Ptsd Recovery Quotes

Years ago, I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no flashbacks. I wouldn't wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn't smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn't come, and I am no longer waiting for it.

A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don't always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses. ~ Roxane Gay

I'm a writer. I was just diagnosed with PTSD. This unfortunate diagnosis, I assure you will not stop me. ~ A.K. Kuykendall

Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

In my personal recovery, mindfulness has helped me to become aware of my trauma responses and given me an anchor to stay present when I have been triggered. Being able to feel my triggers without reacting must be largely credited to learning to anchor myself in my body through mindful body scan meditation. ~ Christopher Dines

Resiliency is not gender-, age-, or intellectually specific ... ~ Asa Don Brown

It is this honest connection behveen two human beings that, in the end, makes what we endured together understandable and meaningful. ~ Lynn I. Wilson

I have suffered pains and torture of all natures. I have heard many say, "I am a survivor." I am not in a boat in a sea of torture awaiting to be rescued. I am a Conqueror, I am a Victor ...
I am one with myself.
I AM FREE! ~ Stanley Victor Paskavich

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. ~ Judith Lewis Herman

See it for what it is and own it, rather than rethink it so you don't have to deal with the trauma of the abuse. This is the only way to move on--through acceptance. ~ Shannon L. Alder

Trauma does not have to occur by abuse alone... ~ Asa Don Brown

I'm not crazy, I was abused.
I'm not shy, I'm protecting myself.
I'm not bitter, I'm speaking the truth.
I'm not hanging onto the past, I've been damaged. I'm not delusional, I lived a nightmare.
I'm not weak, I was trusting.
I'm not giving up, I'm healing.
I'm not incapable of love, I'm giving.
I'm not alone. I see you all here.
I'm fighting this. ~ Rene Smith

I cannot stand the words Get over it. All of us are under such pressure to put our problems in the past tense. Slow down. Don't allow others to hurry your healing. It is a process, one that may take years, occasionally, even a lifetime - and that's OK. ~ Beau Taplin

Home." This was my mantra, my four-letter savior. ~ M.B. Dallocchio

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package. ~ Asa Don Brown

I know you're in a world of pain, but that pain will lessen. At the beginning you can't see that. You can only see your pain and you think it will never go away.
But the nature of pain is that it changes - it changes like a sunset. At first, it's this intense red-orange in the sky, and then it starts getting softer and soften. The texture of pain changes as you work through it. And then one day, you wake up and realize that life isn't just about working through your incest; it's about living, too.
- survivor of child sexual abuse ~ Ellen Bass

In 2017, after the Hollywood producer, Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault scandal went viral, the #MeToo movement grew like wildfire. It triggered my trauma. Flashbacks of horrific injustice. Old memories resurfaced. ~ Dana Arcuri

I have met many, many severely distressed people whose daily lives are filled with the agony of both remembered and unremembered trauma, who try so hard to heal and yet who are constantly being pushed down both by their symptoms and the oppressive circumstances of post traumatic life around them. ~ Carolyn Spring

For many emotionally wounded addicts, the idea of grieving is a daunting prospect. To regularly grieve does require courage and a desire to heal - but rest assured; the resulting gains from these efforts are profound. ~ Christopher Dines

Some of our fiercest battles are fought and won in silence. ~ Kianu Starr

We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay ... , from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men ... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77) ~ Sigmund Freud

Rest, Recreated, Refreshed and Refuel! ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Your instincts will always guide you, like the stars. ~ Holly Ringland

I want what I want when I want it. ~ Eric Cantor

War becomes a part of you. It is a feeling just as much as an experience. If you can't feel it, you weren't paying attention. And if you weren't paying attention, you are probably dead anyway. ~ Clint Van Winkle

Trust the timing of your life. Keep focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, be kind, and follow your heart. Doors will open effortlessly, but first you have to be ready to walk through. ~ Brittany Burgunder

Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as "oppositional defiant disorder," meaning "This kid hates my guts and won't do anything I tell him to do," or "disruptive mood dysregulation disorder," meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Except for normal human emotions we would be feeling anyway, and twinges of discomfort as we begin to behave differently, recovery from codependency is exciting. It is liberating. It lets us be who we are. It lets other people be who they are. ~ Melody Beattie

Having a scriptable infrastructure requires upfront work but can pay huge dividends in bringing new engineers onto your infra team, as well as helping in disaster-recovery scenarios. ~ Mike Krieger

Getting rid of the drugs doesn't get rid of all the other ways you learned to deal with the world. It's not that easy. ~ Amy Reed

Always know there are friends somewhere rooting for you. There are people you don't know, always praying for you and lifting you before God. - Jenee, from "To the Survivors". ~ Robert Uttaro

So ask me if I am alright.
'I'm fine; I'm always fine.'
You see this look in my eyes.
'No, I'm fine. I am always fine.'
There is a corpse behind my smile.
'Listen, I am fine. Always, always fine as fine can be.'
'Are you okay?'
'I am more than okay. I am more than fine. I am wonderful! ~ Emma Rose Kraus

I'm learning how to taste everything. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

What I've discovered is that by keeping peace with those who hurt me, I had no peace. Rather, I was in turmoil. I suffered the aftermath of sexual violence. I am the one who has battled for my life. ~ Dana Arcuri

I went to a psychiatrist (NBC insisted we all go) and told her I had been through traumatic experiences before and understood that the kidnapping would leave "fingerprints" on me for a while. The key was knowing what to expect. If you get blind drunk, you know you're going to wake up with a hangover. By the same token, I expected post-traumatic stress symptoms - anger, irritability, a sense of isolation - and I experienced those feelings, off and on, for several months. It's like having the monkey on your back again, and being self-aware helps shake him off. ~ Richard Engel

Why do you want so much this new beginning? Do you think the new beginning will postpone the end? Are you afraid of the end? Are you afraid of death Michael?" (Ch.35) ~ Stevan V. Nikolic

Having one's mother or father or past abuser admit to their crimes or even apologize for them changes nothing
certainly not what they did. Rather, such an apology would give you the psychological permission to "move on" with your life.
But you do not need anybody's permisson to move on with your life.
It does not matter whether or not those responsible for harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it.
It does not matter.
All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now. ~ Augusten Burroughs

When we leave this life, we only get to take two things: the love we received and the lessons we learned. ~ David W. Earle

Don't judge yourself by what others did to you. ~ C. Kennedy

You preach cleanliness,
so I try to keep my room clean,
but I feel no closer to God, and I guess that's okay
because he doesn't know
who he's fucking with anyway. ~ Kris Kidd

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to "forget" the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital. ~ Dauna Cole

I feel very blessed that at a young age I was able to navigate my battle with drug and alcohol addiction, and through recovery live a sober life. There is such a stigma attached to addiction and it was hard for me to both confront and overcome it. I am very proud and grateful that with the support of family and friends, I was able to do so. ~ Cara Santana

People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000.

Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West. ~ Bill Bryson

Only then can I fly.
Only then can I be free -
when I
let go of me. ~ David W. Earle

We Are Lovable
Even if the most important person in your world rejects you, you are still real, and you are still okay. - Codependent No More

Do you ever find yourself thinking: How could anyone possibly love me? For many of us, this is a deeply ingrained belief that can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Thinking we are unlovable can sabotage our relationships with co-workers, friends, family members, and other loved ones. This belief can cause us to choose, or stay in, relationships that are less than we deserve because we don't believe we deserve better. We may become desperate and cling as if a particular person was our last chance at love. We may become defensive and push people away. We may withdraw or constantly overreact. While growing up, many of us did not receive the unconditional love we deserved. Many of us were abandoned or neglected by important people in our life. We may have concluded that the reason we weren't loved was because we were unlovable. Blaming ourselves is an understandable reaction, but an inappropriate one. If others couldn't love us, or love us in ways that worked, that's not our fault. In recovery, we're learning to separate ourselves from the behavior of others. And we're learning to take responsibility for our healing, regardless of the people around us. Just as we may have believed that we're unlovable, we can become skilled at practicing the belief that we are lovable. This new belief will improve the quality of our rela ~ Melody Beattie

This dog had shown more courage than I. This great, powerful, beautiful dog was willing to take a chance on me - a broken, depressed, lonely Marine. ~ Mary Alice Monroe

If Louisa recovered, it would all be well again. More than former happiness would be restored. There could not be a doubt, to her mind there was none, of what would follow her recovery. A few months hence, and the room now so deserted, occupied but by her silent, pensive self, might be filled again with all that was happy and gay, all that was glowing and bright in prosperous love, all that was most unlike Anne Elliot! ~ Jane Austen

I feel like a caveman's balls. Dragging. This recovery is going to drive me to drink. ~ Debra Anastasia

In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator's first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail. JUDITH LEWIS HERMAN Trauma and Recovery ~ Jon Krakauer

Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home. Iroquois warriors did not have to struggle with that sort of alienation because warfare and society existed in such close proximity that there was effectively no transition from one to the other. ~ Sebastian Junger