Trauma Quotes

• 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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• 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.

  Thomas Keating

  Past, Love Is, Light

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• Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.

  Cherrie Moraga

  Break Through, Way, Kind

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• Someone who has experienced trauma also has gifts to offer all of us - in their depth, their knowledge of our universal vulnerability, and their experience of the power of compassion.

  Sharon Salzberg

  Compassion, Depth, Offers

  "There Is Always Trauma In The Room" by Sharon Salzberg, www.huffingtonpost.com. September 18, 2009.

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• There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

  Laurell K. Hamilton

  Sad, Depression, Pain

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• The second noble truth states that we must discover why we are suffering. We must cultivate the courage to look deeply, with clarity and courage, into our own suffering. We often hold the tacit assumption that all of our suffering stems from events in the past. But, whatever the initial seed of trauma, the deeper truth is that our suffering is more closely a result of how we deal with the effect these past events have on us in the present.

  Peter A. Levine

  Past, Suffering, Looks

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

  Judith Lewis Herman

  Events, Denial, Conflict

  "Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror". Book by Judith Lewis Herman, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 11, 1992.

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• Part of what makes a situation traumatic is not talking about it. Talking reduces trauma symptoms. When we don't talk about trauma, we remain emotionally illiterate. Our most powerful feelings go unnamed and unspoken.

  Tian Dayton

  Powerful, Talking, Silence

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• No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries.

  Leslie Jamison

  Life, Boundaries, Discrete

  Leslie Jamison (2014). “The Empathy Exams: Essays”, p.9, Granta Books

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• This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

  Lynda Barry

  Children, Believe, Resilience

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• One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.

  Jodi Picoult

  Loss, Innocence, Disillusionment

  Jodi Picoult (2013). “Nineteen Minutes: A Novel”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

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• Trauma really does confront you with the best and the worst. You see the horrendous things that people do to each other, but you also see resiliency, the power of love, the power of caring, the power of commitment, the power of commitment to oneself, the knowledge that there are things that are larger than our individual survival. And in some ways, I don't think you can appreciate the glory of life unless you also know the dark side of life

  Bessel van der Kolk

  Commitment, Dark, Caring

  "How Trauma Lodges in the Body". "On Being" with Krista Tippett, onbeing.org. March 9, 2017.

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• Letting go is not the same as aversion, struggling to get rid of something. We cannot genuinely let go of what we resist. What we resist and fear secretly follows us even as we push it away. To let go of fear or trauma, we need to acknowledge just how it is. We need to feel it fully and accept that it is so. It is as it is. Letting go begins with letting be.

  Jack Kornfield

  Letting Go, Struggle, Needs

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• The willingness to face traumas - be they large, small, primitive or fresh - is the key to healing from them. They may never disappear in the way we think they should, but maybe they don’t need to. Trauma is an ineradicable aspect of life. We are human as a result of it, not in spite of it.

  Mark Epstein

  Healing, Thinking, Keys

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• This is a dark time, filled with suffering and uncertainty. Like living cells in a larger body, it is natural that we feel the trauma of our world. So don’t be afraid of the anguish you feel, or the anger or fear, because these responses arise from the depth of your caring and the truth of your interconnectedness with all beings.

  Joanna Macy

  Nature, Fear, Anger

  Joanna Macy, Norbert Gahbler (2006). “Pass it On: Five Stories That Can Change the World”, p.105, Parallax Press

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• You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.

  Andrew Solomon

  Motivational, Hurt, Self

  "How the worst moments in our lives make us who we are". TED Talk, www.ted.com. March 2014.

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• Don’t despair if your heart has been through a lot of trauma. Sometimes that’s how beautiful hearts are remade: they are shattered first.

  Yasmin Mogahed

  Beautiful, Heart, Despair

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• I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening - a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.

  Peter A. Levine

  Dream, Spiritual, Believe

  "Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body". Book by Peter A. Levine, 2005.

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• 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.

  Denise Juneau

  Children, Home, School

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• Trauma never goes away completely, it changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away.

  Mark Epstein

  Pain, Grief, Suffering

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• 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. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterwards.

  Jessica Stern

  People, Anxiety, Doe

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• Most of us have unhealthy thoughts and emotions that have either developed as a result of trauma or hardships in their childhood, or the way they were raised.

  Steven Seagal

  Childhood, Hardship, Way

  PBS Interview, www.pbs.org.

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• 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.

  Alfred Adler

  Success, Congratulations, Failure

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• We're hallucinating. And that's what this world is: a mass hallucination, where fear seems more real than love. Fear is an illusion. Our craziness, paranoia, anxiety and trauma are literally all imagined.

  Marianne Williamson

  Real, Anxiety, World

  Marianne Williamson (2009). “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles”, p.23, Harper Collins

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• A ghost is a human being who has passed out of the physical body, usually in a traumatic state and is not aware usually of his true condition. We are all spirits encased in a physical body. At the time of passing, our spirit body continues into the next dimension. A ghost, on the other hand, due to trauma, is stuck in our physical world and needs to be released to go on.

  Hans Holzer

  Hands, Goes On, World

  48 Copy quote