Whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Gorgon or a vehicle for soaring to the heights of transformation and mastery depends upon how we approach it.
Peter A. LevineRead
The effects of unresolved trauma can be devastating. It can affect our habits and outlook on life, leading to addictions and poor decision-making. It can take a toll on our family life and interpersonal relationships. It can trigger real physical pain, symptoms, and disease. And it can lead to a range of self-destructive behaviors.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Unresolved trauma can severely impact various aspects of a person's life, leading to negative behaviors and relationships.
This quote by Peter A. Levine emphasizes the profound and often hidden effects of unresolved trauma on an individual's mental and physical health. It suggests that trauma does not only linger in the mind but can also manifest through addiction, poor decision-making, strained relationships, and even physical ailments, underscoring the importance of addressing trauma for overall well-being.
Themes
TraumaHealingRelationshipsAddictionDecision-MakingMental Health
In practice
Example use cases
In a mental health awareness seminar, this quote can highlight the importance of addressing trauma.
More from Peter A. Levine
All quotes →We may forget, or be unaware of, how prevalent it is to be sexually traumatized by events that are generally not thought of as traumatizing.
Peter A. LevineRead
If frightening sensations are not given the time and attention they need to move through the body and resolve or dissolve, the individual will continue to be gripped by fear.
Peter A. LevineRead
The paradox of trauma is that it has both the power to destroy and the power to transform and resurrect.
Peter A. LevineRead
When people have been traumatized, they are stuck in paralysis-the immobility reaction or abrupt explosions of rage.
Peter A. LevineRead
Similar quotes
I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.
Philip K. DickRead
My mother struggled immensely with mental illness, and so did I. She grew up bipolar, but it was never diagnosed nor recognized. It was shrugged off like a 'symptom' of being female - of her being weak. I also experienced this growing up: I felt that the great pain I experienced was a dramatisation.
Petra CollinsRead
Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
Elizabeth WurtzelRead
Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Pain or not, I would most likely walk around in a suicidal reverie the rest of my life, never actually doing anything about it. Was there a psychological term for that? Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it? Couldn't talk and thoughts of suicide be considered a whole malady of their own, a special subcategory of depression in which the loss of a will to live has not quite been displaced by a determination to die?
Elizabeth WurtzelRead
That's one of the peculiar things about bad moods - we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true.
David D. BurnsRead