41 Quotes Tagged: trauma

Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.

Trauma isn’t going to win today. Remember how Daphne turned into the laurel tree? This is what you must do too. Form your own roots, feed from the earth that still loves you. Remember how.

Because if you think someone is a monster and the whole world says he’s a saint, you begin to think that you’re the bad person. It must be my fault this is happening is the only conclusion you can draw, because why are you the only one receiving his wrath?

Some things on this earth are unspeakable:
Genealogy of the broken — A shy wind threading leaves after a massacre,
Or the smell of coffee and no one there —

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

When you go through the moments where you are questioning yourself whether or not it was abuse, remember the way it made you feel. Push away the nostalgia that is trying to minimize it, trying to trick you like a bad magician at a children’s party that the rabbit did come from the hat, that love and abuse come from the same hat.

O what will she do, a soul bitten into with wrong?

There is a shock that comes so quickly and strikes so deep that the blow is internalized even before then skin feels it. The strike must first reach bone marrow, then ascend slowly to the brain where the slowpoke intellect records the deed.

I had many things to say, I did not have the words to say them. Painfully aware of my limitations, I watched helplessly and language became an obstacle. It became clear that it would be necessary to invent a new language... I would pause at every sentence, and start over and over again. I would conjure up other verbs, other images, other silent cries. It still was not right. But what exactly was “it”? “It” was something elusive, darkly shrouded for fear of being usurped, profaned. All the dictionary had to offer seemed meager, pale, lifeless.

He’d heard once that the only people who could effectively treat the trauma of surviving an airplane crash were other survivors of airplane crashes. You could only instinctively trust someone who had been there, who had seen it firsthand.

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Years ago, I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no flashbacks. I wouldn't wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn't smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn't come, and I am no longer waiting for it.

A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don't always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses.

All of the diagnoses that you deal with - depression, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar illness, post traumatic stress disorder, even psychosis, are significantly rooted in trauma. They are manifestations of trauma. Therefore the diagnoses don't explain anything. The problem in the medical world is that we diagnose somebody and we think that is the explanation. He's behaving that way because he is psychotic. She's behaving that way because she has ADHD. Nobody has ADHD, nobody has psychosis - these are processes within the individual. It's not a thing that you have. This is a process that expresses your life experience. It has meaning in every single case.

"A few months and many deaths ago, I asked someone "how are you doing" and felt, in the way her eye fell, how I had failed her before I had even reached the end of my question. I've hurt many people but it's the unintended wounds I claim now as children."

I’m stacking days, building a house of cards made from nothing but days. Monday is the Ace of Hearts. Saturday is the Four of Spades. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. Thursday night is, I suspect, the Seven of Diamonds, and it might be heavy enough to bring the whole precarious thing tumbling down around my ears. I would spend an entire hour watching cards fall, because time would stretch, the same way it stretches out to fill in awkward pauses, the way it stretched thin in that thundering moment of a car crash. Or at the edges of a wound.