Augusten Burroughs Quotes

You must find the strength to open the wounds, stick your hands inside, pull out the core of the pain that is holding you in your past, the memories, and make peace with them.

Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.

Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.

Characters who experience great trauma will sometimes create an escape.

For people like me, who have blocked out a chunk of their past, you wonder - if you open that door, if you walk into that room of your memories, what will happen? Will it destroy you or will it make you stronger?

When you come from so many damaged places you don't ever want to spiral back there, so you gotta continue to check yourself.

In treatment, all of the negative things I did were stripped away and I had to start processing my feelings.

The results of any traumatic experience, such as abuse, can only be resolved by experiencing, articulating, and judging every facet of the original experience within a process of careful therapeutic disclosure.

If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.

You externalise extreme emotions, and you look at them objectively and understand them from a different standpoint.

Maybe I spent more time dwelling on emotions than some people, and maybe that's why I ended up writing.

To imagine that trauma casts out fantasy is a dangerous mistake.

You have to live in the present; not on memories.

I want to keep my head in the game, my ego low.

Don't write about your most emotionally charged moment as a learning thing.

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.

The whole point is to discipline the mind.

Many people do not distinguish between something that happens to them and their reaction to it. Yet it isn't the event or situation that holds the emotional charge; it's our beliefs that create our response.

We won't let ourselves feel our anger, rage, and pain. We push it down or anesthetize it through drugs, alcohol, shopping, or whatever we do in order not to feel it. When that memory and the associated feelings get lodged down there in our soul, the feelings are still there. They don't just magically go away. We have to give ourselves the opportunity to feel them.

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

What remains of your past if you didn't allow yourself to feel it when it happened? If you don't have your experiences in the moment, if you gloss them over with jokes or zoom past them, you end up with curiously dispassionate memories.

I handle emotional pain by trying to understand that it's going to be painful and to allow for it instead of fighting it. Doesn't make it any easier, though.

In an era of stress and anxiety, when the present seems unstable and the future unlikely, the natural response is to retreat and withdraw from reality, taking recourse either in fantasies of the future or in modified visions of a half-imagined past.

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.

Mindfulness is about finding ways to slow down and pay attention to the present moment-which improves performance and reduces stress. It’s about having the time and space to attend to what’s right in front of us, even though many other forces are trying to keep us stuck in the past or inviting us to fantasize or worry about the future. It’s about a natural quality each of us possesses, and which we can further develop in just a few minutes a day.