Trauma Quotes

• Whose memories were merely blunted, not integrated as an event that happened in the past, and still caused considerable anxiety—those who received EMDR no longer experienced the distinct imprints of the trauma: It had become a story of a terrible event that had happened a long time ago.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Memories
  • Anxiety
  • Event

• While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Words
  • Story
  • Trauma

• It is one thing to process memories of trauma, but it is an entirely different matter to confront the inner void—the holes in the soul that result from not having been wanted, not having been seen, and not having been allowed to speak the truth.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Truth
  • Memories
  • Result

• Trauma increases the risk of misinterpreting whether a particular situation is dangerous or safe. You can get along with other people only if you can accurately gauge whether their intentions are benign or dangerous. Even a slight misreading can lead to painful misunderstandings in relationships at home and at work. Functioning effectively in a complex work environment or a household filled with rambunctious kids requires the ability to quickly assess how people are feeling and continuously adjusting your behavior accordingly. Faulty alarm systems lead to blowups or shutdowns in response to innocuous comments or facial expressions.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Relationships
  • Safe
  • Response

• The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suffering and trauma that so many in Mexico and Central America endure, and that is all around us whether we notice it or not.

  

  Francisco Goldman
  • Writing
  • Suffering
  • Victim

• Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. Most rape victims, combat soldiers, and children who have been molested become so upset when they think about what they experienced that they try to push it out of their minds, trying to act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Energy
  • Experiences
  • Soldiers

• Many of my patients have survived trauma through tremendous courage and persistence, only to get into the same kinds of trouble over and over again. Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Trouble
  • Create
  • Patients

• It is amazing how many psychological problems involve difficulties with sleep, appetite, touch, digestion, and arousal. Any effective treatment for trauma has to address these basic housekeeping functions of the body.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Problems
  • Treatment
  • Difficulties

• The essence of trauma is that it is overwhelming, unbelievable, and unbearable. Each patient demands that we suspend our sense of what is normal and accept that we are dealing with a dual reality: the reality of a relatively secure and predictable present that lives side by side with a ruinous, ever-present past.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Reality
  • Patient
  • Secure

• Comedy can be a cathartic way to deal with personal trauma.

  

  Robin Williams
  • Comedy
  • Deal
  • Cathartic

• Trauma interferes with the proper functioning of brain areas that manage and interpret experience.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Experience
  • Manage
  • Trauma

• Trauma dissociates us from the parts of our body that are wounded, so we have to leave our whole body. It's a journey you take your whole life, that coming back in, re-landing in your body, in your self, on the Earth. I think one of the reasons it's been so easy, in a way, for us to violate both women and the Earth is this profound dissociation that exists in everyone.

  

  Eve Ensler
  • Life
  • Earth
  • Journey

• A trauma can be successfully processed only if all those brain structures are kept online. In Stan’s case, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) allowed him to access his memories of the accident without being overwhelmed by them. When the brain areas whose absence is responsible for flashbacks can be kept online while remembering what has happened, people can integrate their traumatic memories as belonging to the past.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Brain
  • Memories
  • Accident

• Exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Trauma
  • Sensations
  • Exploring

• We are a hopeful species. Working with trauma is as much about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Species
  • Trauma
  • Remembering

• EMDR, in which EMDR had better long-term results than Prozac in treating depression, at least in adult onset trauma.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Depression
  • Results
  • Adult

• The trauma may be over, but it keeps being replayed in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Memories
  • Trauma
  • Nervous System

• That is my job as an intellectual, as an extension of my vocation: to engage in a serious reckoning with the present manifestation of both white supremacy, white refusal to acknowledge culpability, and the attempts of black people to re-describe the harm and trauma we've endured, as well as to say afresh what it is that must be done if we are to be conscientious.

  

  Michael Eric Dyson
  • Serious
  • Intellectual
  • Manifestation

• Trauma radically changes people: that in fact they no longer are “themselves.” It is excruciatingly difficult to put that feeling of no longer being yourself into words.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Words
  • Changes
  • Trauma

• While you need to be able to stand up for yourself, you also need to recognize that other people have their own agendas. Trauma can make all that hazy and grey.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • People
  • Yourself
  • Trauma

• Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Life
  • Trauma
  • Starts

• The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography.

  

  Bessel van der Kolk
  • Brain
  • Autobiography
  • Sensations

• You know, a lot of actors I think go into acting for therapy from whatever trauma has affected them as children. But for me, I think I sought out the drama. That's why I like doing what I do.

  

  Michael Ealy
  • Children
  • Drama
  • Acting

• Though she doesn't remember any trauma, she said that her parents told her she cried on a daily basis and her grandmother resorted to passing out candy so the kids would play with her. Though it was a humorous moment, Mila said, "I know, God bless her. She's an amazing, amazing woman."

  

  Mila Kunis
  • Kids
  • Parents
  • Play

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