Trauma Quotes

Did I imagine the castle, the dungeon, the ritual orgies and violations? Did Lucy, Billy, Samuel, Eliza, Shirley and Kato make it all up? I went back to the industrial estate and found the castle. It was an old factory that had burned to the ground, but the charred ruins of the basement remained. I closed my eyes and could see the black candles, the dancing shadows, the inverted pentagram, the people chanting through hooded robes. I could see myself among other children being abused in ways that defy imagination. I have no doubt now that the cult of devil worshippers was nothing more than a ring of paedophiles, the satanic paraphernalia a cover for their true lusts: the innocent bodies of young children.

~ Alice Jamieson

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

Cheryl's growing awareness of her emotional difficulties was leading her to research multiple personality. As she had learned more about dissociation, she realised just how severe the abuse had been and how much she had been hurt. Her mind had dissociated to assure survival during the abuse by her father and it had been forced to dissociate by various researchers in government programmes.

~ Cheryl Hersha

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states, each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized had to be both extremely intelligent and under the age of seven, two conditions not yet understood though remaining consistent as factors. The trauma was almost always of a sexual nature… (p52)

~ Cheryl Hersha

Why Cults Terrorize and Kill Children – LLOYD DEMAUSEThe Journal of Psychohistory 21 (4) 1994Extending these local figures to a national estimate would easily mean tens of thousands of cult victims per year reporting, plus undoubtedly more who do not report.(2) This needn’t mean, of course, that actual Cult abuse is increasing, only that-as with the increase in all child abuse reports-we have become more open to hearing them. But it seemed unlikely that the surge of cult memories could all be made up by patients or implanted by therapists. Therapists are a timid group at best, and the notion that they suddenly begin implanting false memories in tens of thousands of their clients for no apparent reason strained credulity. Certainly no one has presented a shred of evidence for massive “false memory” implantations.

~ Lloyd Demause

He asks, in a softer voice, Does your arm still hurt?You touch it with your hand. The big ache is gone, leaving only the little, underneath ache that will gather and swell against the bone. The blood leaks out of the vein where he grabbed you. But you say, It's better now.

~ Jim Grimsley

Ritual abuse diagnosis research – excerpt from a chapter in: Lacter, E. & Lehman, K. (2008).Guidelines to Differential Diagnosis between Schizophrenia and Ritual Abuse/Mind Control Traumatic Stress. In J.R. Noblitt & P. Perskin(Eds.), Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-first Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social and Political Considerations, pp. 85-154. Bandon, Oregon: Robert D. Reed Publishers. quotes: A second study revealed that these results were unrelated to patients’ degree of media and hospital milieu exposure to the subject of Satanic ritual abuse. “In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent with the devastating and pervasive abuse these victims have experienced, so often including immediate family members.

~ Randy Noblitt

Dissociative identity disorder is conceptualized as a childhood onset, posttraumatic developmental disorder in which the child is unable to consolidate a unified sense of self. Detachment from emotional and physical pain during trauma can result in alterations in memory encoding and storage. In turn, this leads to fragmentation and compartmentalization of memory and impairments in retrieving memory.2,4,19 Exposure to early, usually repeated trauma results in the creation of discrete behavioral states that can persist and, over later development, become elaborated, ultimately developing into the alternate identities of dissociative identity disorder.

~ Bethany L. Brand

When preparing for Book One, I talked to a couple of psychiatrists about psychosomatic phenomena, neuroses and dissociative conditions, for example the so—called hysterical blindness suffered by many who saw the Killing Fields in Pol Pot’s Cambodia: their eyes objectively see, but they are not aware of it and are blind because they believe they can’t see. One specialist told me that among modern Western people, ’metaphorical’ symptoms such as Fredy or those Cambodians evince are much rarer now than earlier in the twentieth century or before. Nowadays most people are better equipped by education to verbalise their neuroses, and have lots of jargon in which to do so. For most of the dissociative dimension, I could draw on things I knew from within myself.

~ Les Murray

The central mechanism of the avoidance mechanism of PTSD is the ego defense of denial

~ Frank M. Ochberg

Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal.

~ Jeff Lindsay

And for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.

~ Joseph Conrad

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

~ Peter A. Levine

Empathy means realizing no trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds.

~ Leslie Jamison

the only way to get over a death is by seeing it as a life completed, instead of a life interrupted.

~ Anonymous

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

When we are forced to endure what we cannot endure, something breaks inside our minds. That broken-mindedness is commonly called trauma.

~ John A. Macdougall

You and I were meant to be together, even if we weren't meant to be happy.

~ Stacey T. Hunt

Jun Do had dealt with this his whole life, the ways it was impossible for people from normal families to conceive of a man in so much hurt that he couldn’t acknowledge his own son, that there was nothing worse than a mother leaving her children, though it happened all the time, that “take” was a word people used for those who had so little to give as to be immeasurable.

~ Adam Johnson

A broken soul doesn't invest in boundaries because the world has crossed them, without mercy.

~ Shannon L. Alder

No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free.

~ Yaa Gyasi

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

~ Bryant Mcgill

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

~ Asa Don Brown

Parts of you are phobic of anger and generally terrified and ashamed of angry dissociative parts. There is often tremendous conflict between anger-avoidant and anger-fixated parts of an individual. Thus, an internal and perpetual cycle of rage-shame-fear creates inner chaos and pain.

~ Suzette Boon

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

Denial forces victims to retreat in lifeless existence, dieing in the shadows of buried trauma and painful memories.

~ Trudy Metzger

He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the way up. Back then he'd assumed it was just learned behavior, the body adapting so it could get enough rest in an environment that never really had downtime. Now he wondered if those vets found the constant noise preferable. A way to keep their lost shipmates away. They probably went home after their twenty and never slept again.

~ James S.a. Corey

...and how is a man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of.

~ David Jones

He thought it disproportionate in its violence considering the fragility of us.

~ David Jones

But how intolerable bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word.

~ David Jones

Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma?

~ Dan Wells

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

I want to just go back to being the person I was before, but you can't stop being the person you've become. You just have to keep going forward.

~ Rebecca Rosenblum

Spiritual assets make us more resilient to the trauma and difficult experiences life inevitably throws at us.Since spiritual assets bring us closer to our Higher Power, we do not face the difficulties alone, and we may find a greater purpose and meaning within the stress & trauma. When we lean on our spiritual assets to get us through, the traumatic event becomes less destructive. Instead, it becomes transformative; we see the difficulties in a new light.

~ Daniel D. Maurer

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

~ Khaled Hosseini

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

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

~ Chris Cleave

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 afterwards.

~ Jessica Stern

Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

~ Brian Evenson