Trauma can have a masking effect.

Boundaries are, in simple terms, the recognition of personal space.

Attachment. A secure attachment is the ability to bond; to develop a secure and safe base; an unbreakable or perceivable inability to shatter to bond between primary parental caregiver(s) and child; a quest for familiarity;...

Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain...

Childhood trauma does not come in one single package.

The initial trauma of a young child may go underground but it will return to haunt us.

Other personalities are created to handle new traumas, their existence usually occurring one at a time. Each has a singular purpose and is totally focused on that task. The important aspect of the mind’s extreme...

For no real reason – well, perhaps because of the seriousness under the trees or Nader’s hair, which was very messy and covered in little grass seeds – Katie began to giggle. She knew it...

I am a divorced child, of divided, uncertain background. Within this division I – supposed fruit of their love – no longer exist. It happened nearly forty years ago, yet to me nothing is sadder...

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel...

If I somehow possessed a set of videotapes that contained all the most significant events of your childhood, in their entirety, would you want to see them?-Absolutely. Right this very second.-But why? Don’t you think...

He had been haunted his whole life by a mildcase of claustrophobia—the vestige of a childhood incident he had never quite overcome.Langdon’s aversion to closed spaces was by no means debilitating, but it had always...

Most parents try really hard to give their kids the best possible life. They give them the best food and clothes they can afford, take their own kind of take on training kids to be...

The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.

Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert’s been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her,...

I need to ask, are you afraid of spiders?”Nicholas blinked, suddenly caught off guard, “Yes, I’m afraid of spiders.””Were you always?””What are you, a psychiatrist?”Pritam took a breath. He could feel Laine’s eyes on him,...

Meadow’s Waltz…the meadow had becomeher sanctuary of spiritoffering an escape from a painno child should ever endureforeboding clouds began…

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and unique history of our childhood.

If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don’t think it’s the children who need to be adjusted.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

I want to see her naked, ” Mengele said pointing to Marlene. She cried and shock. My mother flung her body in front of Marlene’s and said, “You can’t have her. I love her, my...

The child is right,” she announced firmly.Arrietty’s eyes grew big. “Oh, no-” she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing...

We don’t yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.

When people encounter the free market and they recoil or react negatively to it, they’re merely confessing that voluntaryism, trade and negotiation are foreign and threatening to them, which tells you everything about how tragically...

The government researchers,aware of the information in the professional journals, decided to reverse the process (of healing from hysteric dissociation). They decided to use selective trauma on healthy children to create personalities capable of committing...

After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.

SCREW CHILDREN! That’s the mantra of the world. Instead of burying them with a national debt, shoving them in shitty schools, drugging them if they don’t comply, hitting them, yelling at them, indoctrinating them with...

By the time Cheryl Hersha came to the facility, knowledge of multiple personality was so complete that doctors understood how the mind separated into distinct ego states,each unaware of the other. First, the person traumatized...

I am done looking for love where it doesn’t exist. I am done coughing up dust in attempts to drink from dry wells.

We already live on the planet of war, we already live on the red planet, and it’s a war against children. All the other wars are just the shadows of the war on children.

The thing is, if you’re an ugly goon when you’re 15, you’re an ugly goon for the rest of your life — until the day you die. You’re always a goon, even if lots of...

The mental health system is filled with survivors of prolonged, repeated childhood trauma. This is true even though most people who have been abused in childhood never come to psychiatric attention. To the extent that...

There’s no weakness as great as false strength.

I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have a childhood that was _not_ like mine. I have no real frame of reference, but when I question strangers I’ve found that their childhood...

Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is...

He’s dead Duncan, killed himself when I was 13. In all those years he forgot something vital. He taught me when he was learning for himself. I know how to inflict pain; the scary thing...

One of the best ways of repressing emotions is artificial certainty.

The hardcore drug addicts that I treat, are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. The commonality is childhood abuse. These people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they...

Dissociation is the common response of children to repetitive, overwhelming trauma and holds the untenable knowledge out of awareness. The losses and the emotions engendered by the assaults on soul and body cannot, however be...

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...

There is no external solution to the problem of insecurity.

You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find...

A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.

I’m freeeee… SPLAT!”.