Angela S. > Angela's Quotes

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#1

“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

262 likes

#2

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

tags: love, poetry

39882 likes

#3

“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
― Fred Rogers

tags: communication, fear, friendship, inspirational, trauma, trust

1033 likes

#4

“The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: denial, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, psychotherapy, ptsd, taboo, trauma, truth

309 likes

#5

“In my early professional years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”
― Carl R. Rogers

tags: healing, psychology, psychotherapy, self-knowledge, therapy

226 likes

#6

“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

#7

“Only the wounded healer can truly heal. (97)”
― Irvin D. Yalom, Lying on the Couch

401 likes

#8

“Life as a therapist is a life of service in which we daily transcend our personal wishes and turn our gaze toward the needs and growth of the other. We take pleasure not only in the growth of our patient but also in the ripple effect—the salutary influence our patients have upon those whom they touch in life.”
― Irvin D. Yalom, The Gift of Therapy

59 likes

#9

“If you desire healing,
let yourself fall ill
let yourself fall ill.”
― Rumi

tags: denial, depression, healing, pain, recovery, sadness, suffering

776 likes

#10

“The acceptance of oneself is the essence of the whole moral problem and the epitome of a whole outlook on life. That I feed the hungry, that I forgive an insult, that I love my enemy in the name of Christ -- all these are undoubtedly great virtues. What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ. But what if I should discover that the least among them all, the poorest of all the beggars, the most impudent of all the offenders, the very enemy himself -- that these are within me, and that I myself stand in need of the alms of my own kindness -- that I myself am the enemy who must be loved -- what then? As a rule, the Christian's attitude is then reversed; there is no longer any question of love or long-suffering; we say to the brother within us "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves. We hide it from the world; we refuse to admit ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves.”
― C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

tags: christianity, denial, forgiveness, love, morality, self-image

734 likes

#11

“Most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

tags: denial, honesty, truth

2710 likes

#12

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
― Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

477 likes

#13

“Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.”
― Peter A. Levine

tags: gift, healing, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, posttraumatic-stress, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, ptsd, relief, trauma, trauma-experiences, trauma-healing, traumatic-epiphonies, traumatic-stress, traumatized

73 likes

#14

“First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

tags: complex-ptsd, healing, healing-abuse, healing-process, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, psychotherapy, ptsd, recovery, recovery-from-abuse, therapy, trauma, trauma-therapy, traumatic-stress

59 likes

#15

“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

tags: abuse, abuse-survivors, abusive-childhood, abusive-parents, avoidance, child-abuse, child-rape, childhood-abuse, defense-mechanism, denial, denial-of-abuse, denial-of-child-abuse, denial-of-incest, dissociated-amnesia, dissociative-amnesia, fear-of-truth, flashback, flashbacks, healing, healing-abuse, healing-from-abuse, healing-insights, incest, intrusive, minimization, minimizing, minimizing-issues, parental-abuse, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, psychological-defence, ptsd, reliving-the-past, sadistic-abuse, subconscious, subconscious-mind, survivors, trauma-memories, traumatic-experiences, traumatic-memories, traumatized

40 likes

#16

“In order to believe clients' accounts of trauma, you need to suspend any pre-conceived notions that you have about what is possible and impossible in human experience. As simple as they may sound, it may be difficult to do so.”
― Aphrodite Matsakis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Complete Treatment Guide

tags: abuse-survivors, denial, disbelief, post-traumatic-stress-disorder, posttraumatic-stress-disorder, society-denial, trauma, traumatic-experiences, traumatized

14 likes

#17

“Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

tags: minimization, posttraumatic, ptsd, reality, society, society-denial, trauma, traumatic

158 likes

#18

“Violators cannot live with the truth: survivors cannot live without it. There are those who still, once again, are poised to invalidate and deny us. If we don't assert our truth, it may again be relegated to fantasy. But the truth won't go away. It will keep surfacing until it is recognized. Truth will outlast any campaigns mounted against it, no matter how mighty, clever, or long. It is invincible. It's only a matter of which generation is willing to face it and, in so doing, protect future generations from ritual abuse.”
― Chrystine Oksana, Safe Passage to Healing: A Guide for Survivors of Ritual Abuse

tags: abusers, child-abuse, child-protection, child-sexual-abuse-lies, deny, fantasy, invalidate, invalidation, media-campaign, media-distortions, perpetrators, propaganda, rape, ritual-abuse, sexual-abuse, society-denial, survivors, truth-violators, victims

161 likes

#19

“Truth, like love and sleep, resents approaches that are too intense.”
― W. H. Auden

tags: love, sleep, society-denial, truth

94 likes

#20

“Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.”
― Christine Stockton, Sluts

tags: denial, rape, rape-culture, reality, shock, society-denial, taboo

21 likes

#21

“With respect to the acceptance of dissociative disorders, as with most issues in life, it is counterproductive to spend time trying to convince people of things they don't want to know.”
― Warwick Middleton

tags: avoidance, denial, dissociation, dissociative-disorders, dissociative-identity-disorder, don-t-want-to-know, not-knowing, society-denial

12 likes

#22

“There is a much greater skepticism toward the memories of those who claim abuse than toward the memories of those who deny it.”
― Sue Campbell, Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars

tags: child-sexual-abuse, dissociative-amnesia, false-memory-syndrome, false-memory-syndrome-campaign, memory-wars, recovered-memories, repressed-memories, repression, society-denial, trauma-memory, traumatic-amnesia

7 likes

#23

“It was that culture of denial that allowed my abuse to take place to start with. Did you know that it wasn't until 1984 that the Department of Health added the category of "sexual abuse" to its list of harms that can befall children? When I was being raped and made pregnant at the age of 11, it wasn't just my own dissociative process that told me that it wasn't happening; it was society too. "We don't have a category for that. Computer says no."͏”
― Carolyn Spring, Living with the Reality of Dissociative Identity Disorder: Campaigning Voices

tags: abuse-deniers, child-protection, child-rape, child-sexual-abuse, childhood-sexual-abuse, chosen-ignorance, denial, denial-of-abuse, denying-reality, department-of-health, dissociative, incest, inconvenient-truth, society-denial

9 likes

#24

“Several psychologists (L. Armstrong, 1994; Enns, McNeilly, Corkery, & Gilbert, 1995; Herman, 1992; McFarlane & van der Kolk, 1996; Pope & Brown, 1996) contend that the controversy of delayed recall for traumatic events is likely to be influenced by sexism. Kristiansen, Gareau, Mittleholt, DeCourville, and Hovdestad (1995) found that people who were more authoritarian and who had less favorable attitudes toward women were less likely to believe in the veracity of women’s recovered memories for sexual abuse. Those who challenged the truthfulness of recovered memories were more likely to endorse negative statements about women, including the idea that battered women enjoy being abused. McFarlane and van der Kolk (1996) have noted that delayed recall in male combat veterans reported by Myers (1940) and Kardiner (1941) did not generate controversy, whereas delayed recall in female survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse has provoked considerable debate.”
― Rachel E. Goldsmith

tags: abuse-survivors, authoritarian, bias, child-sexual-abuse, controversy, credibility, delayed-reaction, denial, doubting-mind, incest, psychological-trauma, recovered-memories, recovered-memory, sexism, sexual-abuse, society-denial, survivors, trauma, trauma-memory, traumatic-experiences

10 likes

#25

“No" is a complete sentence.”
― Annie Lamott

tags: boundaries

449 likes

#26

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”
― Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

tags: boundaries, eros, love

235 likes

#27

“I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

tags: anchoring, attachment, belonging, future, home, homelessness, leaving, memories, memory, moving-on, past, reminiscence, roots, uncertainty

2057 likes

#28

“Home's where you go when you run out of homes.”
― John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

tags: anchoring, attachment, belonging, home, homecoming, homelessness, roots

1391 likes

#29

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

tags: anchoring, attachment, belonging, comfort, completion, fulfillment, home, irrevocability, permanence, philosophy, psychology, safety, security, state-of-mind

1925 likes

#30

“I've been doing this a long time- manipulating people to get my way. That's why you think you love me. Because I've broken you down and built you back up to believe it. It wasn't an accident. Once you leave this behind..... you'll see that. -Caleb”
― CJ Roberts, Seduced in the Dark

tags: attachment, caleb, manipulation, stockholm-syndrome, trauma-bond

285 likes

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