531 Quotes About Ptsd

I’m broken. We’re all broken and right now we’re all isolated within that brokenness. The cure for the loneliness is connection—connection with that broken part of ourselves and with each other—and we can’t achieve that connection while pretending we are okay. We’re not okay.

I no longer seek those things that help me to heal but for those things that fortify me with the strength required to carry the load fate has set upon my shoulders. Instead of finding a way to forget, find a way to bear the constant remembering. The silence of the wild being one of those elements that reinforce the weathered walls of the soul and mind.

There is no “letting go.” I would dare to take it further and say there is no healing from trauma. For nearly 25 years, I’ve waited to get over the traumas that have amassed across my life. The pursuit of this healing has felt a great deal like a search for God—for something elusive, divine, and that may or may not exist.

Now I know, you can’t change what’s happened to you or hide it, or spin it, or get over it. All you can do is hold it confidently knowing that the mistakes are yours but so too is the wisdom earned along the punishing passage. Suffering is the catalyst for transformation. The wounds don’t define us; how we went about surviving does. Oddity, in this sickened society of medicated despair, is a blessed state.

Throughout the journey West, I had a raging fever. In a mere two days, we drove 1,925 miles from Connecticut to Colorado Springs, where we chose to break our journey. The further West we went, the sicker I seemed to become. As though the turmoil, rage, and grief within me were tightening their coiled grip, sensing that something was coming that would force it to relinquish their hold.

Just smile, Max. The paint cannot be stronger than a smile. But it is.

The evils of the world hurt us because they impinge upon our embodied existence, and they can be changed only through our embodied intervention in an actual world (not by 'thinking' of them in a different way, or by the 'treatment' of their effects on us through interference either physical or mental-- with the way we perceive them).

It is also true, however, that many patients experience psychotropic medication as in itself a further source of confusion and discomfort, since it may alter their perception of the world in an idiosyncratic way, so that their experience seems to bear no relation to the meaning of actual events of their world.

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.