Quotes about Being Wounded

THERE IS NO WEAPON
MORE DANGEROUS
THAN A WOUND

The meaning of the word "trauma," in its Greek origin is "wound." Whether we realize it or not, it is out woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs out ways of thinking about the world. It can even determine whether or not we are capable or rational thought at all in matters of the greatest importance to our lives. (p29)

If you look at the origin of the word ‘trauma’, it’s simply the Greek word for wounding. Trauma is a wound. You can think of a wound in two ways. One is that it doesn’t heal, and every time you touch it, it really hurts. Or it’s a wound that’s healed, leaving scar tissue... Trauma is a process, a part of your life, and therefore you have agency, you can do something about it... The word for healing comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for wholeness, and the essential nature of trauma is that it’s a loss of wholeness...

We define ‘trauma’ as an event outside the normal human veins of experience. At least one-third of couples, globally, engage in physical violence. The number of kids who get abused and abandoned is just staggering. Domestic violence, staggering. Rapes, staggering. Psychiatry is completely out to lunch and just doesn’t see this.

When shame has been pumping through a heart, over time the heart itself grows toxic. When we are wounded, we leak toxic waste, and that waste poisons us and the people around us — even when we are completely unaware of it — just like I did with Joanna. The reality is: • Hurt people hurt people. • Broken people break people. • Shattered people shatter people. • Damaged people damage people. • Wounded people wound people. • Bound people bind people.

I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.

What is trauma? As I use the word, "trauma" is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves. "Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you" is how I formulate it. (p33)

"A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from his new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man's hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence - the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown.

("An Episode Of War")"

When he is wounded, I bleed. {page 262 of John Adams}

There is no weapon more dangerous than a wound.

Do you know what it feels like to be wounded
and told that you caused the
wound to yourself by choosing to be
where
the harm landed?

There is no pleasure to be had in writing about trauma. It requires opening a wound, looking into the bloody gape of it, and cleaning it out, one word at a time. Only then might it be possible for that wound to heal.

A bruise to the ego hurts more than a break to the bone.

What hurts us is what heals us

Getting hurt helps you grow stronger and more mature emotionally, so that you can handle life and love and relationships better.