Traumatic Experience Quotes & Sayings

It is indeed the truth of the traumatic experience that forms the center of its psychopathology; it is not a pathology of falsehood or displacement of meaning, but of history itself (p. 5) — Cathy Caruth

'Empire' was a very traumatic experience for me. It was very schizophrenic, and it wasn't what I expected it to be. — Lee Daniels

One out of every four. I have repeated this statistic over and over and still cannot fathom the depth of what it really means. One out of every four girls is sexually abused before the age of eighteen. For boys, the number is one out of six.9 This means one out of every four women at the grocery store, at the bank, at the mall, in the pew at church, and everywhere in "normal" life have had this traumatic experience. For me as a teacher, this means that one out of every four of my precious eighth grade girls will, before they graduate from high school, become one of those victims. — Mary Frances Bowley

I don't remember much about being born but I hear it's quite a traumatic experience. — Phil Wohl

The traumatized person is often relieved simply to learn the true name of her condition. By ascertaining her diagnosis, she begins the process of mastery. No longer imprisoned in the wordlessness of the trauma, she discovers that there is a language for her experience. She discovers that she is not alone; others have suffered in similar ways. She discovers further that she is not crazy; the traumatic syndromes are normal human responses to extreme circumstances. And she discovers, finally, that she is not doomed to suffer this condition indefinitely; she can expect to recover, as others have recovered ... — Judith Lewis Herman

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

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

A dispassionate conceptual development of the typology of violence must by definition ignore its traumatic impact. Yet there is a sense in which a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror. A distinction needs to be made, as well, between (factual) truth and truthfulness: what renders a report of a raped woman (or any other narrative of a trauma) truthful is its very factual unreliability, its confusion, its inconsistency. If the victim were able to report on her painful and humiliating experience in a clear manner, with all the data arranged in a consistent order, this very quality would make us suspicious of its truth. — Slavoj Zizek

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

The inability to get something out of your head is a signal that shouts, "Don't forget to deal with this!" As long as you experience fear or pain with a memory or flashback, there is a lie attached that needs to be confronted. In each healing step, there is a truth to be gathered and a lie to discard. — Christina Enevoldsen

Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. — Diane Arbus

Yolanda Gampel utilizes an expanded concept of the "uncanny" to outline the results of violence:

Those who experience such traumas are faced with an unbelievable and unreal reality that is incompatible with anything they knew previously. As a result, they can no longer fully believe what they see with their own eyes; they have difficulty distinguishing between the unreal reality they have survived and the fears that spring from their own imagination. — Nicole Waller

No-one would want to go through a traumatic experience but when you've survived something life-shattering and risen above it, you achieve a kind of serenity. — Jane Wilson-Howarth

It's traumatic to meditate on the availability of information through the Internet, or the way we perceive the world as a result. People don't experience things totally or viscerally anymore. It's all through representation, be it a record on YouTube or a post on a blog. — Sufjan Stevens

After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don't. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can't understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers. Later — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

It is as though some old part of yourself wakes up in you, terrified, useless in the life you have, its skills and habits destructive but intact, and what is left of the present you, the person you have become, wilts and shrivels in sadness or despair: the person you have become is only a thin shell over this other, more electric and endangered self. The strongest, the least digested parts of your experience can rise up and put you back where you were when they occurred; all the rest of you stands back and weeps. — Peter Straub

As modern neurobiologists point out, the repetition of the traumatic experience in the flashbacks can be itself re-traumatizing; if not life-threatening, it is at least threatening to the chemical structure of the brain and can ultimately lead to deterioration. And this would also seem to explain the high suicide rate of survivor, for example, survivors of Vietnam. — Cathy Caruth

I went to college because my father thought that I should learn engineering, because he wanted to go into the heating business with me. There, I realized I wanted to be a physicist. I had to tell him, which was a somewhat traumatic experience. — Leonard Susskind

Every unpleasant worldly experience in life exposes our sensitive nervous systems to painful phenomena. Despite all the beer commercial advertisement slogans urging us to live with gusto, life is unavoidably painful. Life is a battering ram that inflicts trauma upon human beings. People blunt the traumatic force of enduring a lifetime of pain, fearfulness, and unremitted anguish and boredom with religion, sex, booze, drugs, fantasy, and other indulgent acts and forms acts of escapism. — Kilroy J. Oldster

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

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

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

I think many writers really believe that being published is a traumatic experience. — Lynne Tillman

You have to understand that PTSD has to be an event that you experience, a very traumatic event. And actually, there is evidence that brain chemistry changes during this event in certain individuals where it's imprinted indelibly forever and there's an emotion associated with this which triggers the condition. — Dale Archer

Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell. — Douglas Rushkoff

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

I don't think I've ever met an addict in long-term recovery who hasn't gone through at least one traumatic childhood experience. Research indicates that one traumatic event in childhood is as grave as continuous combat in a war zone. A traumatic event during childhood can leave a grave imprint on the human body. — Christopher Dines

Auditioning for 'Philomena' was such a traumatic experience because I had three callbacks, and I was absolutely positive that I was just an option. — Sophie Kennedy Clark

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

The traumatic stress field has adopted the term "Complex Trauma" to describe the experience of multiple and/or chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interpersonal nature (e.g., sexual or physical abuse, war, community violence) and early-life onset. These exposures often occur within the child's caregiving system and include physical, emotional, and educational neglect and child maltreatment beginning in early childhood

- Developmental Trauma Disorder — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

My traumatic experience was life changing — Asa Don Brown

One of the curious aspects of a traumatic experience like the one you've been through, she says at last, is how it sometimes results in a softening of your existing boundaries. Sometimes the changes are temporary. But sometimes the person finds they actually quite like this new aspect of their personality, and it becomes a part of them. — J.P. Delaney

Setting aside the truth value of the UFO phenomenon, it is an interesting sociological reality that so many people are unwilling to discuss the most - and at times traumatic - experience of their lives. What does it say about our society that this is so? My feeling is that, by its very nature, it represents a form of repression. If you are a reader who believes UFOs to be nonsense of some sort, I can nevertheless assure you that you have a friend or relation who has seen one. They have simply learned not to discuss it. Many people can live perfectly well within the constraints of repression and denial; they simply learn to shut off certain parts of their mind. It is sad, but it happens all of the time.

But not everyone is the same. Not everyone is willing to do this, or even can do this. By any estimate, there are may millions of people on this planet who have had a powerful UFO experience. They cannot and will not be silenced indefinitely. — Richard M. Dolan

We can honor our emotions after any traumatic event by moving through the experience centered in the heart with the goal of reaching the light on the other side. — Molly Friedenfeld

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

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

There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. 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

If Freud turns to literature to describe traumatic experience, it is because literature, like psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relation between knowing and not knowing, and it is at this specific point at which knowing and not knowing intersect that the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience and the language of literature meet. — Cathy Caruth

The experience is no longer traumatic; the response of most women to the experience is relief. — Dawn Johnsen

In avoiding any situations reminiscent of the past trauma, or any initiative that might involve future planning and risk, traumatized people deprive themselves of those new opportunities for successful coping that might mitigate the effect of the traumatic experience. Thus, constrictive symptoms, though they may represent an attempt to defend against overwhelming emotional states, exact a high price for whatever protection they afford. They narrow and deplete the quality of life and ultimately perpetuate the effects of the traumatic event. — Judith Lewis Herman

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

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

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

Being abandoned by a child or children is the most traumatic experience ever suffered by a parent. It's a life-changing event, best- described as a living death. There — Sally Miller

As EP, survivors have been unable to create a complete personal story and are unable to share the original experience verbally and socially. They are stuck in the traumatic experience where they relive rather than retell their terror. — Onno Van Der Hart

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a "significant precursor of suicide." The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. "Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection," they wrote, "a denial of one's most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience." Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared. — Matthew Desmond

I felt that that experience, because of the responsible nature that I found I acted all during that traumatic time, that I felt that I was a man. — Haskell Wexler

What Cathy took from her rejection experience was self-doubt. Until this current traumatic hospitalization, Cathy hadn't realized the fear she was carrying around, how burdened she was by it, and how that fear kept her in a mode where she had to continuously prove her value to others and herself. — Robert Kegan

Men and women who have served in harm's way experience higher rates of divorce and suicide. Many battle the debilitating effects and stigma associated with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. — Ron Wyden

It has been my experience that immediately after certain traumatic separations - leaving one's family to go to war, for instance, or upon the death of a family member, or after parting from one's beloved with no assurances of reunion - there is a strange calmness, almost a sense of relief, as if the worst has happened and nothing else need be dreaded. — Dan Simmons

The brave men and women, who serve their country and as a result, live constantly with the war inside them, exist in a world of chaos. But the turmoil they experience isn't who they are; the PTSD invades their minds and bodies. — Robert Koger

In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so. — Aphrodite Matsakis

Luckily, I am writing a memoir and not a work of fiction, and therefore I do not have to account for my grandmother's unpleasing character and look for the Oedipal fixation or the traumatic experience which would give her that clinical authenticity that is nowadays so desirable in portraiture. — Mary McCarthy

A traumatic experience is a seismic event that shakes our belief in a just world, robbing us of the sense that life is controllable, predictable, and meaningful. — Sheryl Sandberg

The closest thing I could think of that men go through is like a prisoner of war being tortured, and then coming back from that experience. It's traumatic and grounding and makes you commit to the world. Also, because you want all of these things for your kid. — Larkin Grimm

The power we discover inside ourselves as we survive a life-threatening experience can be utilized equally well outside of crisis, too. I am, in every moment, capable of mustering the strength to survive again - or of tapping that strength in other good, productive, healthy ways. — Michele Rosenthal

My writing derived from the conviction I conceived during my college years: one should lead one's life as if one were the protagonist of an epic novel, with the outcome predetermined and chapter after chapter of edifying, traumatic, and exhilarating events to be suffered through. Since the end is known in advance, one must try to experience as much as possible in the brief time allotted. Writing is a way of ensuring that you pay enough attention along the way to understand what you see. — Jeffrey Tayler

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

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

Working with victimized people requires a committed moral stance. The therapist is called upon to bear witness to a crime. She must affirm a position of solidarity with the victim. This does not mean a simplistic notion that the victim can do no wrong; rather, it involves an understanding of the fundamental injustice of the traumatic experience and the need for a resolution that restores some sense of justice. — Judith Lewis Herman