Trauma Cycle Quotes

Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.

What we drug people have, that you don't, is repeatability.

War is the most powerful narcotic ever invented by humankind. The more you seek it out the more powerful it becomes.

Pain is handed down from one generation to the next.

Childhood was the germ of all mistrust. You were cruelly joked upon and then you cruelly joked. You lost the remembrance of pain through inflicting it.

Horror is like a serpent; always shedding its skin, always changing. And it will always come back. It can't be hidden away like the guilty secrets we try to keep in our subconscious.

Someone had to do something sometime. Every victim was a culprit, every culprit a victim, and somebody had to stand up sometime to try to break the lousy chain of inherited habit that was imperiling them all.

I didn't want my son to see the same things I had seen growing up or have to go through the same things I went through.

War is just what we do. Yet, of course, the effects of it are repeatedly deeper, then deeper, then deeper.

If you don't deal with your shadows, you are condemned to repeat the same mistake over and over, as a human being or as a society.

I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent. Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn't groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor or pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.

For the first five years of Luca's life, I desperately wanted to be a good mother and not to pass on this trauma and darkness that his father and I had experienced, but there's a danger of suffocating your kids, too.

Reconciliation is a part of the healing process, but how can there be healing when the wounds are still being inflicted?

Abandon all remorse; On horror's head horrors accumulate.

Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else.

When our response to all trauma is to call the police, then that gets us into a cycle of perpetuating trauma. Mental health trauma is different from somebody breaking into a store. Those are not the same things, and our response has to be different.

We're all the same, and we all want the same thing. We all want to be secure. We all want food on the table. We want to know that our kids aren't going to be destroyed when they're not with us. We all want the same things, and if we've been hurt in our childhoods, we try and recreate the same hurt.

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: "The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair." In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.