Trauma Processing Quotes

You can't un-have an experience. You can deny the experience; you can process it and try to get through it, but you can't change the fact that it happened to you.

There are alway going to be bad things. But you can write it down and make a song out of it.

The truth about childhood, as many of us have had to endure it, is inconceivable, scandalous, painful. Not uncommonly, it is monstrous. Invariably, it is repressed. To be confronted with this truth all at once and to try to integrate it into our consciousness, however ardently we may wish it, is clearly impossible.

If there's ever a problem, I film it and it's no longer a problem. It's a film.

When I went to Africa I think that was when I really found a way to deal with what I had recently discovered; in two-dimensional terms, at least.

Something terrible can happen in my life, but I wouldn't put it in my art.

When I got to write for the 'Battlefield' record, it was almost therapeutic. I had gone through a few things in the two years prior and it was really nice to take those thoughts and emotions and get them out. I definitely want to hone that side of my artistry.

When you watch 'Doom Patrol,' you'll see most of the characters are trying to run away from their feelings and their emotions, and the minute they take a second and look at themselves face to face, that's when things can actually get resolved and get one step closer to peace.

I don't need to manufacture trauma in my life to be creative. I have a big enough reservoir of sadness or emotional trauma to last me.

I've seen the worst. In my head, I've seen the worst. When I go into a fight, I'm all right. You know what I'm saying? I've already made it.

It took me 14 years to write poems about Vietnam. I had never thought about writing about it, and in a way I had been systematically writing around it.

I found when I was a child that if I put the hurt into words, it would go.

Music is therapy for me. It's my outlet for every negative thing I've ever been through. It lets me turn something bad into something beautiful.

Virtual simulations allow post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers to re-experience the events that traumatized them, and then slowly desensitize themselves to their impact through repeated recreations involving not just sight and sound but even smell.

The more I wrote, the more I became a human being. The writing may have seemed monstrous (to some) for it was a violation, but I became a more human individual because of it. I was getting the poison out of my system.

I have always staged my fears as a way to transcend them.

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

While I was thinking about that, the military, I read a book called On Killing, about the obstacles people have to pulling the trigger in combat. So sometimes you just absorb all this stuff without realizing you were doing research.

We do not free ourselves from something by avoiding it, but only by living though it.

I do find it therapeutic, writing about stuff that was frightening and painful as a child, and managing to see it from an adult's point of view. To get it out of the closet onto paper, metaphorically speaking, is therapeutic.

Drama aids self-discovery like nothing else. In removing it from our schools, we remove the inestimable benefits of it from our society. No amount of studying oxbow lakes was ever going to help me emotionally through the death of my father.

People always ask me, 'I don't know how you could watch that, how that affects you,' and I just tell them, 'I went through it in real life, so it's like pilots watching a 'Top Gun' movie or cyclists watching a bicycle movie,' something like that.

It is natural that our minds replay old stories, because that is our own mechanism for trying to work out unresolved problems. Yet rerunning those stories will be a fruitless looping until we learn how to move from the story into our body. This is why therapy alone often doesn't bring full healing and awakening.

When you can bring yourself to write about it one day, you will find it all less painful. It is a catharsis of sorts, but the process can be brutal. Don’t do it until you’re ready.

I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me, and I started shaking. And then I walked back into the house and my wife asked, 'What's the matter?' And I said, 'I don't feel good.' And tears, uncontrollable tears, was coming out of my eyes and she says, 'What's the matter?' And I told her. I said, 'I just thought about that execution that I did two days ago, and everybody else's that I was involved in.' And what it was, something triggered within, and it just, everybody - all of these executions all sprung forward.