Judith Lewis Herman Quotes

No good neurotic finds it difficult to be both opinionated and indecisive.

--Why are we fighting them? --They're mad. We're sane. --How do we know? --That we're sane? --Yes. --Am I sane? --To all appearances. --And you, do you consider yourself sane? --I do. --Well, there you have it. --But don't they also consider themselves sane? --I think they know. Deep down. That they're not sane. --How must that make them feel? --Terrible, I should think. They must fight ever more fiercely, in order to deny what they know to be true. That they are not sane.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.

If I didn't forgive the people who took me into the barracks and beat me unconscious over a period of days during the period when the British state was indicted for inhuman and degrading treatment in 1971-72, or even the guys who shot me, if you don't forgive them, you end up with unnecessary baggage.

As much as I love boxing, I hate it. And as much as I hate it, I love it.

Declaring independence was the most traumatic decision I had to live up to. Because I didn't want to do it.

There's something called latent PTSD. It manifests itself in different ways. I want to be free of it, but I'm not.

Sometimes history reads like a catalogue of post-traumatic stress.

I don't want to show my pain. I resisted; I hesitated. I tried to be invisible, to pretend that nothing was wrong. It's impossible; it's not like me.

David Lynch's 'Fire Walk With Me' has a scene in it that scared me so bad that I don't remember it. I blocked the memory out - repeatedly! I've seen the film two or three times, and I can never remember what it is that scares me.

I still deal with triggers and neuroses that I've developed over the decades. But I do think I have a great amount of compassion for people who feel that they don't fit in, or people who feel they have trouble finding their place in this world.

I could almost see common sense and denial fighting away at each other within her. In the end, denial won, as it so often does.

Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn't cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost. His heart, the war. Her face, the battlefield. With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned. And ran.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

My body Healed quickly. But the wound to my psyche was deep. Wide. First aid, too little, too late, left me hemorrhaging inside, the blood unstaunched by psychological bandage or love's healing magic. Eventually it scabbed over, a thick, ugly welt of memory. I work to conceal it, but no matter how hard I try, once in a while something makes me pick at it until the scarring bleeds. In my arms, Ashante cries, innocence ripped apart by circumstance. Bloodied by inhuman will. Time will prove a tourniquet. But she will always be at risk of infection. (124)

My whole life has been merely a succession of miserable and unsuccessful denials of feelings or reason.

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.

Modern science knows much about such conflicts. We call the mental state that engenders it "ambivalence": a collision between thought and feeling.

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?

I didn't think I should die but I did not know how I would Live.

I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me.

No matter what I do, I'm hurting someone." - Katniss Everdeen

The trauma of the whole thing has been humbling, and for the first time, I'm a little bit wobbly.