Alicia Zigay > Alicia's Quotes

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#1

“We are each other's harvest; we are each other's business; we are each other's magnitude and bond.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks

tags: humanity, understanding, unity

1090 likes

#2

“I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real.”
― Sarah Dessen, Just Listen

tags: assault, fear, memory, nightmare, pain, rape, sad

183 likes

#3

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

tags: nightmare

151 likes

#4

“Oh, he did look like a deity – the perfect balance of danger and charm, he was at the same time fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated flawlessness, and possessing such strength of character that he was dismaying and at the same time utterly attractive in an enticing and forbidden way.”
― Simona Panova, Nightmarish Sacrifice

tags: attract, attraction, attractive, balance, beautiful, beauty, bewitch, bewitched, bewitching, boy, character, character-description, charm, charming, crush, danger, dangerous, deity, demonstrate, demonstrative, description, dismay, dismaying, distant, entice, enticed, enticing, fascinating, female, flawless, flawlessness, forbid, forbidden, girl, god, goddess, goth, gothic, gothic-romance, handsome, he, hero, heroic, in-love, inaccessible, legend, look, looks, love, male, man, myth, mythology, nightmare, perfect, perfection, personality, possess, possession, possessive, pretty, relationship, relationships, romance, romantic, she, suspense, tempt, temptation, tempted, tempting, woman, young-adult, young-adult-gothic-romance

129 likes

#5

“It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

tags: loss

9425 likes

#6

“If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire

tags: fire, flame, isolation, laughter, loss, sacrifice

7808 likes

#7

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger.”
― Emily Jane Brontë , Wuthering Heights

7771 likes

#8

“Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
― Rumi

tags: bereavement, consolation, grief, loss, reincarnation

5274 likes

#9

“You will lose someone you can’t live without,and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”
― Anne Lamott

tags: grief, loss, recovery

4002 likes

#10

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

tags: heartache, loss, love

3085 likes

#11

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi

tags: democracy, fascism, liberty, loss, politics, society, totalitarianism, war

1988 likes

#12

“Every one of us is losing something precious to us. Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back again. That’s part of what it means to be alive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

2081 likes

#13

“At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

tags: death, loss

1792 likes

#14

“Terror had them all for a moment, and it ravaged them, and when it was finished, shock had its way with them, and left them cold and helpless.”
― Dean F. Wilson, Hopebreaker

tags: cold, helpless, moment, ravaged, shock, terror

2 likes

#15

“Shock is when language and emotion get overwritten by trauma's numbing code.”
― Stewart Stafford

tags: in-shock, numb, overwriting, ptsd, shock, shock-and-awe, shocked, shocking, trauma, traumatic-experiences

7 likes

#16

“Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

tags: determinism, free-will, nervous-system, philosophy, reflex-nerves, stimulus

9 likes

#17

“To switch effectively from defense to social engagement strategies, the nervous system must do two things: (1) assess risk, and (2) if the environment looks safe, inhibit the primitive defensive reactions to fight, flight or freeze.”
― Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation

tags: dangerous-people, defensive, defensiveness, distrust, fear-rape, fight-flight-freeze, image-people, interpersonal-problems, interpersonal-relationships, mistrust, nervous-system, neutral-circuits, polyvagal-theory, social-engagement, trust-issues, withdrawn

7 likes

#18

“the distinction between nerves and vessels was not demonstrated until the Third Century B.C., when it was made clear by Erasistratos.”
― James Henry Breasted, The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, Vol 1: Hieroglyphic Transliteration, Translation and Commentary

tags: ancient-greeks, ancient-medicine, circulatory-system, nervous-system

3 likes

#19

“The leafless trees, with their black branches stretched hysterically in every direction, looked to him like illustrations of a central nervous system racked by disease: studies of human suffering anatomized against the winter sky.”
― Edward St. Aubyn, Dunbar

tags: analogy, anatomy, dunbar, king-lear, nervous-system, shakespeare, shakespeare-like

4 likes

#20

“Six Mudras are to be practised daily for 10 minutes.They are Jnana,Prithvi,Apana,Prana,Dhyana and ShoonyaVayu-by which health is enhanced and diseases can be prevented.”
― Suman K.Chiplunkar

tags: ayueveda, blessings, essence, gayatri, health, healthcare, indian, mudras, nature, nervous-system, nutrition, sun, yogeshwara

2 likes

#21

“A child's (or an adult's) nervous system may detect danger or a threat to life when the child enters a new environment or meets a strange person. Cognitively, there is no reason for them to be frightened. But often, even if they understand this, their bodies betray them. Sometimes this betrayal is private; only they are aware that their hearts are beating fast and contracting with such force that they start to sway. For others, the responses are more overt. They may tremble. Their faces may flush, or perspiration may pour from their hands and forehead. Still others may become pale and dizzy and feel precipitously faint.”
― Stephen W. Porges, The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation

tags: defensive, fear, fight-flight-freeze, frightened, nervous-system, neurophysiology, ptsd, threat, trigger

4 likes

#22

“When we feel weak, we drop our heads on the shoulders of others. Don't get mad when someone does that. Be honored. For that person trusted you enough to, even if subtly, ask you for help.”
― Lori Goodwin

tags: help, ptsd, strong, weak

222 likes

#23

“Trauma is personal. It does not disappear if it is not validated. When it is ignored or invalidated the silent screams continue internally heard only by the one held captive. When someone enters the pain and hears the screams healing can begin.”
― Danielle Bernock, Emerging With Wings: A True Story of Lies, Pain, And The LOVE that Heals

tags: captive, childhood-trauma, emotional-abuse, freedom, healing, healing-the-emotional-self, invalidate, lies, love, love-heals, marginalized, pain, ptsd, screams, screams-of-agony, silent-pain, trauma, validation

271 likes

#24

“The ORDINARY RESPONSE TO ATROCITIES is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.

Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work. Folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told. Murder will out. Remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites both for the restoration of the social order and for the healing of individual victims.

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner that undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. When the truth is finally recognized, survivors can begin their recovery. But far too often secrecy prevails, and the story of the traumatic event surfaces not as a verbal narrative but as a symptom.

The psychological distress symptoms of traumatized people simultaneously call attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and deflect attention from it. This is most apparent in the way traumatized people alternate between feeling numb and reliving the event. The dialectic of trauma gives rise to complicated, sometimes uncanny alterations of consciousness, which George Orwell, one of the committed truth-tellers of our century, called "doublethink," and which mental health professionals, searching for calm, precise language, call "dissociation." It results in protean, dramatic, and often bizarre symptoms of hysteria which Freud recognized a century ago as disguised communications about sexual abuse in childhood. . . .”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: abuse, atrocities, consciousness, crime, denial, dissociation, dissociative, freud, ghosts, graves, healing, horrible, humanity, memory, mind, murder, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, power, psychological-trauma, psychology, ptsd, rape, recovered-memory, recovery, repressed-memory, restoration, sigmund-freud, society, society-denial, survivors, trauma, trauma-therapy, truth, unspeakable, victims, violations, wisdom

263 likes

#25

“BEFRIENDING THE BODY

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies.

The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

tags: angeranger, awareness, body, emotions, fear, mind, mind-body-spirit, mindfulnessmindfulness, psychology, ptsd, recovery, touch, trauma, victims

256 likes

#26

“Combat and rape, the public and private forms of organized social violence, are primarily experiences of adolescent and early adult life. The United States Army enlists young men at seventeen; the average age of the Vietnam combat soldier was nineteen. In many other countries boys are conscripted for military service while barely in their teens. Similarly, the period of highest risk for rape is in late adolescence. Half of all victims are aged twenty or younger at the time they are raped; three-quarters are between the ages of thirteen and twenty-six. The period of greatest psychological vulnerability is also in reality the period of greatest traumatic exposure, for both young men and young women. Rape and combat might thus be considered complementary social rites of initiation into the coercive violence at the foundation of adult society. They are the paradigmatic forms of trauma for women and men.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: combat, ptsd, rape, trauma

54 likes

#27

“If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted.”
― Stefan Molyneux

tags: child-abuse, childhood-trauma, freedom, parenting, peaceful-parenting, psychology, ptsd, relationships, self-esteem, self-knowledge, therapy, trauma, unconscious

75 likes

#28

“Here, from her ashes you lay. A broken girl so lost in despondency that you know that even if she does find her way out of this labyrinth in hell, that she will never see, feel, taste, or touch life the same again.”
― Amanda Steele, The Cliff

tags: insomnia, ptsd, rape, rape-survivor, reborn

59 likes

#29

“If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished. If you come from an incomprehensible world filled with secrecy and fear, it’s almost impossible to find the words to express what you have endured. If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

tags: abuse, fear, love, neglect, parental-abuse, parenting, ptsd, secrecy, self-esteem, trauma

137 likes

#30

“We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive.”
― Pat Barker, The Ghost Road

tags: hospitals, mental-illness, ptsd, trauma, war

24 likes

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