Traumatic Experiences Quotes

• The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.

  Alice Miller

  Judging, Abuse, Process

  Alice Miller (1991). “Breaking down the wall of silence: the liberating experience of facing painful truth”, Penguin Press HC, The

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• You can't underestimate how traumatic divorce is for the children.

  Isla Fisher

  Children, Divorce, Underestimate

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

  Diane Arbus

  Photography, People, Tests

  Diane Arbus (1972)

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• Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.

  Diane Arbus

  People, Worry

  Diane Arbus (1972)

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• After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.

  Judith Lewis Herman

  Self, Might, Return

  Judith Lewis Herman (1997). “Trauma and Recovery”, p.35, Basic Books

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• Often, I'm spending months with a person in a very intimate context, getting to know the ins and outs of what they ate for breakfast, not to mention dredging up the most traumatic experiences of their lives, digging through their documents and photographs from difficult times, all of that. And that process, I think, can be extraordinarily strange for subjects who've never been interviewed before, especially if you don't acquaint them from the get-go with what you're trying to do, what it entails, and why you care.

  Sarah Stillman

  Thinking, Trying, Digging

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• My dad took me to my first movie. It was 'The Greatest Show on Earth' in 1952, a movie of such scale it was actually a traumatic experience.

  Steven Spielberg

  Dad, Earth, Firsts

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• When I grew up in Ireland in the seventies there was no such thing as therapy...I mean we didn't even have cappuccinos until 1998! So for me music was therapy, it was also the place where one could speak about himself, where he was allowed to speak about his traumatic experiences.

  Sinead O'Connor

  Mean, Speak, Grew Up

  Source: www.stateofmind.it

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• I think there's a huge - there's a huge desire in me to make sense of the world in a way that I think you can trace back to that early disruption, this idea of wanting to compensate for that really kind of traumatic experience and sort of seeing its impact on my immediate and extended family.

  Khoi Vinh

  Thinking, Ideas, Impact

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. March 3, 2010.

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• Symptoms like anxiety, depression, aggression, alcohol or drug use, are responses to physical and emotional pain that has its roots in traumatic experiences from childhood and later in life.

  Jed Diamond

  Pain, Emotional, Roots

  Source: www.psychologytoday.com

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• Over a period of 11 months I was constantly afraid that Youth Care would lock me up. It was all a frightening and traumatic experience. So often these terrible memories come to me. I can't ignore them.

  Laura Dekker

  Memories, Locks, Care

  "Laura Dekker: a heroine for our times" by Emine Saner, www.theguardian.com. January 23, 2012.

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• I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience.

  Lynne Tillman

  Believe, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I went back to a small town in Poland where my dad grew up. It was a very traumatic experience for me as a young man to know that my father's family were killed by Nazis, killed by Hitler. And that left, you know, if not intellectually, at least an emotional part of me which said, God, we have got to do everything we can to end this kind of horrific racism or anti-Semitism. And I have spent much of my life trying to fight that.

  Bernie Sanders

  Dad, Father, Fighting

  Source: www.npr.org

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• It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.

  Jeffrey Eugenides

  Moving, Forever, Lines

  Jeffrey Eugenides (2003). “Middlesex”, p.424, A&C Black

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• I don’t care what people think…I learned a long time ago…I was 19 and had a very traumatic experience….and I learned that I have to go to bed with myself at night and that I have to please myself…and as long as I don’t go out of my way to offend anybody that I love, upset my mother or my husband…I’ll do my own thing. And if the public doesn’t like it, it’s their problem, not mine.

  Iris Apfel

  Mother, Husband, Night

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• Unless you've also had some experience dragging around a boat trailer, [topping off the gas tank] may not sound important. But trailer driver's know: a gas stop can be a traumatic experience. You need enough clearance on every possible side. You can't cut the turn too sharp or you'll clip the gas pump. Getting back on the freeway can be as challenging as sending a man to the moon.

  Brad Alan Lewis

  Cutting, Moon, Men

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• Americans did not acquire their fear neurosis as the result of a traumatic experience - war devasting their country, pestilence sweeping the land, famine wiping out helpless millions. Americans had to be taught to hate and fear an unseen enemy. The teachers were men in official positions, in government, men whom Americans normally trust without question.

  Martha Gellhorn

  Country, Teacher, Fear

  Martha Gellhorn (2015). “The View From The Ground”, p.154, Granta Books

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• Growing up in a violent home is a terrifying and traumatic experience that can affect every aspect of a child's life, growth, and development.

  Lucille Roybal-Allard

  Growing Up, Children, Home

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• I say that our system of tests and grades, as it now exists, is one source of the low yield of great men from our universities. The marking system is a traumatic experience from which most students emerge with a deep determination never to get into a situation where they can be marked again. They just won't ever again take a chance.

  Edwin Land

  Education, Determination, Men

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• To have your heart in pieces while every other aspect of your life couldn't go better is a traumatic experience. In appearance, life is fine. But as you put your day in focus, everything turns grey. What happened made me realise that complete, absolute happiness doesn't exist.

  Matthew Bellamy

  Heart, Focus, Pieces

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• What first caught my eye about Rihanna was an interview she did with Diane Sawyer after the Chris Brown incident, where she was very articulate, very poised, obviously a smart girl who talked about a very traumatic experience.

  Peter Berg

  Girl, Smart, Eye

  "Why Did You Cast A Massive Music Superstar In What Amounts To A Run-And-Gun Supporting Role?" by Tambay A. Obenson, www.indiewire.com. May 17, 2012.

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• Some form of gnosis or immediacy is attached to all thinking as its root-form or primitive origination; every act of thinking has this passive derivation, this coming-into-being of thinking not out of nothing (as it likes to imagine) but out of some unthinkable something. But the most self-abstractivist or self-reductivist kind of thinking cannot tolerate even the notion (much less the traumatic experience or confrontation) of an incurable pathos, a weakness or blind-spot, within consciousness. The very idea is an insult to the autonomy or self-determinability of ego/will/reason.

  Kenny Smith

  Philosophy, Thinking, Ideas

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• Comedians don't have a monopoly on suffering. But creative people are sometimes fortunate enough to be able to incorporate their most traumatic experiences into their art.

  Matt Lucas

  Art, People, Creative

  "This much I know" by Stuart Husband, www.theguardian.com. June 27, 2009.

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