Quotes on Trauma

Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.

Delusional pain hurts just as much as pain from actual trauma. So what if it's all in your head?

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.

If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped - unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.

Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.

Children are coming to school with trauma, everyday trauma, that they live under: violence in the homes, alcoholism in the community, unemployment thats 80 percent, not just during the recession. We need to help treat that before they can even go sit in a class and learn about math.

There's the hypothesis that things just keep happening to Russians, things that keep turning them into the same kind of subjects, as opposed to citizens. The more credible hypothesis, I think, is that there is a kind of trauma, a social trauma that is passed on from generation to generation.

My personal history, along with the history of many black people in this country, is rife with trauma born out of anti-black policies aided and facilitated by presidents and their administrations.

The trauma of the Sixties persuaded me that my generation's egalitarianism was a sentimental error. I now see the hierarchical as both beautiful and necessary. Efficiency liberates; egalitarianism tangles, delays, blocks, deadens.

A sound-bite culture can't discuss science very well. Exactly what we're losing when we reduce biodiversity, the causes and consequences of global warming-these traumas can't be adequately summarized in an evening news wrap-up.

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.

For whatever trauma came with service in tough circumstances, we should take what we learned - take our post-traumatic growth - and, like past generations coming home, bring our sharpened strengths to bear, bring our attitude of gratitude to bear.

One of the things that pains me is we have so tragically underestimated the trauma, the hardship we create in this country when we treat people unfairly, when we incarcerate them unfairly, when we condemn them unfairly.

In this time of globalization, with all its advantages, the poor are the most vulnerable to having their traditions, relationships and knowledge and skills ignored and denigrated, and experiencing development with a great sense of trauma, loss and social disconnectedness.

The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

We are kept from the experience of Spirit because our inner world is cluttered with past traumas . . . As we begin to clear away this clutter, the energy of divine light and love begins to flow through our being.

No experience is a cause of success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences, so-called trauma - but we make out of them just what suits our purposes.

At least I've had to come to that in my life, to realize that this stuff called failure, this stuff, this debris of historical trauma, family trauma, you know, stuff that can kill your spirit, is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge. You can use those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you.

When tragedy strikes, no one is fully prepared to deal effectively with all the responsibilitie s, emotional trauma, and grief that begin to impact people. Our Rapid Response Team exists so that people can find the care and comfort of Jesus Christ in the midst of tragedy.

Trauma is not the sole province of victims. If that were true, soldiers returning from Afghanistan wouldn't suffer from PTSD.

We cannot have a world where everyone is a victim. "I'm this way because my father made me this way. I'm this way because my husband made me this way." Yes, we are indeed formed by traumas that happen to us. But you must take charge, you must take over, you are responsible.