It is always a mistake to underestimate how long it takes for mankind to understand the traumas it has suffered, especially the self-inflicted ones.

~ A.c. Grayling

A.c. Grayling Abuse Abuse Survivors Amnesia Child Abuse Child Abusers Holocaust Human Rights Violations Survivors Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatized

It is a rare person who can cut himself off from mediate and immediate relations with others for long spaces of time without undergoing a deterioration in personality.

~ Harry Stack Sullivan

Harry Stack Sullivan Abuse Abuse Survivors Abused Children Abusive Parents Complex Ptsd Dissociation Domestic Violence Effects Of Child Abuse Interpersonal Partner Violence Interpersonal Trauma Isolation Mental Health Mental Illness Personality Personality Change Personality Disorder Social Isolation Structural Dissociation Survivors Traumatic Experiences Traumatized

Some of the experiences endured by human beings on this earth are virtually unbelievable.

~ Aphrodite Matsakis

Aphrodite Matsakis Abuse Disbelief Doubt Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Society Denial Trauma Trauma Memories Traumatic Experiences Traumatized Unbelievable

Several researchers demonstrate the ways people fail to label trauma as such or underreport traumatic experiences. In a sample of 1,526 university students, Rausch and Knutson (1991) found that although participants reported receiving punitive treatment similar to that of their siblings, they were more than twice as likely to identify their siblings’ experiences as abusive as they were to label their own in this way. The authors reported that participants were likely to interpret parental treatment toward themselves but not parental treatment toward their siblings as deserved and therefore not abusive. Other studies similarly indicate that those reporting abuse experiences often do not demonstrate a metaconsciousness of having been abused (Goldsmith & Freyd, in press; Koss, 1998; Varia & Abidin, 1999; Weinbach & Curtiss, 1986). KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY (2004)

~ Jennifer J. Freyd

Jennifer J. Freyd Abuse Child Abuse Metacognition Parental Abuse Survivors Survivors Of Abuse Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatized Unawareness

I have tried to communicate my ideas in a language that preserves connections, a language that is faithful both to the dispassionate, reasoned traditions of my profession and to the passionate claims of people who have been violated and outraged. I have tried to find a language that can withstand the imperatives of doublethink and allows all of us to come a little closer to facing the unspeakable.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Abuse Atrocitis Complex Ptsd Double Think Doublethink Horror Of Incest Horror Of Rape Horror Of War Rape Recovery Trauma Trauma And Recovery Traumatic Experiences Unspeakable Violated Violations Violations Of Human Rights

Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.… Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life.… They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror, and evoke the responses of catastrophe.

~ Judith Lewis Herman

Judith Lewis Herman Abuse Atrocities Catastrophe Disasters Helplessness Incest Mental Disorder Mental Health Mental Illness Powerless Powerlessness Ptsd Rape Sexual Abuse Survivors Terrifying Terror Traumatic Experiences Traumatized

One in four girls will experience sexual abuse by the time she is sixteen, and 48 percent of all rapes involve a young woman under the age of eighteen. It’s not surprising then, that in a society where sexual abuse of young women is rampant, many women never share their stories. They remain hidden and invisible.

~ Patti Feuereisen

Patti Feuereisen Abuse Child Rape Childhood Sexual Abuse Hidden Shame Hidden Victims Invisible Girls Invisible People Rape Rape Culture Rape Statistics Sexual Abuse Sexual Abuse Of A Child Silent Pain Survivors Of Abuse Survivorship Trauma Traumatic Experiences Victims

For anyone who wonders what it's like to have a tragedy shatter your existence, this is what I would tell them: it's like going through the motions of everyday life in a zombified state. It's having outbursts of anger for what seems like no apparent reason, for even the smallest of offenses. It's forgetting how to be your once cheerful, perky self, and having to relearn basic social skills when mingling with new people (especially if those people are ignorant, or just plain terrible at showing sympathy). It takes a while to re-learn all those basic skills. Maybe...it's possible. Maybe you have to want your life back first, before it can start repairing itself But then you also have to accept that the mending process may take the rest of your life. I don't think there's a set time limit for it.

~ Sarahbeth Caplin

Sarahbeth Caplin Abuse Ptsd Rape Recovery Sexual Assault Trauma Traumatic Experiences

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

Les Murray Blindness Conversion Disorder Dissociation Dissociative Hysteria Hysterical Dissociation Mental Disorder Mental Illness Neuoroses Neurosis Neuroticism Pol Pot Psychogenic Psychosomatic Trauma Trauma Survivors Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Traumatized

Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.

~ David J. Morris

David J. Morris Combat Ptsd Flashbacks Mental Disorder Mental Distress Mental Illness Military Psychiatry Military Quote Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Time Trauma Survivors Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Traumatized Veterans

I think someone gave me candy when I was younger, someone whose face I don't remember; a blank face from my nightmares.  He gave them to me to cover up the taste of something vile, and I associate the candy with the vile act before it.”Dr. Jane moved over to the couch to sit next to me, put her arm around my shoulder, and cooed as if she were comforting a child.  I felt like a child.  I needed someone to hear the horror of this memory and explain what this might mean.

~ Kimber Nilsson

Kimber Nilsson Erotic Romance Traumatic Experiences

... sexual abuse by the mother is considered to he one of the most traumatic forms of abuse. In some ways it's the ultimate betrayal.

~ Cameron West

Cameron West Abusive Mother Abusive Women Attachment Attachment Trauma Betrayal Betrayal Trauma Child Sexual Abuse Child Sexual Abuse Survivor Childhood Sexual Abuse Incest Male Survivor Parental Abuse Pedophile Pedophiles Society Denial Traumatic Experiences

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

Aphrodite Matsakis Abuse Survivors Counseling Denial Disbelief Mental Health Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Psychotherapy Ptsd Society Denial Therapy Trauma Survivors Traumatic Experiences Unbelievable

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

~ Trudy Metzger

Trudy Metzger Child Sexual Abuse Denial Rape Rape Culture Sexual Abuse Sexual Assault Shame Society Denial Survivor Survivors Of Abuse Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatized Victim Victim Blaming

My squad is my family, my gun is my provider, and protector, and my rule is to kill or be killed.

~ Ishmael Beah

Ishmael Beah Child Soldiers Military Traumatic Experiences Warfare

Dr. Peter Levine, who has worked with trauma survivors for twenty-five years, says the single most important factor he has learned in uncovering the mystery of human trauma is what happens during and after the freezing response. He describes an impala being chased by a cheetah. The second the cheetah pounces on the young impala, the animal goes limp. The impala isn’t playing dead, she has “instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she does immediately thereafter is vitally important. She shakes and quivers every part of her body, clearing the traumatic energy she has accumulated.

~ Marilyn Van Derbur

Marilyn Van Derbur Fight Flight Freeze Play Dead Survivors Trauma Trauma Experiences Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Traumatized

Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.

~ Rachel E. Goldsmith

Rachel E. Goldsmith Abuse Survivors Authoritarian Bias Child Sexual Abuse Controversy Credibility Delayed Reaction Denial Doubting Mind Incest Psychological Trauma Recovered Memories Recovered Memory Sexism Sexual Abuse Society Denial Survivors Trauma Trauma Memory Traumatic Experiences

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.

~ Aphrodite Matsakis

Aphrodite Matsakis Abuse Survivors Denial Disbelief Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Society Denial Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatized

When experiences or emotions become too overwhlming, the mind clevely encapsulates the material and stores it for safe-keeping. Many people respond this way in the face of trauma, but the additional step that occurs in this process, in the case of DID, is the formation of distinct ego states that carry the experience.

~ Deborah Bray Haddock

Deborah Bray Haddock Alter Personalities Compartmentalization Coping Dissociation Dissociative Dissociative Identity Disorder Dissociative Parts Memory Fragmentation Multiple Personalities Ptsd Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatized

The holes are slowly filling up, and despite itself the brain will work until the job is completed.

~ Danny Scheinmann

Danny Scheinmann Trauma Traumatic Experiences

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

Thomas Hodge Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatized

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

American Psychological Association Cognitive Distortions Just World Psychological Trauma Ptsd Sense Of Safety Trauma Trauma Survivors Traumatic Experiences Traumatized World View

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of hurtful treatment by others or one's own failed capabilities can stubbornly persist despite overwhelming evidence that such is no longer the case.

~ Babette Rothschild

Babette Rothschild Child Abuse Childhood Abuse Complex Ptsd Physical Assault Rape Revictimisation Self Defense Self Help Sexual Assault Survivor Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress Victims Vulnerability

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

~ Pierre Janet

Pierre Janet Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Ptss Trauma Traumatic Experiences Traumatic Stress

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

John P. Wilson Countertransgerence Humbling Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Ptsd Therapists Trauma Traumatic Traumatic Experiences World View World Views

Hundreds of men crowded the yard, and not a one among them was whole. They covered the ground thick as maggots on a week old carcass, the dirt itself hardly anywhere visible. No one could move without all feeling it and thus rising together in a hellish contortion of agony. Everywhere men moaned, shouting for water and praying for God to end their suffering. They screamed and groaned in an unending litany, calling for mothers and wives and fathers and sisters. The predominant color was blue, though nauseations of red intruded throughout. Men lay half naked, piled on top of one another in scenes to pitiful to imagine. Bloodied heads rested on shoulders and laps, broken feet upon arms. Tired hands held in torn guts and torsos twisted every which way. Dirty shirts dressed the bleeding bodies and not enough material existed in all the world to sop up the spilled blood. A boy clad in gray, perhaps the only rebel among them, lay quietly in one corner, raised arm rigid with a finger extended, as if pointing to the heavens. His face was a singular portrait of contentment among the misery. Broken bones, dirty white and soiled with the passing of hours since injury, were everywhere abundant. All manner of devices splinted the damaged and battered limbs: muskets, branches, bayonets, lengths of wood or iron from barns and carts. One individual had bone splinted with bone: the dried femur of a horse was lashed to his busted shin. A blind man, his eyes subtracted by the minié ball that had enfiladed him, moaned over and over “I’m kilt, I’m kilt! Oh Gawd, I’m kilt!” Others lay limp, in shock. These last were mostly quiet, their color unnaturally pale. It was agonizingly humid in the still air of the yard. The stink of blood mixed with human waste produced a potent and offensive odor not unlike that of a hog farm in the high heat of a South Carolina summer. Swarms of fat, green blowflies everywhere harassed the soldiers to the point of insanity, biting at their wounds. Their steady buzz was a noise straight out of hell itself, a distress to the ears.

~ Edison Mcdaniels

Edison Mcdaniels Civil War Surgery Trauma Traumatic Experiences

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the uncanny to outline the results of violence: Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination.

~ Nicole Waller

Nicole Waller Denial Derealization Disbelief Ptsd Self Doubt Trauma Memories Traumatic Experiences Traumatized Unreal