Quotes & Sayings About Recovery From Loss

This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that? — Susanna Kaysen

Family secrets can go back for generations. They can be about suicides, homicides, incest, abortions, addictions, public loss of face, financial disaster, etc. All the secrets get acted out. This is the power of toxic shame. The pain and suffering of shame generate automatic and unconscious defenses. Freud called these defenses by various names: denial, idealization of parents, repression of emotions and dissociation from emotions. What is important to note is that we can't know what we don't know. Denial, idealization, repression and dissociation are unconscious survival mechanisms. Because they are unconscious, we lose touch with the shame, hurt and pain they cover up. We cannot heal what we cannot feel. So without recovery, our toxic shame gets carried for generations. — John Bradshaw

He'd been in surgery for-like-ever, then in recovery, but they put him in a room because, despite the amount of blood loss, his wounds were no longer life threatening. "You here to get in my pants?" he asked.
"You're not wearing any pants," I reminded him. "You're wearing a girly gown with a built-in ass ventilator. — Darynda Jones

Pause and remember - Every single event in your life, especially the difficult lessons, have made you smarter, stronger, and wiser than you were yesterday. Be thankful! — Jennifer Young

He walked over to the piano and lifted the cover revealing black and white keys that my fingers knew all too well. "Play for me?"
I looked at the piano hesitantly and I felt the passion start to grow back inside of me. My fingers itched to play and suddenly my body was moving towards the piano and I sat down, my posture back to where it should be, my fingers hovering over the keys ready to play a song that I hadn't heard in years.
I closed my eyes and slowly breathed in and out. And then my fingers flew across the keys, the music filling the room. The music moved me both emotionally and physically as I rocked my body to the music, putting all of me into the song. The music took me to a different place than where I was here and now. This is the melody I always seem to come back to, always finding myself lost in the notes. The song is a part of me as it tells a story. A story about loss and recovery. — Alexandria Rhodes

A lot of things are inherent in life -change, birth, death, aging, illness, accidents, calamities, and losses of all kinds- but these events don't have to be the cause of ongoing suffering. Yes, these events cause grief and sadness, but grief and sadness pass, like everything else, and are replaced with other experiences. The ego, however, clings to negative thoughts and feelings and, as a result, magnifies, intensifies, and sustains those emotions while the ego overlooks the subtle feelings of joy, gratitude, excitement, adventure, love, and peace that come from Essence. If we dwelt on these positive states as much as we generally dwell on our negative thoughts and painful emotions, our lives would be transformed. — Gina Lake

Scripture says: "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted." I call on every American family and the family of America to observe a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, honoring the memory of the thousands of victims of these brutal attacks and comforting those who lost loved ones. We will persevere through this national tragedy and personal loss. In time, we will find healing and recovery; and, in the face of all this evil, we remain strong and united, "one Nation under God." — George W. Bush

You become a house where the wind blows straight through, because no one bothers the crack in the window or lock on the door, and you're the house where people come and go as they please, because you're simply too unimpressed to care. You let people in who you really shouldn't let in, and you let them walk around for a while, use your bed and use your books, and await the day when they simply get bored and leave. You're still not bothered, though you knew they shouldn't have been let in in the first place, but still you just sit there, apathetic like a beggar in the desert. — Charlotte Eriksson

But undying memories stood like sentinels in her breast. When the notes of doves, calling to each other, fell on her ear, her eyes sought the sky, and she heard a voice saying, Majella! — Helen Hunt Jackson

It will feel impossible; like you are dying inside this is your soul crying out for life. It may take everything you have; every ounce of will and strength. You will lose a part of yourself trying to save something essential and innocent. And when you have given everything, you will recover and you will be set free, and you will discover there was even more in you than you ever knew. — Bryant H. McGill

There are recovery programs for people grieving the loss of a parent, sibling, or spouse. You can buy books on how to cope with the death of a beloved pet or work through the anguish of a miscarriage. We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You're on your own for that. — Rachel Held Evans

There was no true recovery from the loss of a child. A part of her was broken and it couldn't be fixed. — Debra Webb

We are all damaged. We have all been hurt. We have all had to learn painful lessons. We are all recovering from some mistake, loss, betrayal, abuse, injustice or misfortune. All of life is a process of recovery that never ends. We each must find ways to accept and move through the pain and to pick ourselves back up. For each pang of grief, depression, doubt or despair there is an inverse toward renewal coming to you in time. Each tragedy is an announcement that some good will indeed come in time. Be patient with yourself. — Bryant McGill

It's not by accident that people talk of a state of confusion as not being able to see the wood for the trees, or of being out of the woods when some crisis is surmopunted. It is a place of loss, confusion, terror and anger, a place where you can, like Dante, find yourself going down into Hell. But if it's any comfort, the dark wood isn't just that. It's also a place of opportunity and adventure. It is the place in which fortunes can be reversed, hearts mended, hopes reborn. — Amanda Craig

You will lose someone you can't live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn't seal back up. And you come through. It's like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly - that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. — Anne Lamott

Hitting bottom is an inside job - it's something that happens within our consciousness. — Christopher Dines

Pause and remember - You will have a lot more time and energy to spend on yourself when you stop worrying and wasting time on how others need to change. — Jennifer Young

It's not wrong to be upset. It's not wrong to cry. It's not wrong to want attention. It's not even wrong to scream or throw a fit. What is wrong is to keep it all inside. What is wrong is to blame and punish yourself for simply being human. What is wrong is to never be heard and to be alone in your pain. Share it. Let it out. — Bryant H. McGill

The process of recovering from addictiveness happens at a deeper level of consciousness and through feeling our pain without using old addictive fixes. There is no escaping that getting in touch with our original pain is the touchstone to mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. — Christopher Dines

Even when everything hurts, even when other cities are exploding and people we love are disappearing, there's still space for sweet things. — Corey Ann Haydu

Animism is the way humanity has been deeply connected to the land and its seasonal cycles for millennia, in rapport and conversation with the animals, plants, elements, Ancestors and earth spirits. The opposite of animism is the "cult of the individual" so celebrated in modern society, and the loss of the animist worldview is at the root of our spiritual disconnect and looming ecological crisis. Human beings are just one strand woven into the complex systems of Earth Community, and the animistic perspective is fundamental to the paradigm shift, and the recovery of our own ancestral wisdom. — Pegi Eyers

Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it, but also the father who wipes away the tears. — Criss Jami

Bear in mind you have a life to live. There is an incredible loss. There is a profound grief. And there is, in the end, after a long time and more work than you ever thought possible, a time when it gets easier. — Marya Hornbacher

Since ideology, particularly in it's shallower versions, is peculiarly destructive of the capacity to apprehend and appreciate irony, I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading ... But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures. — Harold Bloom

The loss of India would mark and consummate the downfall of the British Empire. That great organism would pass at a stroke out of life into history.From such a catastrophe there could be no recovery. — Lord Randolph Churchill

In this week I see such a picture of life, hard and joyful pressed up together and sleeping in the same bed. They come knit together. The lines of pain run through the joy and remind us to go all in, because life is short. The joy edges the pain and gives us a reason to rise. — Anna White

Eating disorders are prevalent among women who were sexually abused as children. They seem to have components of other symptoms such as obsessions, compulsions, avoidance of food, and anxiety, and they primarily include a distorted body image and feelings of body shame.
For some women, eating disorders are related to the loss of control over their bodies during the sexual abuse and serve as a means of feeling in control of their bodies now. Eating disorders can also be indicative of the developmental stage and age at which the sexual abuse began. Women with anorexia and bulimia report that they were sexually abused either at the age of puberty or during puberty, when their bodies were beginning to develop and they felt a great deal of body shame from the abuse. By contrast, women with compulsive eating report that the sexual abuse occurred before the age of puberty; they used food for comfort. — Karen A. Duncan

Whether we experience it or not, grief accompanies all the major changes in our lives. When we realize that we have grieved before and recovered, we see that we may recover this time as well. It is more natural to recover than to halt in the tracks of grief forever. Our expectations, willingness and beliefs are all essential to our recovery from grief. It is right to expect to recover, no matter how great the loss. Recovery is the normal way . — Judy Tatelbaum

Sometimes it seems that half of the fairy tales of the world are some form of Cinderella, ugly duckling, or poor boy story, telling of the little person who has no power or possessions who ends up being king or queen, prince or princess. We write it off as wishful dreaming, when it is actually the foundational pattern of disguise or amnesia, loss, and recovery. Every Beauty is sleeping, it seems, before it can meet its Prince. The duckling must be "ugly," or there will be no story. The knight errant must be wounded, or he will never even know what the Holy Grail is, much less find it. Jesus must be crucified, or there can be no resurrection. It is written in our hardwiring, but can only be heard at the soul level. It will usually be resisted and opposed at the ego level. — Richard Rohr

Pause and remember - At any moment you have the power to say 'this is enough' and radically change the course of your destiny. Have the faith and courage to follow your hearts calling. — Jennifer Young

Defrosting is excruciatingly painful. You have been numb for so long. As feeling comes back to your soul, you start to tingle, and it's uncomfortable and strange. But then the tingles start feeling like daggers. Sadness, loss, fear, anger, anxiety - all of these things that you have been numbing with the booze - you feel them for the first time. And it's horrific at first, to tell you the damn truth. But welcoming the pain and refusing to escape from it is the only way to recovery. You can't go around it, you can't go over it, you have to — Glennon Doyle Melton

If we can have record high unemployment, record job loss, and just an absolutely anemic economic recovery because of Obama's policies, and he's not blamed for it, what makes anybody think he's gonna get blamed when an insurance company starts doubling their premiums? — Rush Limbaugh

Acceptance is the road to all change. — Bryant H. McGill

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive. — Gail Caldwell

Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation. — Lawrence N. Powell

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. — Gail Caldwell

I felt like I was being carried over the threshold of a sisterhood of loss. I knew I was not walking alone, and that eventually I would bob back up to the surface of the deep, because the women around me showed me what healing looks like. — Anna White

Unfortunately, as anyone who has lived through a tragedy knows, life does, rather infuriatingly, go on. — G. Norman Lippert

Sometimes it's hard to see the rainbow when there's been endless days of rain. — Christina Greer

Recovery unfolds in three stages. The central task of the first stage is the establishment of safety. The central task of the second stage is remembrance and mourning. The central focus of the third stage is reconnection with ordinary life. — Judith Lewis Herman

Pause and remember - Every person is going through difficult hardships and growth. Let's be more conscious of this by being more patient, compassionate and understanding. — Jennifer Young

Pause and remember - No one is coming to rescue you from yourself; your inner demons, your lack of confidence, your dissatisfaction with yourself and life. Only self-love and good decisions will rescue you. — Jennifer Young

Pause and remember - Every morning is a new page in the story of your life. You are creating your life at every moment. Think wisely about the day you want to create for yourself. — Jennifer Young

She hadn't been Rachel that night. She was evidence, a body of things to be picked and probed at, pictured and asked about, recorded and quoted. I want my life back. The voice was faint inside her own mind. She could hear the plaintive, almost despairing note to that voice. Like the wail of a scared child, this wasn't just about facing her fears. This was about everything. Her injuries, the loss of the life and world she'd once taken for granted, her long recovery. — Anais Torres

This relates to the concept of time and our ability as dreamers to reach across time to a past or future self and do some good. This is very important as it relates to soul loss and soul recovery. — Robert Moss

The way you react has been repeated thousands of times, and it has become a routine for you. You are conditioned to be a certain way. And that is the challenge: to change your normal reactions, to change your routine, to take a risk and make different choices. — Miguel Angel Ruiz