A traumatic experience is a seismic event that shakes our belief in a just world, robbing us of the sense that life is controllable, predictable, and meaningful.

You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases.

Your trauma is not “in your head”; it is literally a changed state in your brain, and the only way you will help your body to return to its actual state is by recreating the feeling of safety that allows you to “turn off” survival mode and return to normal life.

you will suffer something else: a psychic trauma, a personality change whose dimensions still elude full explanation. You will be emotionally fragile – as prone to tears as to rage. You will be subject to depressions, sudden, black and sometimes suicidal. At one moment you will be as dependent as a child, seeking reassurance after a nightmare. The next you will be angry and frustrated by your own impotence. Your short-term memory may be defective. Your tolerance of emotional stress will be greatly reduced. You will be strongly advised by the counsellors who will be working with

I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.

Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you

Trauma when left untreated has the capacity to make a villain out of you.

Marginalized peoples — excluded, minimized, shamed — are traumatized peoples, because as we’ve discussed, humans are fundamentally relational creatures. To be excluded or dehumanized in an organization, community, or society you are part of results in prolonged, uncontrollable stress that is sensitizing (see Figure 3). Marginalization is a fundamental trauma. This is why I believe that a truly trauma-informed system is an anti-racist system. The destructive effects of racial marginalizing are pervasive and severe.

You got shook and shook till there was nothing left. You lost your name and your body and your self and you just didn't care.

Many times I see you as a portrait of torture.

Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability, to be vulnerable. There's a reclaiming that has to happen.

When you’re in the GAP about any experience, that experience becomes somewhat of a trauma to you. The word trauma may sound extreme, but trauma, by nature, is an experience you’ve framed as negative, which you avoid, and which creates ongoing dysfunction and debilitation in your

...and trauma had a way of burning memories deeper into the mind.

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.

The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015