Traumatic Quotes

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on? ~ Noah Hawley

Setting aside the truth value of the UFO phenomenon, it is an interesting sociological reality that so many people are unwilling to discuss the most - and at times traumatic - experience of their lives. What does it say about our society that this is so? My feeling is that, by its very nature, it represents a form of repression. If you are a reader who believes UFOs to be nonsense of some sort, I can nevertheless assure you that you have a friend or relation who has seen one. They have simply learned not to discuss it. Many people can live perfectly well within the constraints of repression and denial; they simply learn to shut off certain parts of their mind. It is sad, but it happens all of the time.

But not everyone is the same. Not everyone is willing to do this, or even can do this. By any estimate, there are may millions of people on this planet who have had a powerful UFO experience. They cannot and will not be silenced indefinitely. ~ Richard M. Dolan

There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. ~ Diane Arbus

When people are unable to integrate their traumatic memories, they seem to lose their capacity to assimilate new experiences as well. It is as if their personality stops at a certain points and cannot enlarge any more by the addition or assimilation of new elements. Unless they become aware of the split off elements and integrate them into a story that had happened in the past but was now over, they would experience a slow decline in their personal and professional functioning. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Crack!
I covered my head, ducked down. Bird didn't laugh. She likened me to a survivor of some traumatic event who is always spooked by certain noises.
She just touched my shoulder and said, "It went the other way."
I straightened up. "But it was a foul ball."
"Yeah."
I hated that I kept flinching. I wondered how long it was going to take before I could totally relax at a game. ~ Rachel Hawthorne

Sometimes reality is a fantastically traumatic nightmare. ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic? ~ P.D. James

Those very traumatic events in our lives give us a privileged opportunity to let God's love become concrete for us. What the psychoanaylyst strives to do by bringing traumatic experiences to consciousness often comes about much quicker and more completely by the action of the Holy Spirit. "The spirit of man is the lamp of the Lord, searching all his inermost parts" (Prov. 20:27) We can ask him to illuminate our past and lead us to those incidents that we have still not accepted wholeheartedly. We can save a lot of time if we go into analysis with the Holy Spirit...who is our true and ultimate therapist. Nothing is hidden from him. ~ Wilfrid Stinissen

It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim's response. ~ David Yeung

Much like his birth, Cole's first hunting experience was a little more traumatic. He was give years old and we were getting ready to have our Christmas party at Phil's house in 2002. Because we hunt on private land, we're allowed to shoot deer from our vehicles. Cole and I climbed into my truck right before dark, and I drove next to the woods. As I was explaining safety and other things about hunting to him, a deer walked right into the middle of a trail. We hadn't been there for five minutes before the deer showed up! I looked at Cole and pointed toward the front of the truck.
Without saying anything, I leaned my gun out the driver's-side window of my truck and shot the deer. The deer did a double backflip and hit the ground. I looked at Cole and his mouth was wide open. I could have picked his jaw up from the floorboard.
"That's how you do it, son," I told him.
Cole didn't say anything. I figured his ears were still ringing, and I instantly regretted not telling him to cover them. It ended up being a pretty traumatic experience for him, and I feared he'd never want to go hunting again. In hindsight, he might have been a little too young to witness something like that. ~ Jase Robertson

They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened
Exodus (1960) screenplay ~ Dalton Trumbo

It didn't take long for us to realize, though, that we hadn't eaten since the eggs twenty-four hours earlier. Eating was the one desire of the flesh we hadn't fulfilled.
I remembered seeing a McDonald's near the entrance of our hotel, and since I needed a little exercise I offered to dart out for some safe and predictable American food, which would tide us over till the dinner we had reservations for that night. Our blood sugar was too low to comb the city, looking for a place to have a quick lunch.
I knew Marlboro Man was a ketchup-only guy when it comes to burgers, and that's what I ordered when I approached the counter: "Hamburger, ketchup only, please."
"Sar…you only want kitchipinmite?" the innocent clerk replied.
"Excuse me?"
"Kitchipinmite?"
"Uh…pardon?"
"You jis want a hamburger with kitchipinmite?"
"Uh…what?" I had no idea what the poor girl was saying.
It took me about ten minutes to realize the poor Australian woman behind the counter was merely repeating and confirming my order: kitchip (ketchup) inmite (and meat). It was a traumatic ordering experience.
I returned to the hotel room, and Marlboro Man and I dug into our food like animals.
"This tastes a little funny," my new husband said.
I concurred. The mite was not right. It didn't taste like America. ~ Ree Drummond

If you know that you have had countless lives, then what happens in this life is not quite as traumatic. ~ Frederick Lenz

observations suggest that the survivor as ANP typically engages in tasks of daily life such as reproduction, attachment, caretaking, and other social action tendencies, and avoidance of traumatic memories, which support a focus on daily life issues. In contrast, the survivor as EP primarily displays evolutionary defensive and emotional reactions to the (perceived) threat on which he or she seems to be fixated. Third, survivors should be very susceptible to classical conditioning, because, as we discuss below, EP and ANP strongly respond to unconditioned and conditioned threat cues. ~ Onno Van Der Hart

Part of what makes a situation traumatic is not talking about it. Talking reduces trauma symptoms. When we don't talk about trauma, we remain emotionally illiterate. Our most powerful feelings go unnamed and unspoken. ~ Tian Dayton

And Eth couldn't help looking. It's been years since he's seen a beautiful naked woman in the flesh. I'd be worried about him if he hadn't looked."
"He's a minister!"
"It was a blessed event. You sure you don't want me to hang that robe up?"
"You're making a joke out of this."
"Absolutely not. Only an insensitive jerk would think something this traumatic was funny. Tell you what. I'll go downstairs right this minute and kill him before he gets away. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

The fundamental act of medical care is assumption of responsibility. Surgery has assumed responsibility for disease which is largely acute, local or traumatic. This is responsibility for the entire range of injuries and wounds, local infections, benign and malignant tumors, as well as a large fraction of those pathologic processes and anomalies which are localized in the organs of the body. The study of surgery is a study of these diseases, the conditions and details of their care. ~ Francis Daniels Moore

To my mind, every emergency room should have a low-intensity laser for people with stroke or head trauma. This therapy would be especially important for head injuries, because there is no effective drug therapy for traumatic brain injury. Uri Oron has also shown that low-intensity laser light can reduce scar formation in animals that have had heart attacks; perhaps lasers should be used in emergency rooms for cardiac ~ Norman Doidge

There are few experiences in life as painful and brutal as the failure of a small business. For a small business conceived and nurtured by its owner is like a living, breathing child. Its loss is no less traumatic than losing a loved one. ~ William Manchee

I didn't mean to scare you. I'm not suicidal if that's what's freaking you out. I'm not fucked up in the head. I'm not deranged. I'm not suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. I'm just a brother who loved his sister more than life itself, so I get a little intense when I think about her. ~ Colleen Hoover

I went back to a small town in Poland where my dad grew up. It was a very traumatic experience for me as a young man to know that my father's family were killed by Nazis, killed by Hitler. And that left, you know, if not intellectually, at least an emotional part of me which said, God, we have got to do everything we can to end this kind of horrific racism or anti-Semitism. And I have spent much of my life trying to fight that. ~ Bernie Sanders

No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal - but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell. ~ Philip Ball

Analysis helps patients put their unconscious procedural memories and actions into words and into context, so they can better understand them. In the process they plastically retranscribe these procedural memories, so that they become conscious explicit memories, sometimes for the first time, and patients no longer need to "relive" or "reenact" them, especially if they were traumatic. (229-230) ~ Norman Doidge

My writing derived from the conviction I conceived during my college years: one should lead one's life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic, and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted. Writing is a way of ensuring that you pay enough attention along the way to understand what you see. ~ Jeffrey Tayler

It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations - leaving one's family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one's beloved with no assurances of reunion - there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded. ~ Dan Simmons

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

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

Sometimes a soldier returns home and all he can do is share his story in the hopes that somehow, in some way, it helps another soldier make sense of things. And although the stories may not be perfect, sometimes just sharing is enough to make a difference. ~ Michael Anthony

I didn't realize I actually had post-traumatic stress disorder at the time, but why would I think I had that? Anyway, how would I know which was post-traumatic stress, which is addiction, which is bipolar, which is Libra? ~ Carrie Fisher

Physical injury carries with it the fallout of mental injury, the damage never being equal to the traumatic event. E does not equal MC2 in this particular case. The logic of emotion carries no logic and hurt is an emotional value. I'm unsure what that value equals. ~ Carla R. Herrera

It's worth knowing more about the complicated environmental and genetic factors that could explain why traumatic brain injuries lead to long-term disabilities in some people and not in others. ~ Anne Wojcicki

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

Men and women who have served in harm's way experience higher rates of divorce and suicide. Many battle the debilitating effects and stigma associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. ~ Ron Wyden

Traumatic events always happen exactly two years before I reach the maturity level to deal with them. ~ Tim Sandlin

My traumatic experience was life changing ~ Asa Don Brown

They have made me understand how the City can get under your skin, and never be sweated out. I mean, it's still aesthetically traumatic, but it's got spirit. ~ Kamila Shamsie

Some of your childhood traumas may be remembered with incredible clarity, while others are so frightening or incomprehensible that your conscious mind buries the memory in your unconscious. ~ Renee Fredrickson

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) also has dissociative symptoms as an essential feature. PTSD has been classically seen as a biphasic disorder, with persons alternately experiencing phases of intrusion and numbing... [T]he intrusive phase is associated with recurrent and distressing recollections in thoughts or dreams and reliving the events in flashbacks. The avoidant/numbing phase is associated with efforts to avoid thoughts or feelings associated with the trauma, emotional constriction, and social withdrawal. This biphasic pattern is the result of dissociation; traumatic events are distanced and dissociated from usual conscious awareness in the numbing phase, only to return in the intrusive phase. ~ James A. Chu

What Cathy took from her rejection experience was self-doubt. Until this current traumatic hospitalization, Cathy hadn't realized the fear she was carrying around, how burdened she was by it, and how that fear kept her in a mode where she had to continuously prove her value to others and herself. ~ Robert Kegan

My dad died when I was 14. It was very sudden, traumatic, and confusing. I always felt I could have gone down a bad road at that point, but I made a choice to be a winner. ~ Taryn Manning

This study began in an exact and precise manner only with the labours of Professor Charcot at the Salpetriere, on the traumatic accidents of the hystericals: the paralyses, the contractures, mutisms, or anorexias. Everywhere, as we have seen, he showed the importance of the fixed idea which produced and kept up the accident, the reproduction of identical facts by suggestion, the treatment by isolation, and the moral influences which modified not the physical state, but the mental pathological state of the hysterical. It remained to generalise somewhat more this conception ~ Anonymous

Miriam is upset. Her voice is stretched and I can't look at her. Perhaps they beat something out of her she didn't get back. ~ Anna Funder

If you cannot read Shakespeare, or Melville, or Toni Morrison because it will trigger something traumatic in you, and you'll be harmed by the read of the text because you are still defining yourself through your self-victimization, then you need to see a doctor. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Years later, the trauma of those experiences continued to haunt me. Most Japanese Americans from my parents' generation didn't like to talk about the internment with their children. As with many traumatic experiences, they were anguished by their memories and haunted by shame for something that wasn't their fault. Shame is a cruel thing. It should rest on the perpetrators but they don't carry it the way the victims do. ~ George Takei

You've been told that you're broken. That you're damaged goods ... there is also Post-Traumatic Growth. You come back from war stronger and more sure of who you are. ~ James Mattis

I guess by default we're all the ones shaking our heads at the stupidity of others until we're forced into traumatic experiences ourselves. ~ J.A. Redmerski

Having my defenses down felt good. I didn't realize how much energy it took to carry my armor. My wall of protection kept bad stuff out, but it also kept good stuff from coming in. Guarding my heart is important, but not at the expense of being known by people who love me. ~ Shauna L. Hoey

A traumatic past does not condemn us to a dysfunctional future. ~ Nita Lapinski

Post-traumatic shock,' said Shaun. 'He thinks he's a boa constrictor. ~ Mira Grant

When I got out of prison, I was basically no longer human,' Miriam says. ~ Anna Funder

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation. ~ Lawrence N. Powell

Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art. ~ Matt Lucas

For Wendy and Sam, the best rule was "everything has a home." We made a list of their main household items and where they went - for example, pill bottles in the bathroom medicine cabinet, laundry in the hamper, and food in the kitchen cabinets. This may seem like a fundamental rule that everyone learns as a child, but many hoarders didn't pick that up either because they grew up in hoarding houses themselves, or they grew up in traumatic households where finding a meal and avoiding a beating was a daily reality. Cleaning was the least of their worries. ~ Matt Paxton

Thirty-six House incumbents with ratings from the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education of seventy-five or higher were defeated - especially traumatic since Republicans had filibustered labor's fondest legislative wish: a repeal of the right-to-work provision of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Union members voted for politicians who weakened their unions because the Democrats supported civil rights. ~ Rick Perlstein

He felt more crypts cracking open inside of him; the stench he smelled was not decayed bodies but decayed memories, and that was somehow worse. ~ Stephen King

A possessive part of me wants to hoard this story. I want to chipmunk or squirrel away the memory of this event, place it in a tree trunk with the memories of all the other rapes, attempted rapes, and gropes, memories that will never be released or consumed. When a man asks, "What did he do to you?" he's asking to eat one of these traumatic acorns. Girls never ask for these seeds. They know what it's like to be degraded and fucked by this world, to be made a big-time bottom by life. They don't need the details of my particular shame to construct empathy. ~ Myriam Gurba

First things first: studies show policing is hard. At a minimum, they prove many LEO's struggle to cope with what they are exposed to. For example, research indicates that while 8.2% of the general population suffers from an active alcohol or substance abuse addiction, up to 23% of public safety personnel, including law enforcement officers, are engaged in the same struggle. Furthermore, due to the constant exposure to violence, conflict, death, pain and suffering, coupled with the extremely stressful and draining nature of their work, police run a significant risk of experiencing Post-Traumatic Stress Injuries (PTSI)/Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Lastly, research by Dr. John Violanti in 2004 indicates a combination of alcohol use and PTSD produces a tenfold increase in the risk of suicide. This small snapshot of research paints a grim picture on how policing can negatively impact those that take up its calling. ~ Karen Rodwill Solomon

Many people look at their past and bemoan their mistakes. Those errors in judgment, behavior, hurting others, and the wrong decisions may be what consumes them now. It does not have to be that way, for recovering from a traumatic situation is all a matter of how we think about what happened. It is not so much about what happened to us as what we make of the circumstance. ~ David W. Earle

For me, and I suspect a lot of socially awkward people, dealing with people face-to-face seems really traumatic. Particularly if you have massive sweating issues, and particularly if on top of that you have quite smelly sweat that smells like onion soup. ~ Caitlin Moran

Haphephobia. The fear of being touched that often presented itself after a traumatic event. Touch from another human being often felt like fire burning the sufferer's skin. ~ Tessa Bailey

Whatever I have to do here, I'm ready for it. Work hard, do my homework, get an A, get back home to Bob and the kids, and back to work. Back to normal. I'm determined to recover 100 percent. One hundred percent has always been my goal in everything, unless extra credit is involved, and then I shoot higher. Thank God I'm a competitive, type A perfectionist. I'm convinced I'm going to be the best traumatic brain injury patient Baldwin has ever seen. But they won't be seeing me for very long because I also plan to recover faster than anyone here would predict. I wonder what the record is. ~ Lisa Genova

Just because you can't see my injury doesn't mean I don't have one. Traumatic Brain Injuries take many forms, from the person who lives their life with few problems to those who live in a vegetative state. I'm thankful that my accident didn't take my ability to walk and talk. I pray for those whose injury is more severe than mine. Still, my brain injury has taken a lot from me and I live with its affects everyday. ~ Lyla Jo

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is. ~ Annette Bening

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

It's pretty traumatic knowing that your instrument that's your career isn't working, and you've got to have an operation. ~ Jess Glynne

Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle. Dim memories of life before the traumatic separation of birth may be the source of Arcadian fantasies of a lost golden age. ~ Camille Paglia

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered. ~ Patrick J. Carnes

I trudged back to my bedroom and pushed the door open, intending to wash my face or brush my teeth or make some stab at smoothing my hair, because I thought it might make me feel a little less trampled.
Eric was sitting on my bed, his face buried in his hands. He looked up at me as I entered, and he looked shocked. Well, no wonder, what with the very thorough takeover and traumatic changing of the guard.
Sitting here on your bed, smelling your scent," he said in a voice so low I had to strain to hear it.
Sookie . . . I remember everything."
Oh, hell," I said, and went in the bathroom and shut the door. I brushed my hair and my teeth and scrubbed my face, but I had to come out. I was being as cowardly as Quinn if I didn't face the vampire.
Eric started talking the minute I emerged. "I can't believe I - "
Yeah, yeah, I know, loved a mere human, made all those promises, was as sweet as pie and wanted to stay with me forever," I muttered. Surely there was a shortcut we could take through this scene.
I can't believe I felt something so strongly and was so happy for the first time in hundreds of years," Eric said with some dignity. "Give me some credit for that, too. ~ Charlaine Harris

Post-Traumatic Stress Injury isn't a disease. It's a wound to the soul that never heals. ~ Tom Glenn

Changing my name was traumatic for me. ~ Eve Best

Often it isn't the initiating trauma that creates seemingly insurmountable pain, but the lack of support after. ~ S. Kelley Harrell

The ascent from grass to grace is a glorious cruise but the descent is a traumatic bruise. ~ Vincent Okay Nwachukwu

The Frays had never been a religiously observant family, but Clary loved Fifth Avenue at Christmas time. The air smelled like sweet roasted chestnuts, and the window displays sparkled with silver and blue, green and red. This year there were fat round crystal snowflakes attached to each lamppost, sending back the winter sunlight in shafts of gold. Not to mention the huge tree at Rockefeller Center. It threw its shadow across them as she and Simon draped themselves over the gate at the side of the skating rink, watching tourists fall down as they tried to navigate the ice.

Clary had a hot chocolate wrapped in her hands, the warmth spreading through her body. She felt almost normal - this, coming to Fifth to see the window displays and the tree, had been a winter tradition for her and Simon for as long as she could remember.

"Feels like old times, doesn't it?" he said, echoing her thoughts as he propped his chin on his folded arms.

She chanced a sideways look at him. He was wearing a black topcoat and scarf that emphasized the winter pallor of his skin. His eyes were shadowed, indicating that he hadn't fed on blood recently. He looked like what he was - a hungry, tired vampire.

Well, she thought. Almost like old times. "More people to buy presents for," she said. "Plus, the always traumatic what-to-buy-someone-for-the-first-Christmas-after-you've-started-dating question."

"What to get the Shadowhunter who has everything," S ~ Cassandra Clare

It's post-traumatic stress disorder. When these women go ballistic and shoot their husbands or slice off their dicks, they aren't thinking about the consequences . . . just about stopping the aggression. ~ Jodi Picoult

When I first started to remember specific memories of abuse, I felt like I had a storm cloud over me for about two or three days beforehand. When the memory finally surfaced, I felt like I was alone in a dark cave. I stayed in bed just thinking and crying and eating chocolate. I wrote in my healing journal and talked it out with a friend. I examined what I thought and how I felt and cried some more. It was agonizing. The more issues I faced, the stronger I got. It wasn't a pleasant process, but I knew it would be over in a few days and I would feel alive again. With each memory, I recovered faster and I had longer and longer breaks in between them. Facing them made me stronger. I was able to see more and more of the truth without it overwhelming me. Even though the memories increased in intensity, it was easier to deal with them. ~ Christina Enevoldsen

With regard to complex trauma survivors, self-determination and autonomy require that the therapist treat each client as the "authority" in determining the meaning and interpretation of his or her personal life history, including (but not limited to) traumatic experiences (Harvey, 1996). Therapists can inadvertently misappropriate the client's authority over the meaning and significance of her or his memories (and associated symptoms, such as intrusive reexperiencing or dissociative flashbacks) by suggesting specific "expert" interpretations of the memories or symptoms. Clients who feel profoundly abandoned by key caregivers may appear deeply grateful for such interpretations and pronouncements by their therapists, because they can fulfill a deep longing for a substitute parent who makes sense of the world or takes care of them. However, this delegation of authority to the therapist can backfire if the client cannot, or does not, take ownership of her or his own memories or life story by determining their personal meaning.Moreover, the client can be trapped in a stance of avoidance because trauma memories are never experienced, processed, and put to rest. Helping a client to develop a core sense of relational security and the capacity to regulate (and recover from) extreme hyper- or hypoarousal is essential if the client is to achieve a self-determined and autonomous approach to defining the meaning and impact of trauma memories, a crucial goal of posttraumatic therapy. ~ Christine A. Courtois

I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event
a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party. ~ Wallace Stegner

Every single time I get sent to her, she asks me questions that sound like they came from some "How to Talk to Statistical Black Children Who Come to Your Office Often" handbook.

How is your home life? (None of your business.)

Have you witnessed any traumatic events lately, such as shootings? (Just because I live in the "ghetto" doesn't mean I dodge bullets every day.)

Are you struggling to come to terms with your father's murder? (It was twelve years ago. I barely remember him or it.)

Are you struggling to come to terms with your mother's addiction? (She's been clean for eight years. She's only addicted to soap operas these days.)

What's good with you, homegirl, nah'mean? (Okay, she hasn't said that, but give her time.) ~ Angie Thomas

Caregivers of those with a traumatic brain injury had their blood pressure recorded at certain time of day
at meals and during other activities, .. The blood pressure of the people who had adopted the pets went down dramatically. ~ Karen Allen

The thing about post-traumatic stress disorder, we know about one in five, about 20 percent of individuals that are exposed to a direct traumatic stress will develop this disorder. ~ Dale Archer

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

I don't care what people think ... I learned a long time ago ... I was 19 and had a very traumatic experience ... .and I learned that I have to go to bed with myself at night and that I have to please myself ... and as long as I don't go out of my way to offend anybody that I love, upset my mother or my husband ... I'll do my own thing. And if the public doesn't like it, it's their problem, not mine. ~ Iris Apfel

The days of my youth can be described as my innocence hitting every obstacle along the way while plummeting into the abyss. ~ Oliver Oyanadel

I tend to fall more into the fun horror genre than the traumatic horror genre. I love the films where you're laughing as much as screaming, but that doesn't mean I don't like the other ones. ~ Drew Goddard

Triggers are like little psychic explosions that crash through avoidance and bring the dissociated, avoided trauma suddenly, unexpectedly, back into consciousness. ~ Carolyn Spring

For two days, we had travelled the Labyrinth - across pits of darkness and around lakes of poison, through dilapidated shopping malls with only discount Halloween stores and questionable Chinese food buffets.
The Labyrinth could be a bewildering place. Like a web of capillaries beneath the skin of the mortal world, it connected basements, sewers and forgotten tunnels around the globe with no regard to the rules of time and space. One might enter the Labyrinth through a manhole in Rome, walk ten feet, open a door and find oneself at a training camp for clowns in Buffalo, Minnesota. (Please don't ask. It was traumatic.) ~ Rick Riordan

And it's not the good stuff that I recall. No. It's the most traumatic shit that plays in the 3D IMAX Theater of My Mind. ~ Sherman Alexie

Together we can break the silence! ~ Flashbacks In Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Surviving The Flood

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

Nick tugged her head back, his tormented gaze raking over her face. His trembling fingertips traced the line of her cheek and jaw. "My God. Lottie…" As his panicked exploration continued, he discovered the bruises on her throat, and he uttered a cry of fury. "Holy hell! Your neck. He dared to… I'm going to slaughter that bastard - "
Lottie placed her fingers over his mouth. "I'm all right," she said gently. Feeling the way his large body shook, she drew her hand over his chest in a calming stroke. After the traumatic events of the past hours, it was so wonderful to be with him that her lips curved in a wobbly smile. She gazed into his dusty, sweat-streaked face with concern. "In fact, I believe I may be in better condition than you, my darling."
A primitive groan came from his throat, and he clutched her with his right arm, bending over her hungrily. "I love you," he said in a low, shaken voice. "I love you so much, Lottie." His lips covered hers in a fiercely ardent kiss.
Clearly he was too unsettled to recall that there were others in the room. Lottie turned her face away with a muffled laugh. "I love you, too," she whispered. "Not here, darling. Later, with more privacy, we can - " She was silenced as Nick seized her mouth once more. Suddenly she found herself pushed up against the wall by six feet of aroused, overwrought male. Realizing that there was no hope of subduing him, Lottie stroked his broad back in an effort to soothe him. He possessed her with ~ Lisa Kleypas

The non-disclosure of emotional pain can be deeply traumatic. It leads to depression. In such situations of vulnerability, one must choose to speak to a person you trust. Someone who could care for you and heal you. ~ Avijeet Das

A phobia is an excessive or unreasonable fear of an object, situation or place. Phobias are quite common and often take root in childhood for no apparent reason. Other times they spring from traumatic events or develop from an attempt to make sense of unexpected and intense feelings of anxiety or panic.

Simple phobias are fears of specific things such as insects, infections, or even flying. Agoraphobia is a fear of being in places where one feels trapped or unable to get help, such as in crowds, on a bus or in a car, or standing in a line. It is basically an anxiety that ignites from being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing). A social phobia is a marked fear of social or performance situations.

When the phobic person actually encounters, or even anticipates, being in the presence of the feared object or situation, immediate anxiety can be triggered. The physical symptoms of anxiety may include shortness of breath, sweating, a racing heart, chest or abdominal discomfort, trembling, and similar reactions. The emotional component involves an intense fear and may include feelings of losing control, embarrassing oneself, or passing out.

Most people who experience phobias try to escape or avoid the feared situation wherever possible. This may be fairly easy if the feared object is rarely encountered (such as snakes) and avoidance will not greatly restrict the person's life. At other times, avoiding the fear ~ Sahar Abdulaziz

Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been touched. The degree of damage depend on the degree of traumatic sexualization, stigmatization, betrayal and powerlessness, the child has experienced. This in turn depends on a number of factors such as:
* who the abuser was;
* how many abusers were involved;
* if the abuser was same-sex or opposite sex;
* what took place;
* what was said;
* how long the abuse went on for;
* How the child felt and how she interpreted what was happening;
* if the child was otherwise happy and supported;
* how other people reacted to the disclosure or discovery of the abuse;
* how old the child was ~ Carolyn Ainscough

What does it really mean to be a leftist in the early part of the 21st century? What are we really talking about? And I can just be very candid with you. It means to have a certain kind of temperament, to make certain kinds of political and ethical choices, and to exercise certain analytical focuses in targeting on the catastrophic and the monstrous, the scandalous, the traumatic, that are often hidden and concealed in the deodorized and manicured discourses of the mainstream. That's what it means to be a leftist. So let's just be clear about it. ~ Cornel West

One of the central elements of resilience, Bonanno has found, is perception: Do you conceptualize an event as traumatic, or as an opportunity to learn and grow? "Events are not traumatic until we experience them as traumatic," Bonanno told me, in December. "To call something a 'traumatic event' belies that fact." He has coined a different term: PTE, or potentially traumatic event, which he argues is more accurate.

The theory is straightforward. Every frightening event, no matter how negative it might seem from the sidelines, has the potential to be traumatic or not to the person experiencing it. Take something as terrible as the surprising death of a close friend: you might be sad, but if you can find a way to construe that event as filled with meaning - perhaps it leads to greater awareness of a certain disease, say, or to closer ties with the community - then it may not be seen as a trauma. The experience isn't inherent in the event; it resides in the event's psychological construal.

It's for this reason, Bonanno told me, that "stressful" or "traumatic" events in and of themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "The prospective epidemiological data shows that exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning," he said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response." In other words, living through adversity, be it endemic to your environment or an acute negative event, doesn't guarant ~ Maria Konnikova

In 2011, actor Johnny Depp told the November issue of Vanity Fair that he felt participating in a photoshoot was akin to rape.

"Well, you just feel like you're being raped somehow. Raped . . . It feels like a kind of weird - just weird, man. But whenever you have a photo shoot or something like that, it's like - you just feel dumb. It's just so stupid," he said.

Likening instances of being flustered or uneasy to the often life-shattering experience of rape has become a far too common comparison in modern lexicon.

The phrase "Facebook rape" is perhaps the most widely used, which implies one person has posted on another person's Facebook account - usually something intended to embarrass the person.

But the casual, flippant use of the term "rape" in instances that do not involve sexual violence is highly problematic in that it trivialises one of the most despicable invasions of a human being.

Desensitising the masses to the term "rape" is just another way the conversation surrounding sexual assault is derailed or diluted in society.

Rape is, and should be considered universally, as a serious societal sickness that occurs within the "toxic silence" that surrounds sexual assault as Tara Moss put so elegantly in her recent Q&A appearance.

Further to that, the use of the term can be a trigger for rape survivors in that it may jolt terrifying memories of their own experience.

According to the ~ Emma Elsworth

I almost turned around right there. Stupid, yeah, but PTSADS doesn't care how stupid a trigger is. If you need me to spell that out, it's Post-Traumatic Stuffed Animal Death Syndrome. I thought it was pretty funny. Mom and the psychologist did not. The psychologist said I had substituted George for Dad and I actually had post-dad syndrome. I told her George was a fucking bunny. ~ Leah Raeder

I have this helicopter crash, and I fall in love with this man who was in the crash with me. I must have been suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. ~ Christie Brinkley

I had built such a wall between my experiences and how I felt about those experiences that I was incapable of reliving both simultaneously. I could talk about my traumas, even walk through them, but I couldn't feel them. When I tried to bring it all together, when I tried to remember how I had felt, I disappeared in my own head. My to-do list took on grave importance. The book I read the night before filled my thoughts. Yesterday's article suddenly called out to be rewritten. I couldn't get inside myself. ~ Sarah Hackley