Gabriel Mac > Quotes

“A lot of people don’t heal, and it manifests in a lot of different ways throughout their lives,” she said once. “Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, Meredith said, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.”
― Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

“the post-traumatic-stress-disordered often vacillate between phases of symptoms, moving from intrusion—the crying and howling nightmares and other asylum-worthy behaviors—to constriction and back, without predictability or reason. It’s one of the many things that undermine their credibility with the outside world: People seem fine for a while, but then they’re not fine, or they go from one extreme set of symptoms to an opposite one.”
― Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

“but I still told them very little, trying to spare them from the monotony of chronic illness.”
― Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story

“I could have lived like that. For a long time. People do it. Like a piece of cardboard, walking around tall and flat in the world, without nerve endings, sinews stiff enough to keep any weakness they’re holding safely twined up. It keeps the good things from getting in, too. But you barely register emptiness when you only have two dimensions. People do it, keep their constriction mostly intact; except for the moments when they don't.”
― Mac McClelland, Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story