Hypervigilance Quotes

“After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Fear and anxiety affect decision making in the direction of more caution and risk aversion... Traumatized individuals pay more attention to cues of threat than other experiences, and they interpret ambiguous stimuli and situations as threatening (Eyesenck, 1992), leading to more fear-driven decisions. In people with a dissociative disorder, certain parts are compelled to focus on the perception of danger. Living in trauma-time, these dissociative parts immediately perceive the present as being "just like" the past and "emergency" emotions such as fear, rage, or terror are immediately evoked, which compel impulsive decisions to engage in defensive behaviors (freeze, flight, fight, or collapse). When parts of you are triggered, more rational and grounded parts may be overwhelmed and unable to make effective decisions.”
― Suzette Boon, Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists

“Blame is a Defense Against Powerlessness

Betrayal trauma changes you. You have endured a life-altering shock, and are likely living with PTSD symptoms— hypervigilance, flashbacks and bewilderment—with broken trust, with the inability to cope with many situations, and with the complete shut down of parts of your mind, including your ability to focus and regulate your emotions.

Nevertheless, if you are unable to recognize the higher purpose in your pain, to forgive and forget and move on, you clearly have chosen to be addicted to your pain and must enjoy playing the victim.

And the worst is, we are only too ready to agree with this assessment! Trauma victims commonly blame themselves. Blaming oneself for the shame of being a victim is recognized by trauma specialists as a defense against the extreme powerlessness we feel in the wake of a traumatic event. Self-blame continues the illusion of control shock destroys, but prevents us from the necessary working through of the traumatic feelings and memories to heal and recover.”
― Sandra Lee Dennis

“I am hyper alert to people turning away from me. I have a perennial sense of being an outsider.”
― Wendy Hoffman, White Witch in a Black Robe: A True Story About Criminal Mind Control

“HYPERAROUSAL
After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyerarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. Kardiner propsed that "the nucleus of the [traumatic] neurosis is physioneurosis."8 He believed that many of the symptoms observed in combat veterans of the First World War-startle reactions, hyperalertness, vigilance for the return of danger, nightmares, and psychosomatic complaints-could be understood as resulting from chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system. He also interpreted the irritability and explosively aggressive behavior of traumatized men as disorganized fragments of a shattered "fight or flight" response to overwhelming danger.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror

“Hyperarousal causes traumatized people to become easily distressed by unexpected stimuli. Their tendency to be triggered into reliving traumatic memories illustrates how their perceptions have become excessively focused on the involuntary search for the similarities between the present and their traumatic past. As a consequence, many neutral experiences become reinterpreted as being associated with the traumatic past.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain

“July 15, 1991

Nita: My mother was a paragon of our neighborhood, People always come up to us with hugs, saying "You have the most wonderful mother." l'd think. “Don't you see what's going on in this house?” To this day, if somehow even in jest raises their hand to me, I will do this (raises hands to protect face and cowers) I cringe. Then they look at me like, what's your probem? You don't get that from a great childhood.”
― Sarah E. Olson, Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Dissociative Identity Disorder

“Parentified children learn to take responsibility for themselves and others early on. They tend to fade into the woodwork and let others take center stage. This extends into adulthood - adult children may put others' needs before their own. They may have difficulty accepting care and attention.”
― Kimberlee Roth, Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem

“God will come barefoot
looking for his lost shoe
eaten up by pseudo sons
waiting with charts of Obituary
at every unreal heart-scope
while volcanoes gather around me
( Selected Poems of Malay Roychoudhury )”
― Malay Roychoudhury

“If we ignore our abuse and trauma, it will continue to reveal itself to us. It may be subtle or it may be intense. Trauma can show up in our sleep. We may battle insomnia and nightmares. We can experience physical pain and emotional distress. We may struggle with anxiety and depression. Or we may suffer hypervigilance, dissociation, and Complex PTSD/PTSD. We may have flashbacks. We may battle triggers. Or we can suddenly be slammed with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. Each of these signs are a normal trauma response. Even if we are unaware that it’s linked to our emotional trauma.”
― Dana Arcuri, Certified Trauma Recovery Coach, Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma

“The lack of divine love has created a parasitical environment in which humans feed on other humans for power, much like vampires seeking blood, although this feeding is energetic power. The lack of divine love frequency has resulted in an environment in which humanity is incapable to undergo the natural process of biological ascension without the help of divine intervention. And yet, divine intervention requires the individual to be conscious beyond the belief in news, government, corporate, and mask wearing programming to ask in commitment, benevolence, and dedication for this hyper vigilant assistance.”
― Deborah Bravandt

“His unpredictable responses lead her to 'walk on eggshells', endlessly hypervigilant, alert to the need to adapt her behaviour to prevent further abuse. Needless to say, the victim is left exhausted by constantly having to monitor her abuser's emotional state.”
― Jess Hill, See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Violence

“Even rest is fragile. I am afraid all the time. I am afraid of what has already happened. And of what could happen.”
― Edith Eva Eger, The Choice: Embrace the Possible

“The cognitive style of individuals with paranoid personality disorder deserves special mention. Overtly, they have a legalistic bent, sharp attention, rich vocabulary, hypervigilance, and a tendency toward perceptual hairsplitting; they often possess striking oratorial skills. Covertly, however, they are unable to grasp the “big picture.” They readily dismiss the obvious, including any evidence that is contradictory to their preexisting beliefs. Their attention is narrow and biased. They are experts in seeing the “truth” but almost always fail to grasp the “whole truth.”
― Salman Akhtar, Quest for Answers: A Primer of Understanding and Treating Severe Personality Disorders

“Our faces are neither paler nor more flushed than usual; they are not more tense nor more flabby - and yet they are changed. We feel that in our blood a contact has shot home. That is no figure of speech; it is fact. It is the front, the consciousness of the front, that makes this contact. The moment that the first shells whistle over and the air is rent with the explosions there is suddenly in our veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a heightening alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. the body with one bound is in full readiness.”
― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“Denial helps the bystander. . . We would rather not know about terror or be confronted with evil. . . But the victim, too, cannot bear to believe. She may bury or dissociate from or disown her pain. She may drink or take drugs, or become unwittingly promiscuous. Compelled to repeat the violation again and again. . . The impact of the violation drips lazily down, like that clock in Dalí's painting, pooling in the form of shame. She may remember the facts that transpired, but the outline is blurry. There is a haze in the brain, and the facts are detached from feeling.

Certain sounds or scents may terrify the victim. But she may not notice her fear. . . For a very long time, I had forgotten or dissociated or forgotten the source of my terrors.

To be raped or abused or threatened with violent death, to be treated as an object in a perpetrator's dream, rather than the subject of your own – these are bad enough. But when observers become complicit in the victim's desire to forget, they become perpetrators, too.

This is why traumatized groups sometimes fare better than traumatized individuals. When the feeling of terror is shared, victims have a harder time forgetting what occurred or denying their terror. In the camps, what mattered most. . .was whether there were witnesses willing to share the burden of overwhelming emotion. Talking about what occurred with other survivors or witnesses was an essential part of recovery. . .

When authorities disbelieve the victim, when bystanders refute what they cannot bear to know, they rob the victim of normal existence on the earth. Bystander and victim collude in denial or forgetting, and in so doing, repeat the abuse. . .

In this new world, the victim can no longer trust the evidence of her senses. Something seems to have happened, but what? The ground disappears. This is the alchemy of denial. Terror, rage, and pain are replaced with free floating shame. The victim will begin to wonder, 'what did I do?' She will begin to believe 'I must have done something bad.' But the sensation of shame is shameful itself. So we dissociate that, too. In the end, a victim who has suffered the denial of others will come to see herself as a liar.

The terrible truth is that once a person has been raped or abused, she seems to acquire a scent or a frequency that makes her an irresistible target for abusers. She may be haunted by a feeling of ungroundedness, by periods of hypervigilance. If she is lucky, as I was, she may find or fall into a career where hypervigilance is useful. Though, it is unlikely to be useful in her personal life. . .

The dizziness brought on by the denial of others is often worse than the original crime. When I think about what denial does, I can understand why some victims, thank God a small number, take out a gun and find someone to shoot or maul or rape, sometimes in their own homes.”
― Jessica Stern, Denial: A Memoir of Terror

“To walk through unknown streets in cities where you are merely learning the language is to force yourself into a new state of hypervigilance. You are a traveler, and hopefully not just a tourist, and must appear calm, but maintain your bearings. Not to get too lost, too off course and without alternatives, without an escape plan in the event of a dangerous situation.”
― M.B. Dallocchio, The Desert Warrior

“Nassun can't see his face, and must gauge his mood by his broad shoulders. (It bothers her that she does this, watching him constantly for shifts of mood or warnings of tension. It is another thing she learned from Jija. She cannot seem to shed it with Schaffa, or anyone else.)”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“At the sound, XX rolls over and looks around with feral, instantly-alert eyes. He will, she imagines, never lose that habit of the palace slave.”
― Candas Jane Dorsey, Black Wine

“Non sognamo, forse, l'implosione, piuttosto che l'esplosione, la metamorfosi, piuttosto che l'energia, l'obbligo e la sfida rituale, piuttosto che la libertà, il ciclio territoriale piuttosto che...
Ma le bestie non pongono domande. Tacciono.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation