Traumatization Quotes

“Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Attitude Is Everything

We live in a culture that is blind to betrayal and intolerant of emotional pain. In New Age crowds here on the West Coast, where your attitude is considered the sole determinant of the impact an event has on you, it gets even worse.In these New Thought circles, no matter what happens to you, it is assumed that you have created your own reality. Not only have you chosen the event, no matter how horrible, for your personal growth. You also chose how you interpret what happened—as if there are no interpersonal facts, only interpretations.

The upshot of this perspective is that your suffering would vanish if only you adopted a more evolved perspective and stopped feeling aggrieved. I was often kindly reminded (and believed it myself), “there are no victims.” How can you be a victim when you are responsible for your circumstances?

When you most need validation and support to get through the worst pain of your life, to be confronted with the well-meaning, but quasi-religious fervor of these insidious half-truths can be deeply demoralizing. This kind of advice feeds guilt and shame, inhibits grieving, encourages grandiosity and can drive you to be alone to shield your vulnerability.”
― Sandra Lee Dennis

“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.”
― Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

“The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Survivors are damaged to different degrees by their experiences. This does not depend on what happened physically. A Survivor who has been raped will not necessarily be more damaged than a Survivor who has been touched. The degree of damage depend on the degree of traumatic sexualization, stigmatization, betrayal and powerlessness, the child has experienced. This in turn depends on a number of factors such as:
* who the abuser was;
* how many abusers were involved;
* if the abuser was same-sex or opposite sex;
* what took place;
* what was said;
* how long the abuse went on for;
* How the child felt and how she interpreted what was happening;
* if the child was otherwise happy and supported;
* how other people reacted to the disclosure or discovery of the abuse;
* how old the child was”
― Carolyn Ainscough, Breaking Free: Help for survivors of child sexual abuse

“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

“I would like to turn in my skin and change it for a new epidermis. It feels as if I will never be able to rinse the sadness from my soul. All the while I am cognizant of the fact that I am trying to purge myself of my feelings. I start with my shell.
I am in the water at least an hour. I immerse my head. My long, thick mane is so heavy, but I feel the lightness of my hair as it floats. I can hear my heart beating in my ears. I wonder what would happen if I died in this water. I drain the bathtub and refill it. I scrub my skin until it stings. I still don't feel clean. I close my eyes.
I switch to lying on my back. I gaze at the heavens through the skylight on the ceiling above the tub. I am thinking about Isabella. I am struck by the feeling of uncleanness that I have been immersed in that day. I would imagine that this child feels unclean always, in body and in mind. I am hoping that the sheets in her foster home are snow white and fragrant. I am hoping that she felt safe. I am worried that she is so deeply alone and frightened. I know somewhere deep inside of me that the decisions and choices I made today were sound. I am praying, with eyes glued to the stars, that I will not awaken in the night with my heart beating out of my chest; that I will not be haunted by Francis's diseased body; that I will not perseverate on ever nuance of my day - the smells, the cockroaches, the piercing torment of Isabella's unseeing eye, her father's sore-ridden penis penetrating her tiny body. Yet in many ways this is an experience I hope never to forget. The pearls. I must not forget the pearls that I have promised her.”
― Holly A. Smith, Fire of the Five Hearts

“Children who are resilient often have an appearance of a Teflon coating: nothing seems to faze these children.”
― Asa Don Brown, The Effects of Childhood Trauma on Adult Perception and Worldview

“I am inundated with feeling. I feel like a pinball machine on tilt. All the buzzers are ringing, lights are flashing, and I am about to fry my circuits. Nothing is coming in,and nothing is going out. I feel electrified. The wires ignited, sparked, and fizzled. I want it all to slow down. I go right to the water to douse my flame. I immerse myself in the hot water. I want to wash the smells off my body. I can smell Isabella's hair, her breath, and her child vaginal scent. My hair smells of smoke,and I want to wash Francis off me.”
― Holly A. Smith, Fire of the Five Hearts

“It registers that I am sitting there topless, but this body I am in doesn't feel like mine anymore so the half-nakedness seems irrelevant, like a rumor, something I'm supposed to care about but don't.”
― Lauren Miller, All Things New

“I was born into the horror of your words.”
― Laura Gentile, Daughterbody I: a self-exorcism through poetry

“Trauma can be defined in terms of the relationship you establish with an event.
Becoming traumatized depends on how your system responds to the way you perceive, interpret, and interact with the events you experience as overwhelming/shocking/threatening.
Trauma is not the event itself!”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Being emotionally hurt is frequent but long-lasting damage from being emotionally hurt is not.
Being traumatized is not necessarily the result of emotional hurt.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Traumatization is the dreadful period where the individual’s system tries to overcome risk or adversity to safeguard its continuous operation.
In other words, it's the struggle for survival.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Trauma can be defined in terms of the relationship you establish with what happened to you.
It involves the way you integrate the experience into your life story, the beliefs you hold about yourself and the world, and the internal dynamics you develop in response to the circumstances.
Happiness could be defined exactly the same way!”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Trauma is phenomena that refers to the effects of the activation of the innate survival circuits designed to protect the individual from the possibility of dying after a severe reaction to a threatening occurrence.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“A trauma disorder unfolds from the severe stress that crushes one’s hopes, defined by an extremeness that goes beyond tolerable.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“To comprehend 'trauma,' one must differentiate the origin of distress, identify the internal and external factors that influenced the system during the struggle for survival, and assess the extent of the consequences.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Each one of us is truly distinct, with unique and subjective experiences. This subjectivity plays a crucial role in traumatization. People can have different reactions to the same occurrence, with one person finding an event devastating while another might consider it uneventful.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Trauma may be a new subject in psychology, but its repercussions are centuries old.
As society becomes more aware of its impact, we must actively take responsibility and make profound changes in the way we think, treat, and mitigate the consequences of psychological struggles.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“The greatest misunderstanding that we confront every day in the mental health arena is thinking all emotional wounds are trauma.
The greatest risk we face is not knowing that we can play an active role in our healing no matter the size of the wound.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Trauma is not an artificial concept. Trauma is a very real and complex psychological and physiological phenomena studied and understood within the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and related disciplines, and it is recognized as a significant aspect of human experience.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“The stories we tell ourselves inform our emotional responses, and they can actually become mental realities.
Trauma centrality builds up our stories around unfortunate occurrences. Trauma may become our mental reality until we rewrite it, making it less prominent”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Anything, be it an action, event, or circumstance, is considered traumatic if it has the potential to jeopardize one's life or physical, mental, and social well-being. This assessment relies on the subjectivity of each individual.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Being traumatized means operating under a new program, a maladaptive one that keeps the body anticipating danger in a very subjective way, malfunctioning, with a lack of internal equilibrium, and focused on survival.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Traumatization can be prevented early in the process, or resolved at any point during the struggle if the one encountering or experiencing the traumatic event intervenes and regains confidence.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Traumatization can be prevented early in the process or resolved at any point during the struggle if the individual encountering or experiencing the traumatic event intervenes and regains confidence in surviving or feeling safe.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Fear may be more hurtful than the wounds inflicted by the very things you fear, as it shapes your responses, perpetuating the internal struggle to survive a perhaps fictitious enemy.”
― Antonieta Contreras, Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders

“Numerous individuals who are traumatized are unaware of it, while others who claim to be traumatized may not actually be.”
― Antonieta Contreras