Past Trauma Quotes

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

Ben Stewart

#2. I began to think that there was a place for 'Footloose' to get retold again, that there was actually a more conducive political climate, an emotional climate to explore a town that has experienced a trauma and a shock, and starts overreacting.

Craig Brewer

#3. If we make it through this, we will be friends. Bonded by trauma.

Eoin Colfer

#4. 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

#5. Turning away, sobbing, I hide behind my hair, the kettle and coffee forgotten. It's too hard to talk about it. I can't talk about it. It's no one's business but mine. The trauma breathes in my blood, it feasts on my life, it gives me cold sweats and nightmares still.

Poppet

#6. When I ask you who you are, you'd better say my fucking name.

Alicen Grey

#7. A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals
that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.

Zadie Smith

#8. We are creatures built on a house of cards of language.

Stefan Molyneux

#9. That moment you finish a book, look around, and realize that everyone else is just getting on with their lives as though you didn't just experience emotional trauma at the hands of a paperback

Anonymous

#10. 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

#11. Sitting on my bed with all these things I used to love but not loving them anymore, I just wanted to set them on fire. That's when I knew I was never going to be all right again.

Wendy Walker

#12. ... it is to your credit that you recognize that if he was a monster then it was other monstrous things which made him so. The iron forged on the anvil cannot be blamed for the hammer...

Terry Pratchett

#13. Sometimes, PTSD sufferers will shut out memories of painful periods in their lives and experience amnesia. Thus, a traumatized individual might not remember when his spouse died in a car accident. Another person who was abused might have gaps in her memory of childhood.

Glenn Schiraldi

#14. Community is about sharing my life; about allowing the chaos of another's circumstances to infringe on mine; about permitting myself to be known without constraint; about resigning myself to needing others.

Sandy Oshiro Rosen

#15. And so, now, she runs. In her running, her mind leaves her.
And she can hear nothing but her heart, the blast making her deaf.
There is a great white silent empty in her running.
She runs.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#16. The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It's so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.

Rasmenia Massoud

#17. The psycho-babble lavished on her by her mother in a prior life found her, whispering of trauma and coping, how this was not her fault and blaming herself at all was useless. She would eventually try to believe this, as soon as she was behind her locked bedroom door.

Thomm Quackenbush

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

Thomas Hodge

#19. Our identities are tremendously warped and distorted by yesterday's trauma and tomorrow's expectations.

Bryant McGill

#20. Whatever it was, she knew she would not be blamed for it, she was blameless. But what use had that been to her in the past, to be blameless? So at the same time she felt guilty, and as if she was about to be punished.

Margaret Atwood

#21. She knew she couldn't escape unscathed, and the trauma would take her a long time to get past. And she might never fully heal mentally.
There was no denying the fact, though, that everything had changed for her. To know what to expect wasn't the same as actually living it.

Cheyenne McCray

#22. Healing doesn't just take a little time, it also takes commitment to get started and to complete the process.

Sereda Aleta Dailey

#23. It would cut into him at unpredictable moments, like a gutting knife made of colored light.

David Baldacci

#24. The past was in them, still disturbing but no longer a governing history; the trauma strengthened the convictions they possessed about how to lead their lives.

Richard Sennett

#25. 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

#26. When you can identify the insecurities inside the person that is hurting you then you can begin to heal. It isn't about you. It is about their past.

Shannon L. Alder

#27. When you hold onto a script that doesn't serve you, you leave no space to write a new one that does.

Jennifer Ho-Dougatz

#28. You can travel the world but If you cannot let go of the past, you will never move on.

Gerald Freeman

#29. Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different.

Oprah Winfrey

#30. 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

#31. Dr. Shapiro is a pioneer in the field of helping people overcome trauma and negative past experiences.

Daniel Amen

#32. Childhood trauma is not necessarily a prophecy of doom, because some children are resilient or because later experiences help to restore mental health.

Richard Bentall

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

Graydon Carter

#34. Abuse may consist of physical maltreatment or language that is belittling, discriminatory ...

Asa Don Brown

#35. Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

Wendy Hoffman

#36. Traumas produce their disintegrating effects in proportion to their intensity, duration and repetition. (1909)

Pierre Janet

#37. 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

#38. In this time of globalization, with all its advantages, the poor are the most vulnerable to having their traditions, relationships and knowledge and skills ignored and denigrated, and experiencing development with a great sense of trauma, loss and social disconnectedness.

James Wolfensohn

#39. No-one would want to go through a traumatic experience but when you've survived something life-shattering and risen above it, you achieve a kind of serenity.

Jane Wilson-Howarth

#40. Anger is the immune system of the soul.

Stefan Molyneux

#41. As a veteran, I know firsthand the satisfaction there is in defending the democracy you so strongly believe in, but I can also attest to the trauma encountered from combat on the battlefield.

Charles B. Rangel

#42. I have to say that those nine years were full of turmoil and drama and trauma to me, in actual fact.

Joan Collins

#43. Trauma has a way of indelibly linking the incidentals to the profound.

Richard Paul Evans

#44. This was the face that Ga had shown the world, that of a boy who had swallowed the things that had happened to him, but who wouldn't understand what they meant for a long, long time.

Adam Johnson

#45. 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

#46. The ice cold fear I'd felt, not knowing if Wyatt was alive, pressed into the wall with other girls and surrounded by guys who were unspeakably brave, hit my body again in a wave. This was trauma - the gift that keeps on giving.

Laura Anderson Kurk

#47. One of the marvels of personality is its resistance to prediction. One man's paralyzing trauma is another man's invitation to take control of his life; one woman's grounds for insanity is another woman's ground to a dramatic shaping of self.

Rosellen Brown

#48. Admitting pain humbles us to the reality of our personal histories and our present conditions. We no longer have to pretend we are something that we are not.

Steven Franssen

#49. I spent many years trying to make up reasons about why I had the flashbacks, memories, continuous nightmares. When I finally decided to quit trying to hide from truth, I began to heal.

Karen Marshall

#50. It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.

Jodi Picoult

#51. Ghettos and barrios and abusive homes and trauma wards may produce scarred souls; they can cripple more human spirits than they strengthen.

John Ortberg

#52. It's as if I died too,' she whispered to herself, 'as if I was born dead.'
Ironically, it was true. Emotionally she knew what her mind did not, beyond logic, beyond reason, as if somehow deep inside she felt what Sarah knew.

Denny Taylor

#53. Black trauma is never given space to heal because we have to make sure the white people who hurt us don't feel too bad about it. Even as victims, we're told to care about the feelings of those who harm us.

Luvvie Ajayi

#54. Developmental trauma occurs when "emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held."1 In retrospect, I can see that this was the case for

Mark Epstein

#55. Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.

Anna Funder

#56. When we seek to escape from inner conflict and pain, we are running away from unresolved childhood trauma or original pain. Most people with serious addictive natures who are in the process of recovery have found that trauma played a huge role in escalating their addictions. It certainly did for me.

Christopher Dines

#57. After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don't. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can't understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers. Later

Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#58. In some ways therapists have it harder than surgeons, who can often correct the
issue with one operation. There's no quick fix for emotional trauma.

Daria Snadowsky

#59. Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

James Frey

#60. You as a whole person are thus unable to reconcile conflicts about anger and learn to tolerate and express anger in healthy ways. Inner turmoil and dissociation are maintained.

Suzette Boon

#61. We don't necessarily need to know each other's name, age, profession, drug of choice, childhood trauma or recent tragedy to understand what pain feels like and offer comfort. We are strangers drawn together by a shared desire for lasting peace.

Marta Mrotek

#62. Trauma can have a masking effect.

Asa Don Brown