Trauma Survivors Quotes

“If your body is screaming in pain, whether the pain is muscular contractions, anxiety, depression, asthma or arthritis, a first step in releasing the pain may be making the connection between your body pain and the cause. “Beliefs are physical. A thought held long enough and repeated enough becomes a belief. The belief then becomes biology.”
― Marilyn Van M. Derbur, Miss America By Day: Lessons Learned From Ultimate Betrayals And Unconditional Love

“The damage and invisible scars of emotional abuse are very difficult to heal, because memories are imprinted on our minds and hearts and it takes time to be restored. Imprints of past traumas do not mean a person cannot change their future beliefs and behaviors. as people, we do not easily forget. However, as we heal, grieve, and let go, we become clear-minded and focused to live restore and emotionally healthy.”
― Dee Brown, Breaking Passive-Aggressive Cycles

“I have met many, many severely distressed people whose daily lives are filled with the agony of both remembered and unremembered trauma, who try so hard to heal and yet who are constantly being pushed down both by their symptoms and the oppressive circumstances of post traumatic life around them.”
― Carolyn Spring

“She had taken many more punches to both body and soul than anyone should ever have to endure. But she had been able to rebel every time.”
― Steig Larson, The Girl Who Played with Fire

“Emotional abuse is designed to undermine another's sense of self.
It is deliberate humiliation, with the intent to seize control of how others feel about themselves.”
― Lorraine Nilon, Breaking Free From the Chains of Silence: A respectful exploration into the ramifications of Paedophilic abuse

“Like revenge, the fantasy of forgiveness often becomes a cruel torture, because it remains out of reach for most ordinary human beings. Folk wisdom recognizes that to forgive is divine. And even divine forgiveness, in most religious systems, is not unconditional. True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.”
― Judith Lewis Herman

“TRAUMA STEALS YOUR VOICE

People get so tired of asking you what's wrong and you've run out of nothings to tell them.

You've tried and they've tried, but the words just turn to ashes every time they try to leave your mouth.

They start as fire in the pit of your stomach, but come out in a puff of smoke.

You are not you anymore.

And you don't know how to fix this.

The worst part is...you don't even know how to try.”
― nikitta gill

“We wage battle with our traumas each day, individually and, to a broader extent, collectively. Too often we are dragged from our sleep by inner skirmishes that invade and dominate our emotions, rile the inner snipers, and hold our bodies hostage to our histories. Often we are ambushed by an unseen enemy from within and for the untrained, unconditioned warrior, there is no safety. We hide, isolate, avoid known landmines, and shield ourselves with alcohol, other drugs, spending, raging, sex, gambling, risk taking. At least, for a moment, the terror dissolves and we can attach ourselves to a sense of safety. Even in the full knowledge that it's all temporary.”
― Louise Sutherland-Hoyt

“Time after time, the amazing fact is uncovered that sons and daughters are unconsciously re-enacting their parents fate— all the more intensely the less precise their knowledge of it.”
― Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

“I think there’s a pretty good chance that things are never going back to normal.”
― Stiles Stilinski

“We must, especially within the Church, come to terms with the reality that a person with depression doesn’t always appear sad. Mental illness can often be invisible. The one struggling might be bubbly, accomplished, and concerned about their appearance. There is this filter applied so no one can see the inner chaos that silently suffocates them under the weight of despair.”
― Julie Busler, Joyful Sorrow: Breaking Through the Darkness of Mental Illness

“Her strength is what makes her so dangerous. People like her basically make themselves be strong and neglect their insides.”
― Julie Busler, Joyful Sorrow: Breaking Through the Darkness of Mental Illness

“There was something about her playing ... a knowledge of darkness in the most extreme form.” He frowned. “But it’s quite common, isn’t it? What you tend to find in the personal lives of brilliant men is devastation akin to a nuclear bomb going off. Marriages mangled. Wives left for dead. Children growing up as deformed prisoners of war—all of them walking around with holes where their hearts should be, wondering where they belong, what side they’re fighting for. Extreme wealth, like the kind Cordova married into, only magnifies the size and scope of the fallout.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Because you don’t owe them your trauma. No one has a right to know who you are and if you don’t want them to.” -Dr. Hartfield”
― J.M. Hernandez, Fragments

“Trauma survivors who can remove themselves from a toxic environment may have a higher chance of making progress towards recovery. On the other hand, those who stuck in such an environment may find it more difficult to improve their mental health conditions.”
― Hong Wang Fung, Be A Teammate With Yourself: Understanding Trauma and Dissociation

“Some theorists argue that the fact that we get stuck in this way means that we are literally unable to experience the traumatic event as it is happening to us. We may survive and move on in our lives, but, at some level, our bodies don’t know that we are out of danger. The body, as it has been said, remembers. The body keeps score, and this is why the event returns against our will, haunting us in our dreams, intrusive thoughts, and other forms of flashbacks.”
― Karyn L. Freedman, One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery

“All too often, society is horrified with trauma survivors; their symptoms; and the burdens it places on the health care, child welfare, criminal justice, and educational systems—and insufficiently horrified by the systems of oppression that underlie so much trauma, violence, and abuse.”
― Kathryn Becker-Blease

“Love is born to lead happiness.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“Dependency on God is an absolute prerequisite for true, Spirit-filled, Spirit-led ministry, and if depression is the school in which dependency can be learned, then depression has been a gift allowed by God, for your good, your ministry, your relationship with Jesus, your joy, and God's kingdom.”
― Julie Busler

“Always and never are the absolutes that lose sight of eternity as our feelings blind our knowledge. There is a day unbeknownst to us that the imperfect will pass away as the perfect will be ushered in for all eternity. This is good news that challenges always and never. Jesus is our hope. As a Christian, whose eternity is secured through Christ, this earth is the only hell you will ever know. Your pain has an expiration date. Your mental struggles will cease to exist.”
― Julie Busler, Joyful Sorrow: Breaking Through the Darkness of Mental Illness

“She looked up to the sun. Ninety-three million miles away, it took just over eight minutes for its rays to reach the eyes. It was like seeing the past.”
― Nicole T. Smith, We Have Shadows Too

“When you can leave the past behind you, the future vividly awaits.”
― Norah Marler

“So many memories come to mind—the child you were, the adult you’ve become—so much anguish for what happened all those years ago. You never wanted to let anyone down, I know. You feel everything so intensely. Just don’t tell me that you don’t deserve better. You do. Don’t tell me you’re a failure. You’re not. We learn from every mistake. That’s not failing; it’s growing. You are a beautiful, empathetic being of love and light. And don’t say hope will damn you. It won’t always, I promise.”
― D.K. Sanz, Grateful to Be Alive: My Road to Recovery from Addiction

“I’m not going to be specific, but I had some early sexual experiences that, as I got older, were really, really difficult to deal with. It wasn’t to do with anything that happened in my family or at home, it was these… different things that happened. So my mental health had come through the negotiation of sex as a teenager and a young man, and romantic relationships.”
― Matty Healy

“You thought that you knew me so well. But if you did, you’d have known that I never turned away from my trauma. I paid attention. I took it all in. Every single detail. I owned my pain. It wasn’t separate from me. It was me. I was it. The fact that you even thought that you could hurt me, to feed on me, to use me… and believe that that was enough for me to kill you… shows just how little you understand. Every time I gave you my pain, I held back. Each and every time. I held back because I cared. You only glimpsed the tip of the iceberg. You want my pain? Take it. Take it all. Take what I have learned to live with all my life. This time I won’t hold back.”
― Lilith Fury, In the darkness we share

“Trauma tried to tell me that I was not human and that I should be excluded from humanity.”
― Carolyn Spring

“Every trait to which he objected was a spoil of a hard-won war against reality.”
― Lynn Messina, A Lark's Conceit

“All she ever had was daring and pluck.
Take them away and you were left with with one more lonely child weeping under a thin cotton blanket in an orphan asylum.”
― Lynn Messina, A Lark's Conceit

“Every trait to which he objected was a spoil of a hard-won war against reality, and if anything, that was her conceit: that Verity Lark had earned her place in the world.”
― Lynn Messina, A Lark's Conceit

“What about parents who traumatize their children and then tell them to get over it...”
― Niedria D. Kenny