I was called everything ugly and black in the world. Man, those where some tough times. They called me Fat Albert, Magilla Gorilla, black ape. It all hurt.
Trauma fractures comprehension as a pebble shatters a windshield. The wound at the site of impact spreads across the field of vision, obscuring reality and challenging belief.
When the Cleveland Cavaliers lost the 2015 NBA Finals to Golden State, LeBron James sat motionless in the locker room, staring straight ahead, still wearing his game jersey, for 45 minutes after the final buzzer. Here was a guy immensely wealthy, widely admired, at the peak of his powers - yet stricken, inconsolable.
Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure/A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.
Unlike other professions - doctor, lawyer, teacher, journalist, sales clerk, stock broker - when a cop makes a bad mistake, it could mean someone is dead. They take home mental baggage unlike anything carried in almost every other job.
Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.
People say you need to be strong, smart, and lucky to survive hard times, war, a natural disaster, or physical torture. But I say emotional abuse—anxiety, fear, guilt, and degradation—is far worse and much harder to survive.
The psychology of brutality was worse than the beatings.
Once I beat a guy, mentally and physically, hes never the same.
My three obsessions are mental illness, horror and religion.
New York, home of the vivisectors of the mind, and of the mentally vivisected still to be reassembled, of those who live intact, habitually wondering about their states of sanity, and home of those whose minds have been dead, bearing the scars of resurrection.
To torture a man you have to know his pleasures.
There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.
No pain equals that of an injury inflicted under the pretense of just punishment.
I'm ruined beyond repair, is what I fear...And if so, in time we'd both be wretched and bitter." "I know people can be mended. Not all, and some more immediately than others. But some can be. I don't see why not you." "Why not me?
I spent five years in a North Vietnamese POW camp, kept in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again?
Depression leads him close to his wounds, but only the mourning for what he has missed, missed at the crucial time, can lead to real healing.
I have a store full of thousands and thousands of images in my brain. I've got this terrible feeling I'm like some abattoir boss: I know death; I know the cut pieces of the human body.
Probably the biggest thing for me was my Wrestlemania match getting cut; I don't think I ever really mentally recovered from that.
I do not know what horrified me most [during the depression]: the economic misery of my companions [or] their moral and ethical coarseness.
We do a very good job at fixing broken bodies but not such a great job at healing broken minds with our returning veterans.
I am not trying to say I'm a genius, but 'Underground' was the strongest attack there has been on Milosevic. It is about a man who locks his friends in a cellar for 40 years and convinces them that the war is still going on. He uses them, but they still think he is a great guy. And this was shown in every cinema in Serbia.
Childhood trauma is the rocket fuel for addictive pathology, and this fundamental truth is laid bare in 'Patrick Melrose.'
A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.
I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?
