Traumatic Stress Quotes

“PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.”
― Susan Pease Banitt

“When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
― Alexander Den Heijer

“Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”
― Peter A. Levine

“First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“In situations of captivity the perpetrator becomes the most powerful person in the life of the victim, and the psychology of the victim is shaped by the actions and beliefs of the perpetrator.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Unlike simple stress, trauma changes your view of your life and yourself. It shatters your most basic assumptions about yourself and your world — “Life is good,” “I’m safe,” “People are kind,” “I can trust others,” “The future is likely to be good” — and replaces them with feelings like “The world is dangerous,” “I can’t win,” “I can’t trust other people,” or “There’s no hope.”
― Mark Goulston MD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder For Dummies

“Eighty two percent of the traumatized children seen in the National Child Traumatic Stress Network do not meet diagnostic criteria for PTSD.15 Because they often are shut down, suspicious, or aggressive they now receive pseudoscientific diagnoses such as “oppositional defiant disorder,” meaning “This kid hates my guts and won’t do anything I tell him to do,” or “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” meaning he has temper tantrums. Having as many problems as they do, these kids accumulate numerous diagnoses over time. Before they reach their twenties, many patients have been given four, five, six, or more of these impressive but meaningless labels. If they receive treatment at all, they get whatever is being promulgated as the method of management du jour: medications, behavioral modification, or exposure therapy. These rarely work and often cause more damage.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Being in a state of denial is a
universally human response to
situations which threaten to
overwhelm. People who were abused
as children sometimes carry their
denial like precious cargo without a
port of destination. It enabled us to
survive our childhood experiences, and often we still live in survival mode decades beyond the actual abuse. We protect ourselves to excess because we learned abruptly and painfully that no one else would.”
― Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Dr. Peter Levine, who has worked with trauma survivors for twenty-five years, says the single most important factor he has learned in uncovering the mystery of human trauma is what happens during and after the freezing response. He describes an impala being chased by a cheetah. The second the cheetah pounces on the young impala, the animal goes limp. The impala isn’t playing dead, she has “instinctively entered an altered state of consciousness, shared by all mammals when death appears imminent.” (Levine and Frederick, Waking the Tiger, p. 16) The impala becomes instantly immobile. However, if the impala escapes, what she does immediately thereafter is vitally important. She shakes and quivers every part of her body, clearing the traumatic energy she has accumulated.”
― Marilyn Van M. Derbur, Miss America By Day: Lessons Learned From Ultimate Betrayals And Unconditional Love

“When you go through a traumatic event, there's a lot of shame that comes with that. A lot of loss of self-esteem. That can become debilitating.”
― Willie Aames

“Complexly traumatized children need to be helped to engage their attention in pursuits that do not remind them of trauma-related triggers and that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery. Safety, predictability, and "fun" are essential for the establishment of the capacity to observe what is going on, put it into a larger context, and initiate physiological and motoric self-regulation.”
― Sarah Benamer, Trauma and Attachment

“Trauma is any stressor that occurs in a sudden and forceful way and is experienced as overwhelming.”
― Stephanie S. Covington

“It was difficult to find information because Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was called shell shock during W.W.II, and when Vietnam Vets were found to suffer from the same symptoms after exposure to traumatic war scenes, a study was embarked upon that ended with the new, more appropriate name in 1980. Thomas was diagnosed with P.T.S.D. shortly afterwards, before the term P.T.S.D. was common.”
― Sara Niles

“To feel understood is the one pain medicine that soothes the deepest wounds. Sitting eye to eye, heart to heart, with someone who gets your pain is worth one thousand hours of therapy. We need at least one person to understand us.”
― Shauna L Hoey

“Most people show compassion in the early weeks after a traumatic event, but their support fades. Grief is a process that takes longer than I would like—weeks, month, years. Don’t assume I am okay.”
― Shauna L Hoey

“The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I've told myself. But now increasingly I don't tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won't make me any more inconsolable. Or less.”
― Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“Memory has ambushed her again, slamming down a wall between her and the present moment. Sometimes it comes in order, like a story, sometimes in flashes, like a series of snapshots. Sometimes it comes in a split second, cutting through the middle of another thought. It grabs her and won't let her pay attention to what is being said around her. Other times it just settles softly down on her like a pillow, cutting off air.”
― Meredith Miller

“In important ways, an experience does not really exist until it can be named and placed into larger categories.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Researchers’ understanding of [Dissociative Disorders] has been augmented by developments in investigative tools and strategies but also by a willingness of mainstream researchers to acknowledge the importance of traumatic dissociation in psychiatry and to investigate the possible effects and outcomes in patients who present for treatment.”
― Julie P. Gentile

“Because if I am living an honest life, and my eyes are open, and I'm trying my hardest to be good and kind, then anything I'm doing is fine to tell people.”
― Penelope Trunk (Journalist)

“Sometimes a stare comes from too much anxiety or stress. Your system can become overwhelmed." I didn't know it then. but parts inside were scared because he was looking at us so closely. He's getting too close. He's going to find out about us. I didn't make the effort to try to catch any of these thoughts.”
― Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“It is the integrative synergy of the arts, based on cultural traditions and current trauma-informed practice, that is requisite to addressing traumatic stress with most children, adults, families, groups, and communities.”
― Cathy A. Malchiodi, Trauma and Expressive Arts Therapy: Brain, Body, and Imagination in the Healing Process

“[T]he study of trauma has become the soul of psychiatry: The development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a diagnosis has created an organized framework for understanding how people’s biology, conceptions of the world, and personalities are inextricably intertwined and shaped by experience. The PTSD diagnosis has reintroduced the notion that many “neurotic" symptoms are not the
results of some mysterious, well-nigh inexplicable, genetically based irrationality, but of people’s inability to come to terms with real experiences that have overwhelmed their capacity to cope.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Essentially, the introduction of the PTSD diagnosis has opened a door to the scientific investigation of the nature of human suffering. Although much of human art and religion has always focused on expressing and understanding man’s afflictions, science has paid scant attention to suffering as an object of study. Hitherto, science has generally categorized people’s problems as discrete psychological or biological disorders — diseases without context, largely independent of the personal histories of the patients, their temperaments, or their environments. PTSD, then, serves as a model for correcting the decontextualized aspects of today’s psychiatric nomenclature. It refocuses attention back on the living person instead of our overly concrete definitions of
mental “disorders” as “things” in and of themselves, bringing us back to people’s own experiences and the meaning which they assign to it.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Essentially, the introduction of the PTSD diagnosis has opened a door to the scientific investigation of the nature of human suffering. Although much of human art and religion has always focused on expressing and understanding man’s afflictions, science has paid scant attention to suffering as an object of study. Hitherto, science has generally categorized people’s problems as discrete psychological or biological disorders — diseases without context, largely independent of the personal histories of the patients, their temperaments, or their environments. PTSD, then, serves as a model for correcting the decontextualized aspects of today’s psychiatric nomenclature. It refocuses attention back on the living person instead of our overly concrete definitions of mental “disorders” as “things” in and of themselves, bringing us back to people’s own experiences and the meaning which they assign to it.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Posttraumatic stress fundamentally challenges the notion that time can heal all wounds.”
― David A. Treleaven, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing

“It is what it is.

Everything happens for a reason, and there is a reason they happen when they happen and why.”
― Linda McClure, Battles of The Mind: A Memoir

“unhealed trauma will make you think every lover you meet is up to something”
― Winnie Nantongo, Dining with the Enemy

“Why is there a perseveration on gender instead of expanding inquiry and addressing all dimensions of a being in distress? Why are we enabling kids to possibly run from something such as past trauma or encouraging distraction from emotional pain by quickly writing a prescription for puberty blockers or a cross-sex hormone on the first or second visit to a clinic?”
― Lisa Shultz, The Trans Train: A Parent's Perspective on Transgender Medicalization and Ideology