Trauma Memories Quotes

Quotes tagged as "trauma-memories" Showing 1-30 of 43
Judith Lewis Herman
“In order to escape accountability for his crimes, the perpetrator does everything in his power to promote forgetting. Secrecy and silence are the perpetrator’s first line of defense. If secrecy fails, the perpetrator attacks the credibility of his victim. If he cannot silence her absolutely, he tries to make sure that no one listens. To this end, he marshals an impressive array of arguments, from the most blatant denial to the most sophisticated and elegant rationalization. After every atrocity one can expect to hear the same predictable apologies: it never happened; the victim lies; the victim exaggerates; the victim brought it upon herself; and in any case it is time to forget the past and move on. The more powerful the perpetrator, the greater is his prerogative to name and define reality, and the more completely his arguments prevail.”
Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“She's terrified that all these sensations and images are coming out of her — but I think she's even more terrified to find out why." Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing.”
David L. Calof

“The damage and invisible scars of emotional abuse are very difficult to heal, because memories are imprinted on our minds and hearts and it takes time to be restored. Imprints of past traumas do not mean a person cannot change their future beliefs and behaviors. as people, we do not easily forget. However, as we heal, grieve, and let go, we become clear-minded and focused to live restore and emotionally healthy.”
Dee Brown, Breaking Passive-Aggressive Cycles

Laura   Davis
“Many survivors struggle to believe the abuse happened. They don’t want to believe it. It’s too painful to think about. They don’t want to accuse family members or face the terrible loss involved in realizing “a loved one” hurt them; they don’t want to rock the boat.”
Laura Davis, Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child

“You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.”
Daisy Whitney, The Rivals

“What most people call spontaneous recall usually involves memories that have been denied, not repressed. The survivor has always been aware that the sexual abuse happened, but he or she has studiously avoided thinking about it. A catalyst sets the memory process in motion, but the essential factor in the memory surfacing is the readiness of the survivor to deal with the reality of abuse.”
Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse

Olga Trujillo
“How could I even function today if all of this happened to me?" I pleaded, wishing Dr. Summer would tell me that he'd been wrong, that all of those thoughts didn't belong to me.

Dr. Summer reminded me gently, "When you were attacked, your mind went far away so you could survive. Some people describe this as an out-of-body experience. Your mind creatively and instinctively protected you by dissociating from the violence and terror. When you talk about the thoughts in your head, you have a flat demeanor like you're talking about someone else. Doesn't it feel that way to you?"

"Yes. It doesn't ever feel like I'm talking about me. It doesn't feel like it happened to me.”
Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

“When clients are hyperaroused or overwhelmed emotionally, voluntarily narrowing their field of consciousness allows them to assimilate a limited amount of incoming information, thereby optimizing the chance for successful integration. For example, as one client began to report her traumatic experience, her arousal escalated: Her heart started to race, she felt afraid
and restless, and had trouble thinking. She was asked to stop talking and thinking about the trauma, to inhibit the images, thoughts, and emotions that were coming up, and orient instead to her physical sensation until her arousal returned to the window of tolerance. With the help of her therapist, she focused on her body and described how her legs felt, the phyisical feeling of anxiety in her chest, and the beating of her heart. These physical experiences gradually subsided, and only then was she encouraged to return to the narrative.”
Pat Ogden, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy

“Remembering things or processing memories can be a charged, or frightening, or uncomfortable time. It can help to imagine yourself being a reporter. This can take pressure off of needing to remember 'all the details' or not wanting to 'be wrong about something', if you simply just write down whatever comes to you down on paper without editing it, censoring it, or passing judgment—for the time being—on either its content, or on whether it is l00% accurate in every way. Simply write it down and come back to it later, when things may make more sense, or as additional information comes to you...”
A.T.W., Got Parts?: an Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder

Olga Trujillo
“I opened my eyes and felt better, exhausted but relieved of a burden. The pressure to tell and the weight of the emotions had been with me for weeks. Now that I'd told what had happened, the burden lifted a bit.”
Olga Trujillo, The Sum of My Parts: A Survivor's Story of Dissociative Identity Disorder

Sonali Deraniyagala
“Somehow on this boat I can rest with disbelief about what happened, and with the impossible truth of my loss, which I have to compress often and misshape, just so I can bear it -so I can cook or teach our floss my teeth.”
Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“[In a] recent PubMed and PsychAbstracts search... as we could not find a single reference for recovered memory therapy apart from those writing about its dangers. Our experience suggests that an overwhelming majority of clinicians do not assume or suggest to clients that they must have buried traumas from their past. It is also our experience that most clinicians are careful not to assume the literal veracity of reported traumatic memories, whether newly remembered or not."
Cameron, C., & Heber, A. (2006). Re: Troubles in Traumatology, and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory/Reply: Troubles in Traumatology and Debunking Myths about Trauma and Memory. Canadian journal of psychiatry, 51(6), 402.”
Colin Cameron

“The media-contamination hypothesis usually focuses on the book Michelle Remembers (Smith and Pazder, 1980) and the movie Rosemary's Baby;. These images were in the popular culture for centuries before survivor memories started to surface in therapy; therefore, the media-contamination hypothesis fails to account for the time lag and cannot provide a full account of the phenomenona.”
Colin A. Ross, Satanic Ritual Abuse: Principles of Treatment

“Richard Gardner (2004), the creator of ‘‘parental alienation syndrome’’, considers that the ‘‘parental alienation syndrome (PAS) is primarily a disorder of childhood. The false memory syndrome (FMS) is a disorder of young adults, primarily women. They share in common a campaign of acrimony against a parent’’. In reality, these so-called syndromes are both used to discredit the testimony of individuals who claim to have been abused, sexually or otherwise. When adults report that they have recovered memories of childhood abuse, others may claim that they have false memory syndrome. When children do not repress or forget the abuse, if there is no period of amnesia, then some may claim that they have parental alienation syndrome (Ceci & Bruck, 1995; Dallam, 1999).”
Jenny Ann Ryberg

“I want to remember my past
To see before my eyes
The image of my parents
The house in which I grew up
The village in which my family lived for generations
I don't want to remember my past
I fear for what my memory
Might bring before my eyes
I wonder whether I can continue my life
If I'll rescue from oblivion
What I want to recall.”
Itta Benhaiem-Keller

“Empowerment is something that happens throughout your healing, as courage and success in facing your memories build your self-esteem. Some of the strengths you get from taking on your buried memories does not show up in your life until long after the resolution has been achieved.”
Renee Fredrickson, Repressed Memories: A Journey to Recovery from Sexual Abuse

“The accuracy of my memories, whether things happened exactly the way that the personalities remember, doesn't really matter. If my memory, combined with the memories of the other
personalities, provides some coherent past, then that is far better than the blankness I have. Whatever inaccuracies may occur because of the passage of time or because of the colored intensity of "emotional truth" harm no one. All that matters is that I gain a firm grasp on what is real. The memories of the total entity, accurate or not, are providing me a handle. I must have some background to adequately explain where I am now. I must have a base from which to build an unfragmented future.”
Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“Here (as memories) fallen angels tread,
penetrate, thrust and recede inside this head.”
Lavinia Valeriana, Adrift in Acheron

J.R. Ward
“Sometimes the worst part about trauma was not going through it. It was the aftermath, when you were free. And you obsessed about what would have happened if you hadn't gotten out.”
J.R. Ward, Prisoner of Night

“Because you don’t owe them your trauma. No one has a right to know who you are and if you don’t want them to.” -Dr. Hartfield”
J.M. Hernandez, Fragments

“Although false memory psychologists point to therapy sessions as the setting in which people commonly determine that they forgot, and then remembered, abuse. Elliott (1997) found that the majority of people who had forgotten a traumatic event and then remembered it identified the trigger as some form of media presentation, such as a film or a television show. Psychotherapy was the least common trigger for remembering trauma."
KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY”
Jennifer J. Freyd

“Traumatic memories are hallucinatory and involuntary experiences consisting of dissociated sensorimotor phenomena, including visual images, sensations, emotions, and/or motor acts pertaining to past traumatic experiences that may engross the entire perceptual field (e.g.,Van der Kolk & Fisler, 1995).”
Kathy Steele

Sonali Deraniyagala
“They had become muffled and distant then anyway. This happened in those first days after the wave. I couldn't find their faces, they quivered as in a heat haze. Even in my stupor I knew that details of them were dropping away from me crumbs. Still, whenever they emerged, I panicked.”
Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave

“Are any of these anxieties or beliefs about my past real? Maybe I'm just making them up⎯re-creating the past.
I have to smile as I look at what I just wrote. I can tell when my solitary exploration becomes too threatening, or when I'm treading close to a memory too frightening to be remembered. Rather than push through unfamiliar brush, I stomp the well-worn path of "Maybe I'm making all of this up." But retreating there no longer makes sense to me.”
Joan Frances Casey, The Flock: The Autobiography of a Multiple Personality

“Even among professionals, beliefs about dissociation/DD often are not based on the scientific literature. Multiple lines of evidence support a powerful relationship between dissociation/DD and psychological trauma, especially cumulative and/or early life trauma.”
Richard Loewenstein

“Professional surveys that establish that the position that DID "does not exist" or that there is "no evidence" for the diagnosis are minority opinions, particularly among those who have any experience with alleged dissociative symptoms [12,13]. The related belief that traumatic memories cannot be forgotten is held by fewer than 10% of experimental psychologists and fewer than 5% of clinical psychologists [14].”
A Steven Frankel

Pierre Janet
“One of the most remarkable cases published in France is that of Louis Vivet, studied from 1882 to 1889 by many authors, by Legrand du Saulle, Voisin, Mabille and Ramadier, Bourru and Burot. This boy has six different existences. Each of them is characterized, first, by modifications of the memory affecting now one period, now another; secondly, by modifications of character; in one state he is gentle and industrious, in another he is lazy and irascible; thirdly, by modifications of sensibility and of motion; in one state he is insensible, and paralyzed in his left side; in another he is paralyzed in his right side; in a third he is paraplegic, etc.”
Pierre Janet, The Major Symptoms Of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given In The Medical School Of Harvard University

“I think DID remains quite threatening to many people – this idea that people could have multiple personalities and switch back and forth. … I think unfortunately the media has created a stereotype, often a violent stereotype. So that’s part of what is frightening to people.

Also, there are a lot of people who just simply can’t believe it. How could this be!? It doesn’t make sense to them, and they miss it, even when it’s right in front of them. I certainly have seen DID patients switching away and the interviewer having no idea that this is going on or asks a vaguely-perceptive question like, “Did you just hear an hallucination?” Something like that. They recognise that something changed in the patient but they attribute it to more “conventional” symptoms like hallucinations.”
Frank W Putnam

“Everything that happened that night . . . It was something darker and worse than hell. I can’t get it out of my head. I don’t reckon I ever will.”
Giselle Beaumont, On the Edge of Daylight

“Trauma doesn't end when the trauma ends. Everyone's past forms their present.”
Tracy Sierra, Nightwatching

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