PTSD Quotes and Insight into The Complexity of Trauma

​To find out what you want, you need to learn to express and act on what you don't want. It is that which helps you to clear your boundaries and intentions.

​Recovery from trauma has its own rhythm. You will have to feel yourself where you can "up" your efforts or when you might be doing too much. Sometimes doing more is less because you might not be ready or receptive just yet.

​It’s imperative to remove yourself from an abusive environment before you can start your healing process.

​Guilt, blame or self-reproach, in terms of trauma, is intrinsically linked to the story of what happened to you; as in flashbacks, replaying of events or reenactment.

​There is the assumption that a change of habit will change one's emotional well-being, rather than realizing that a change in emotional well-being will facilitate making a change in habit patterns and in turn will promote better health.

​​Dissociation is both a lifesaver, as it attempts to regulate the overwhelming emotions, and may form an obstacle to healing, as it keeps the emotional inner storm from being fully met. This is the conundrum of trauma. Understanding these mechanisms and then slowly, gently allowing them to unfold within a safe setting will help bring about its resolution.

​The process of overcoming is endless. Overcoming is not resolution. Overcoming is a looping process where a dominant emotion has to be overcome by its opposite, and it is the opposites that are bound together.

​PTSD, in most cases, is not caused by a stand-alone incident. It is highly linked to developmental issues that have formed character structures, which causes individuals  to attract situations that can be retraumatizing.

​When the brain is still developing and the identity of a person is forming, patterning of the nervous system and brain tissue might be impaired or impeded, due to traumatic experiences or periods; therefore, working through these early patterns will take significantly more time and dedicated work than traumas experienced in adulthood.

​When healthy boundaries have been breached we swing between hyperactivation, fight and flight responses, and hypoactivation, or freeze response, each with their own set of distinct symptoms.

​Perspective is so vital in how we interpret reality, as well as in our healing process. A change of perspective demands a flexibility of our belief systems, and this can be challenging but very rewarding in the long run.

​Going through a traumatic experience or period in life disconnects us from embodiment, from a sense of integrity; it is through connecting to self and others, that we can reestablish that sense of integrity, capacity and healthy boundaries again.

​I think we need to healthily balance our efforts to address post-trauma, within containment, and to leave enough space to not get too focused on it. It is so easy to either fall into resistance to it, or get overwhelmed and drown in our post-trauma symptoms. Part of the work is to keep finding that dynamic middle-- that dynamic balance of not too much and not too little--of rest and activity.

​​The longer traumatic residue stays in the body and the mind, the more complex and rooted become the coping mechanisms originally adopted to deal with the emotionally overwhelming experience or period in life.