Trauma Response Quotes

“Maybe - you didn't have so much control over your life as a kid. So, to avoid disappointment, you learned never to ask yourself what you truly wanted.”
― Emily Henry, Beach Read

“Children of borderlines may tune out by dissociating and disconnecting from their environment. They cannot feel embarrassed, humiliated, ridiculed, or hurt if they are no longer in their own bodies. Unfortunately, the sensation of depersonalization or dissociation makes them feel crazy.”
― Christine Ann Lawson, Understanding the Borderline Mother

“I didn't want to talk. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be.”
― K.L. Speer, Bones

“If that was the cause - all these ambiguities, these contradictions, these grey areas that spread and engulfed all sense - how could Pip rectify that? How could she cure herself from the after effects?”
― Holly Jackson, As Good As Dead

“When we resist the urge to respond impulsively, and plant ourselves in our center as opposed to grasping at straws outside ourselves, we tap into a wellspring of inner fortitude.

Such mindful silence allows us to detach from the heat of the moment and respond with clarity rather than reactivity. Choosing silence more and more, we lose less and less energy to ‘dumb shit,’ as I like to say, while intelligently reclaiming our power faster and faster.”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality

“Your brain is recognizing a pattern that it has flagged with life-or-death importance, and it reflexively shoots out what it believes to be the appropriate response… None of this of course is reasonable or rational. But your brain is not trying to be reasonable. It’s trying to save your life.”
― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know

“One of the greatest threats to the well-being of Black women is not recognizing behaviors as trauma responses, because it keeps us trapped in a dangerous cycle of self-harm. We are definitely susceptible to this when our trauma responses coincide with practices that we value and honor, and that we are praised and celebrated for in culture and music.”
― Shanita Hubbard

“He’s still in shock, but sooner or later, his trauma will catch up to him, and the anger will surface. Better we allow him to purge it in a way that brings him closure, than let it simmer beneath the surface and poison him.”
― Marie Mistry, Across an Endless Sea

“These researchers found that trauma is a subjective, perceptive, and physiological response to a person, place, or thing that overwhelms the nervous system's natural capacity to cope. Practically, this means that trauma is in the eye of the beholder. What is traumatic for one person may not be traumatic for another, and thr body may experience trauma as a result of either a real threat or a perceived one.”
― Laura E. Anderson, When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion

“I've been on the very top. I've been as happy as a man can be. I've had the greatest joys. The greatest friends. I've had victories and I've had....love. And then...something happens. You lose something or...someone or...and there it is again. I'm there again. Mother's tangled. Father's yelling. I'm ten and I'm on my damn knees. And I'm scared out of my damn mind. And feeling that, I say...I become...something, I do things....I'm not...I am myself. But I'm not what I want to be or what I should be. I'm scared. And I'll do anything to get out of the fright.”
― Tom King, Batman, Vol. 8: Cold Days