He asks, in a softer voice, “Does your arm still hurt?”You touch it with your hand. The big ache is gone, leaving only the little, underneath ache that will gather and swell against the bone....

Isolation of catastrophic experiences. Dissociation may function to seal off overwhelming trauma into a compartmentalized area of conscious until the person is better able to integrate it into mainstream consciousness. The function of dissociation is...

There’s no weakness as great as false strength.

Part of the process in healing from trauma, like recovering from addiction, is developing connection and support with others.

PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions.

Write the poems.

Those who were molested or beaten as children or teenagers might later be vulnerable to sexual abuse or violence, because their natural impulses to protect themselves and protest (physical and verbal) were extinguished. Expectation of...

When trauma involves intentional harm, such as in a crime or abuse, trust can totally collapse.

The memories seem to come in layers. For example, the first memory might be of incest; then they remember robes and candles; next they realize that their father or mother or both were present when...

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the...

The vast majority of incest begins years before the earliest conceivable age of consent. p4

In fact, less media exposure was associated with production of more Satanic content in patients reporting ritual abuse, evidence that reports of ritual abuse are not primarily the product of exposure contagion.” Responses are consistent...

The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It’s so easy to be reassuring when you...

I don’t understand this–when people love you so much they are willing to get rid of you. I think if I loved someone that much I’d want to stay with them. It doesn’t make sense...

Betrayal is a more subtle, twisted feeling than terror. It burns and eats, but terror stabs right through.

Shut up and do not think. All the theorists agree: shut up and keep the words from being said. And all of the scars will remain invisible; and all of the scars will remain under...

The wounded are instruments, singing pain.

O what will she do, a soul bitten into with wrong?

Being bound to one particular storyline such that one’s narrative is rigid, does not imply the need to avoid formulating particular other kinds of possibilities. Rather, it involves being stuck in one self-limiting, self-reinforcing set...

There are no injuries that run so deep that one can’t add insult to them and make them feel even worse.

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...

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...

Most dissociative parts influence your experience from the inside rather than exert complete control, that is, through passive influence.*In fact, many parts never take complete control of a person, but are only experienced internally. *Frequent...

Not one person on earth is immune to crime and trauma.

Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of...

We were still young enough to remember the cubist architecture of the piles of corpses we had seen during the war.

You can travel the world but If you cannot let go of the past, you will never move on.

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

Coming to terms with incest is not easy. Learning to be a survivor, not a victim, gives new meaning to life

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

Trauma is any stressor that occurs in a sudden and forceful way and is experienced as overwhelming.

Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic...

The trauma said, ‘Don’t write these poems.Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.

The symptomatology of PTSD.In PTSD a traumatic event is not remembered and relegated to one’s past in the same way as other life events. Trauma continues to intrude with visual, auditory, and/or other somatic reality...

El problema es que mucha gente tiene miedo a sufrir cuando en el pasado han tenido experiencias amorosas traumatizantes. Como si les entrara un miedo a la vida, andan a la defensiva armando sus muros...

Can I dwell on what I scarce remember? I held a castle on the Marches once, and there was a woman I was pledged to marry, but I could not find that castle today, nor...

A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person oridea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit,indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as...

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.

Our work calls on us to confront, with our patients and within ourselves, extraordinary human experiences. This confrontation is profoundly humbling in that at all times these experiences challenge the limits of our humanity and...

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...

I’m ready for the day when Mom loves me too much to keep me, and for every other person who will someday see that I’m not worth holding on to.