Trauma Aftermath Quotes

There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier's sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.

The greatest problem that war leaves, in a man, is how to recapture reality. That's because war is unreal.

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.

We don't forget, but something vacant settles in us.

From any traumatic injury, you're going to experience a lack of confidence. There's a whole process you have to go through to break free of that.

'The melancholy of all things done' is the way Buzz once described his complete mental breakdown after returning from the moon. Booze. A couple of divorces. A psych ward. Broke. At one point he was selling cars.

I Was Psychologically Sick For 3 Days Afterwards.

But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you.

When the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only in appearance. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

The rain Never falls upwards. When the wound Stops hurting What hurts is The scar.

The maimed bodies aren't the worst. That's the easy way to hate war. The safe way. I - hate it just as much for the maimed souls that stay at home.

Was it harder to die, or harder to be the one who survived?

I say a murder is abstract. You pull the trigger and after that you do not understand anything that happens.

Often people who live through the trauma are nostalgic when it's over. When I went back to Bosnia 20 years after the brutal civil war, even people who had been badly wounded told me they missed those times. They were missing their more courageous selves.

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.

A particular type of film emerged from World War Two, with the Italian neorealist school. It was perfectly right for its time, which was as exceptional as the reality around us. Our major interest focused on that and on how we could relate to it. Later, when the situation normalized and post-war life returned to what it had been in peacetime, it became important to see the intimate, interior consequences of all that had happened.

Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

I only know it takes weeks to recover, as if one had been in a car accident.

My father was one of the first six guys ashore on Iwo Jima. He's 86 years old now, and every single night of his life, he has nightmares, and he wakes yelling.

It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.

I was bullied at school, and I let that get hold of me and withdrew into myself - I regret letting that happen.

What happens for a lot of veterans when they come home, especially when they get back to their community is that they can go to a very tough and hard place and they start to wonder, 'What's next for me?' and they ask themselves, 'Why did this happen to me?'

With soldiers, their wives are so fundamental in their relationships, and yet there's this kind of other war happening back in the States, where wives of soldiers don't quite understand what their husbands have been through, because their husbands won't really talk about it, and that's really the hidden war.

Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.