33 Quotes About Trauma-memory

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 on the lives of its victims. Again and again they relieve the life-threatening experiences they suffered, reacting in mind and body as though such events were still occurring. PTSD is a complex psychobiological condition.

Is this truth too potent for me to hold? If I keep it close, will I tumble? At times, I don't know.

To think of them and memories with - on days with mood dimmed by some traumatic spell of a haunting quite residual - is to have the brain become a cell and trapped inside there is only the music of the surly sullen bell.

It is dangerous to use our own ability to access non-traumatic memories as a standard against which we judge a trauma victim’s response.

The murders force us to cut off the hair of our sisters a few minutes before their deaths and we, temporarily spared, do it in the shadow of the whips. We have been deprived of a reason and are the tools of criminals. My friend who worked with me sorting clothes as me quietly:— Why have you changed so much? I don't recognise you!

Trauma can warp the brain.

Not knowing trauma or experiencing or remembering it in a dissociative way is not a passive shutdown of perception or of memory. Not knowing is rather an active, persistent, violent refusal; an erasure, a destruction of form and of representation. The fundamental essence of the death instinct, the instinct that destroys all psychic structure is apparent in this phenomenon. . . . The death drive is against knowing and against the developing of knowledge and elaborating [it].

I have met many, many severely distressed people whose daily lives are filled with the agony of both remembered and unremembered trauma, who try so hard to heal and yet who are constantly being pushed down both by their symptoms and the oppressive circumstances of post traumatic life around them.

Because during trauma it is usually not safe or possible for individuals to consciously access their emotional reactions or experiences, awareness often emerges after trauma ceases."KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY