ John McLaughlin

Death to the young is more than that undiscovered country; despite its inevitability, it is a place having reality only in song or in other people's grief. ~ Maya Angelou

To psychotherapists, I say, don't just leave us abandoned because you think you don't know enough to help us, or because the world doesn't believe in what we went through, or because our trauma is too awful to hear about. ~ Wendy Hoffman

Looking at that pain in her eyes, he felt a closeness with her that he had never experienced before. Like they shared something powerful and unspoken, something so deep and devastating, it bonded them together. He knew then, that if she didn't forgive him, he would never survive.

He was nothing without her. ~ Jacqueline Simon Gunn

Truth is, life is going shake you, it will rip you right out of your comfort zone;just when you feel settled, it will shock you with some trauma and make you face adversity in the most undesirable of ways ... And here is the question of it all? What's it all for ... Not many search long enough to know but the wise ask you.. Are you going to be a slave to your journey or the pioneer to your dream, if God handed you a lesson ;he knew before your time, your strength could endure i. so next time you doubt another thought or feed your heart with negative emotions think about it ... You are here, alive, breathing and if that's not enough than you should think about what is. ~ Nikki Rowe

[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories a ~ Jeanine Cummins

What if the preacher or father's saying 'Someone here's lost and hopeless' was tantamount to those Sun-Times horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they're feeling a certain way then surely they're the only person who is feeling like that. ~ David Foster Wallace

There is no excuse for bullying. Not even in schools. The parents should be arrested. But the most worrying thing is that authorities do it: politicians and journalists. They consider it part of their job. This world is wrong. It's a crime: Causes traumas to vulnerable people. ~ Maria Karvouni

Even as a child, I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye. ~ P.D. James

Some sort of belief in all-powerful supernatural beings is common, if not universal. A tendency to obey authority, perhaps especially in children, a tendency to believe what you're told, a tendency to fear your own death, a tendency to wish to see your loved ones who have died, to wish to see them again, a wish to understand where you came from, where the world came from, all these psychological predispositions, under the right cultural conditions, tend to lead to people believing in things for which there is no evidence. ~ Richard Dawkins

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement. ~ Joy DeGruy