Hidden Trauma Quotes

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

Whatever had happened to him [Newt] out there — maybe even related to his lingering ankle injury — had been truly awful.

When you meet me and hang out with me, I might come across as a very upbeat, driven person. I don't come across as someone who is wounded.

My dad served in the Air Force as ground crew for several years, and doesn't really talk about it. I know that it's there. I think my main thing about direct or indirect experiences as near to home as it were is the idea of self-sacrifice really.

As victims of hurt, we frequently don't bring up what ails us, because so many wounds look absurd in the light of day.

A lot of the people who are supposed to be enforcing the crime, enforcing the law, are also criminals. They've suppressed something in their childhood and they don't want to think they themselves were sexually abused as children or they are abusing their own children and they're sitting on a bench and they either can't admit it, won't admit it, depending on how deeply buried it is.

After I became an attorney, the mother of two girls I'd known in high school came to see me. She'd endured years of heinous abuse from her husband that nearly destroyed her. I'd never suspected a thing.

As I handed her the bag, the old scars on my wrist throbbed with buried memories.

You are never angry for the reason you think you are. There's an older hurt under that.

We didn't talk about our scars, the ones you could see and the ones you couldn't.

If you want to understand a difficult or trying person, begin by asking the question: 'What is the wound they are trying to heal?'

It occurred to me that there was a story behind the scar -- maybe not as dramatic as the story of my wrists, but a story nonetheless -- and the fact that everyone had a story behind some mark on their inside or outside suddenly exhausted me, the gravity of all those untold pasts.

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.

The interesting thing about something in the back of your mind is that it can travel pretty far back in your mind.