Brin-Jonathan Butler Quotes

I'm happy that I'm alive. I feel like someone coming back from Vietnam, you know; I'm sure that later on I'll start killing people in a square somewhere, but right now, I just feel happy to be alive.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

Children can only take so much, and they deal with it however they can.

If you write a novel where war is nothing but hell and no one experiences excitement or cracks a dark joke, then you're not actually admitting the full experience.

Let's suppose somebody abused you sexually. You still had a choice, though not a good one, about what to tell yourself about the abuse.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

People endure what they endure and they deal with it. It may corrupt them. It may lead them into all sorts of compensatory excesses.

It's kind of a mystery to me, as far as my own life experiences and what I've witnessed - why some people can just move on through traumatic experiences, in childhood particularly, and why other people are just paralyzed by it. I just don't know how and why that is.

My fears and anxieties throughout my whole life have been slowly squeezing my voice.

Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.

When you're traumatized, you pick out one thing you remember more than anything else.

My mother had a lot of phobias. She's pregnant with me and she was a very phobic person. So I was born into phobia, basically.

I had my moments when I got very frightened that I would not recover.

There is research on the effects of 9/11, and you know, compared to the enormity of it, it didn't have a huge effect on people's mood. They were going about their business, mostly.

I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

I probably only cried five or six times in my life and I think four of those times was from my daddy kicking my butt.

We manage the fear, I manage the fear, but it certainly takes its toll, the strain does.

I had trained myself not to go to the bathroom throughout my elementary and junior high school years because I was bullied. And you don't understand why you're being bullied, so you just suppress it.

I have survivor's curiosity, I guess.

I was interested in the war part of 'Star Wars,' so I started reading about what it's like to go to war, what that does to you psychically, about the adrenaline and the rush.

'Creep,' unfortunately, was one of my true stories.

Trauma and pain and suffering can be the very thing that dislodges a person from themselves both in awful ways and larger ways that force one to reckon with one's own life.

Even though I will never be evicted again, I am haunted by those times and still work relentlessly.

I can't imagine having to it to walk into murder scenes, and then trying to let that go, at the end of the day, and going home to your own family to live a normal life.

I think for guys who get severely injured and can't move forward, it's because the 'what-ifs' absolutely destroy their recovery.