Accept that all of us can be hurt, that all of us can — and surely will at times — fail. Other vulnerabilities, like being embarrassed or risking love, can be terrifying, too. I think we should follow a simple rule: if we can take the worst, take the risk.

Trauma makes us thin-skinned, overly sensitive, hypervigilant, and prone to pain. And it’s often all-encompassing, too, so our attention is focused on the pain and on desperately trying to avoid more of it.

What we desire makes us vulnerable.

When we’re willing to face, process and heal from our trauma, we often reveal the hidden gifts and learnings concealed within the darkness. When we avoid trauma, we relive it continuously.

We came to the realization that what traumatizes us is not an individual experience of exposure to one violent act: it is living in environments that deny you your basic dignity.

What hurts us worst is to have our favorite self-deceptions stripped away.

The damage suffered by people I know and love is almost always based on the trauma of the only elder they had treating them badly or being interested only in their silence. And what you’re left with, by the grace of God and some miracle, is this inner self. Our experiences are painful and sometimes annihilating, and if we have the strength to crawl out of and excavate that wreckage, we have to ask ourselves how to describe the truth of it.

to be the person who we long to be — we must again be vulnerable. We must take off the armor, put down the weapons, show up, and let ourselves be seen.

There is a strong element of shame in Trauma that makes thinking and behavior so inflexible. The person cannot accept adjustment, an altering of their self-concept; they won’t bear it and they won’t live with it. And if their group, clique, family, community, religion, or country also doesn’t support self-criticism, they ultimately can’t live with it.

Girls who survive trauma do wear a certain vulnerability around them, but this kind of vulnerability is from where their greatest strength stems.

Trauma when left untreated has the capacity to make a villain out of you.

Your trauma creates you.

Healing both requires and implies regaining the vulnerability that made us shut down emotionally in the first place. We are no longer helplessly dependent children; we no longer need fear emotional vulnerability. We can permit ourselves to honour the universally reciprocal human need for connection and to challenge the ingrained belief that unconsciously burdens so many people with chronic illness: that we are not lovable. Seeking connections is a necessity for healing. (p279)

It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.