#trauma

Many survivors insist they’re not courageous: ‘If I were courageous I would have stopped the abuse.’ ‘If I were courageous, I wouldn’t be scared’... Most of us have it mixed up. You don’t start with courage and then face fear. You become courageous because you face your fear.” The Courage to Heal Workbook by Laura Davis ↗

— Laura Davis

#child-sexual-abuse #courage #fear #healing #mental-health

Our favorite film is Vertigo. Amy Eleni and I must watch it seventeen or eighteen times a year, and with each viewing our raptness grows looser and looser; we don't need the visuals anymore--one or the other of us can go into the kitchen halfway through and call out the dialogue while making up two cups of Horlicks. From the minute you see empty, beautiful, blond Madeleine Elster, you know she is doomed because she exists in a way that Scottie, the male lead, just doesn't. You know that Madeleine is in big trouble, because she's a vast wound in a landscape where wounds aren't allowed to stay open--people have to shut up and heal up. She's in trouble because the film works to a plan that makes trauma speak itself out, speak itself to excess until it dies; this film at the peak of its slyness, when people sweat and lick their lips excessively and pound their chests and grab their hair and twist their heads from side to side, performing this unspeakable torment. ↗

— Helen Oyeyemi

#vertigo #wound #beauty

A bad thing happened to you kids, Dad said. But it could have been worse. So much worse, Mom said. But because of you kids, Dad said, it wasn't. You did so good, Mom said. Did beautiful, Dad said. ↗

— George Saunders

#children #trauma #beauty

Just like there's always time for pain, there's always time for healing. ↗

— Jennifer Brown

#life-lessons #pain #traumatic-experiences #experience

When you're surrounded by friends and exes, there's a whole lot of stuff that starts crawling out. But however serious and traumatic those experiences may be to the participant, to the onlooker they're hilarious. ↗

— Steven Moffat

#experiences #friends #hilarious #however #lot

I think if you've held onto a character for several years and then you're getting rid of that character, it's going to be traumatic. ↗

— Dominic Monaghan

#getting #going #held #i #i think

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions. ↗

— Henry A. Kissinger

#american foreign policy #applying #caused #conditions #foreign

When I was six years old, my parents took me to this farmers' market with a petting zoo. They put me on a pony and, for some reason, it took off at a run and they had to chase it down. They tell me it was kind of traumatic. ↗

— David Schwimmer

#down #farmers #had #i #kind

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off. ↗

— Peter Straub

#agreed #books #childhood #days #effects

I get mad at people who talk about traumatic job interviews, about going on one and getting rejected. I get rejected all the time and not only do I get rejected, but people have no problem being really specific about why I was rejected. ↗

— Julia Sweeney

#being #get #getting #going #i