Ralph Nader Quotes

I have a hot memory, but I know I've forgotten many things, too, just squashed things in favor of survival.

Flashbacks rarely involve language. Mine certainly didn't. They were visual, motor, and sensory, and they took place in a relentless, horrifying present.

The thing that always interests me from a storytelling point of view is how that moment of trauma, whatever the trauma is, even divorce, your dog dies, whatever it is, the consequence, in terms of people's emotional lives and the way it resonates behaviorally for a long time, is really the stuff that interests me.

Stuff happens when you are a kid; it scars you inside for life.

It's a universal truth that no parent wishes to acknowledge that the fear and phobias we are in thrall to in adulthood almost invariably connect back to childhood experiences.

I think when people are repressing things, or burying things, that can manifest in all sorts of ways.

You do run and scream and cry and work yourself up into hysterics, and then you get back to the hotel at the end of the day, and you feel really off and really strange. And that's because rationally, even though you know everything is OK, you have put yourself through this traumatizing experience, and your body is still going.

The shock of any trauma, I think changes your life. It's more acute in the beginning and after a little time you settle back to what you were. However it leaves an indelible mark on your psyche.

It's a painful thing to talk about my childhood. I kind of don't talk about it much.

If you don't work through the things that haunt you early, they'll stay with you for the rest of your life.

I feel like I've had a lot of painful situations that I intentionally delete from my memory.

There are things that can harm a lot more than physically.

As human beings, even if we were to have tried to forget the past, if you dealt with it in a cavalier fashion, it would return to haunt you.

I don't think it's healthy to have 68-year-old men, 70-year-old men thinking regularly about a traumatic experience that happened to them and thinking that they cannot talk about it with anybody, and no one wants to listen.

I think that definitely any trauma - whether it's childhood or later in life - affects you negatively, especially when it's suppressed, but there's so much of us which is already in place.

I have PTSD from all the reporters coming in over the years.

'Closure' is the word used for a loss that's not acknowledged - and the habit this causes, physically and mentally, for anybody who is participating in that.

It's not good for you to be barred from traveling to certain places in your head because some skeleton is in the closet.

For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain.

I think there's loads of undiagnosed depression where I came from. Post-traumatic stress disorder as well. Some of the things you see as a kid are like the things you'd expect to see in a war zone, but there's no one to talk to about it because running to a psychiatrist ain't the thing.

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

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

Shame--what happened when my mother, the dragon, huffed and puffed and blew my self down.

My guess is that fearful events are the hardest to root out. They're the ones we naturally remember the best, after all.

You get these fear memories that are hard to undo.