Relational Trauma Quotes

In this paper I propose the existence of two distinct presentations of DID, a Stable and an Active one. While people with Stable DID struggle with their traumatic past, with triggers that re-evoke that past and with the problems of daily functioning with severe dissociation, people with Active DID are, in addition, also engaged in a life of current, on-going involvement in abusive relationships, and do not respond to treatment in the same way as other DID patients. The paper observes these two proposed DID presentations in the context of other trauma-based disorders, through the lens of their attachment relationship. It proposes that the type, intensity and frequency of relational trauma shape - and can thus predict - the resulting mental disorder.
- Through the lens of attachment relationship: Stable DID, Active DID and other trauma-based mental disorders ~ Adah Sachs

The development of a working alliance is crucial because it addresses a psychic phobia associated with relationships that is common in complex trauma clients. As we discussed, when primary relationships are sources of profound disillusionment, betrayal, and emotional pain, any subsequent relationship with an authority figure who offers an emotional bond or other assistance might be met with a range of emotions, such as fear, suspicion, anger, or hopelessness on the negative end of the continuum and idealization, hope, overdependence, and entitlement on the positive. Therapy offers a compensatory relationship, albeit within a professional framework, that has differences from and restrictions not found in other relationships. On the one hand, the therapist works within professional and ethical boundaries and limitations in a role of higher status and education and is therefore somewhat unattainable for the client. On the other, the therapist's ethical and professional mandate is the welfare of the client, creating a perception of an obligation to meet the client's needs and solve his or her problems. Furthermore, the therapist is expected to both respect the client's privacy and accept emotional and behavioral difficulties without judgment, while simultaneously being entitled to ask the client about his or her most personal and distressing feelings, thoughts and experiences. Developing a sense of trust in the therapist, therefore, is both expected and fraught with inherent diff ~ Christine A. Courtois

A child needs to feel safe and protected, which means that their body, psyche, and belongings are safe and secure from violation. Because a child is helpless and dependent on their caregiver, they need a guardian in this predominantly unknown and sometimes scary and dangerous world. A child's caregiver is responsible to fit the roles of safe haven and protector. ~ Darius Cikanavicius

Rigidity or inflexibility can be the result of a previous history of abuse or trauma, or of an upbringing that offered a child no permission to experiment or to deviate from the family norms. Flexibility can come from the freedom of having been allowed to make one's own choices as one was growing up. ~ Jared Diamond

He was born to be a farmer. It was something that he was good at, something he knew well. He was a giver of life, an alchemist that worked in dirt, seed, and manure. ~ Tracy Winegar

The sacred wandering is a healing journey. It gives us the courage to face old wounds. We bravely face our past hurts. If we don't give ourselves permission to feel the pain, we cannot heal the pain. We must feel it to heal it. ~ Dana Arcuri

He'd experienced it as a private trauma. Failure in American schools was demoralizing and to be avoided at all costs. American kids could not handle routine failure, or so adults thought. ~ Amanda Ripley

Christianity has lost its place at the center of American life. Christians must learn how to live the gospel as a distinct people who no longer occupy the center of society. We must learn to build relational bridges that win a hearing."7 ~ Hugh Halter

Keep your heart wide open and you'll be received with open hearts - not by everyone, but to be received by one open heart is more than worth the journey. ~ Marnie Grundman

Bruce Wayne's childhood experience of losing his parents during a random back-alley mugging remains the primary origin story for the Batman character, but other than irrationally (or, more accurately: insanely) motivating his desire to fight crime, the trauma seems to have had little discernable effect on his character. ~ Dan Hassler-Forest

In their wedding photos, they both have the blank-eyed, sedated look of recent trauma victims. ~ Liane Moriarty

Hyperarousal causes traumatized people to become easily distressed by unexpected stimuli. Their tendency to be triggered into reliving traumatic memories illustrates how their perceptions have become excessively focused on the involuntary search for the similarities between the present and their traumatic past. As a consequence, many neutral experiences become reinterpreted as being associated with the traumatic past. ~ Marion F. Solomon

The hostility and venomous response the topic of sexual trauma and rape in the military brings up, especially with men from my Era, is revealing. This opposition speaks to their guilt and toward the truth that stays hidden. ~ Diane Chamberlain

It's possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It's possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skilks, it actually detracts from civilian medicine be diverting resources, research, and personnel from medical practices more relevant and applicable to the general good. ~ Ann Jones

One-half plus one-half does not equal one; one whole plus one whole equals relational wholeness. ~ Surya Das

The warped perception of time is a hallmark of trauma. ~ Laurie Halse Anderson

Witty closing remarks have been replaced by massive head trauma and severe hemorrhaging. ~ Jhonen Vasquez

If you are told from the time you are one month that you're no good and you're not smart and you can't do it and you don't have an opinion of your own and you pick the wrong friends and you don't study the right way and you don't wear the right clothes and you don't look nice, at some point you're going to start believing it. And if you believe it, you're going to need a mommy to tell you what to do. And that's abuse. Not to let your child grow up to be an independent, respected human being. ~ Victoria Secunda

Even in times of trauma, we try to maintain a sense of normality until we no longer can. That, my friends, is called surviving. Not healing. We never become whole again ... we are survivors. If you are here today ... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it thru hell and are still standing? We bare a different name: warriors. ~ Lori Goodwin

The objective is for the past to become a very tiny part of your very large, confident, capable, and free self. ~ Michele Rosenthal

My joy and my accomplishments existed, and so did the pain from my abuse. How can we feel one without the other? Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized my suffering didn't undo my joy. ~ Jonathan Van Ness

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years. ~ Jerry Saltz

Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior. ~ Adrienne Maree Brown

When I ask you who you are, you'd better say my fucking name. ~ Alicen Grey

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what's no longer there. ~ Larry Watson

Trauma always has a way of accelerating relationships, creating intimacy where none existed before. ~ Carrie Ryan

Without confidence we feel insecure. We replay the doubting voices of our parents on a loop in our own minds. ~ Steven Franssen

I opened my eyes and felt better, exhausted but relieved of a burden. The pressure to tell and the weight of the emotions had been with me for weeks. Now that I'd told what had happened, the burden lifted a bit. ~ Olga Trujillo

Do not assume that divine guidance flows only when you are in need of help. Guidance continues to flow whether or not you have problems.
It transcends problems, heartbreaks, and traumas,
flowing through dreams and illuminations.
Whether guidance comes during times of tranquility or trauma, however,
it is up to you to have the courage to acknowledge it ~ Caroline Myss

As you may already know, post-traumatic stress disorder is extremely complex. Each client has a unique, perhaps virtually unbelievable, set of experiences, and an almost equally set of reactions to those experiences. ~ Aphrodite Matsakis

The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of of self-absorption, while guilt is an emphatic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another. ~ Esther Perel

I want queer authors to write anything and everything they need to write. I have no interest in gatekeeping; I want the full spectrum. I want the coming out books. I want the books about queer suffering. I want on-page catharsis and exploration of trauma. I want the happy books, too: queer joy books, cute romantic comedies, first crush books, fantasies about queer royals and revolutionaries and spaceship captains. (...) We need all types of queer stories because all types of queer people exist. I want the market to be so saturated with queer books that anyone who needs to see themselves in a story - anyone who hasn't yet seen themselves, hasn't yet gotten to be the hero - can walk into any bookstore and find a book (or six) about someone who experiences the world like they do. I want every queer author to get the chance to tell their story. To tell people, We exist everywhere. We suffer, we survive, we love. We can be magic, too. ~ Nina Varela

Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and our view of the world... ~ John P. Wilson

Our legacy comprises the spiritual, intellectual, relational, vocational, and social capital we pass on. It's the sum total of the beliefs you embrace, the values you live by, the love you express, and the service you render to others. ~ Michael Hyatt

The child is right," she announced firmly.
Arrietty's eyes grew big. "Oh, no-" she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing always they were safe and wrong. ~ Mary Norton

Is the person I was before dead? Or will the worst things that happened to me eventually get diluted by the rest of my life, become just a part of the story that I've always been writing? ~ Rebecca Rosenblum

Oh yes, that's about as sensitive as blunt trauma. ~ Trevor Alan Foris

no recovery from trauma is possible without attending to issues of safety, care for the self, reparative connections to other human beings, and a renewed faith in the universe. The therapist's job is not just to be a witness to this process but to teach the patient how. ~ Janina Fisher

I knew I did not deserve help, because this was not real trauma. He was a kid, not a criminal. Accomplished, not dangerous. He was the one who lost everything. I was just the nobody it happened to. ~ Chanel Miller

One of the most compelling sources on the validity of repressed memories of trauma has been the field of combat trauma. - Advances in Dissociation Research and practice in Israel ~ Eli Somer

The fatal flaw of human wisdom is that it promises that you can change your relationships without needing to change yourself.
Every painful thing we experience in relationships is meant to remind us of our need for God. And every good thing we experience is meant to be a metaphor of what we can only find in Him ... We settle for the satisfaction of human relationships when they were meant to point us to the perfect relational satisfaction found only with God. ~ Paul David Tripp

Reason to live, they repeat like a pop song,
The bones of a beloved emperor, and I, the
motionless chariot
trying to drag them home with forced hope. ~ Robin Sinclair

My friend, you are not alone. No matter what you've suffered, the abuse was not your fault. You didn't cause someone to hurt you. Not as an innocent child, teenager, nor as an adult. Let that sink in. It's not your fault. ~ Dana Arcuri

It's like she's floating inside of herself, in the dark, and whatever hasn't already emptied inside her is emptying now... ~ Daniel Abbott

It appears that a simple rule, of something adhering to another similar idea, repeated, leads to stabilities. This seems to be a function of relational data sets, linked to rules, like in DNA chains that have infinite adaptability for sequencing proteins. Out of only four bases, which in turn are further limited by two rules of complimentarity, a myriad of forms arise. ~ Cecil Balmond