“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.” ―Susan Pease Banitt
Quotes
Get Up!
“Get up…dust off the negativity and complaints of life. Bust through the hard times. Run like a sprinter through the difficult times, run with endurance and hope for your future through the painful times. Pound each step with power through each of your troubles. You ain’t no lazy sucker that’s gonna let life beat you up! You’re a champion and you need to charge through life with the fury that nothing and no one is gonna stop you. Not negativity, problems, people, heartache, setbacks, depression, sadness…. You decide now: you’re choosing to be positive! You’re gonna make today great, you’re gonna find good things to talk and think about. Big things and hopes and dreams to focus on! Quit listening to negative people and negative things…. Your mind is what you feed it. Negativity and hopelessness, or positivity, hope, and love. You choose with each word, thought, and comment. Start busting through the negative junk and people in the world. Run so fast and powerful with your positivity that nothing can stick or stay with you. You don’t have time to listen or think about it. GO, go live with joy, power, and strength….run hard through the troubles! You’ve got big things waiting for you.” -Kandee Johnson
Do Not Spoil What You Have
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.” ―Epicurus
Write The Poems
“The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day, I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives.
The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her a twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.”
The first psychotherapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once, but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.
The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give than what they get.
The pharmacist said “Lexapro, Lamictal, Lithium, Xanax.”
The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said.
The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.”
But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”
My bones said, “Write the poems.”
―Andrea Gibson
I have felt this way more times than I care to count, and it’s getting worse. I broke down yesterday in despair and exactly two people reached out to me, which lets me know it’s time to weed people out of my life once more.
Cat, knowing something was very wrong with Mommy, crawled into my lap, sat by my feet while I forced myself to eat dinner, and was in bed with me before my head hit the pillow last night. I slept solidly for the first time in months, not so much as moving, as far as I can tell. Upon waking, Cat was in the same spot by my feet and Kitten was coming in to check on us. If I didn’t have these two little beings in my life with their unconditional love, I would probably be dead. It makes me sick to my core that animals care and love far more than people. Today, this quote resonates in more ways than one.
There Are Women…
“There are women who only look at another woman’s shoes and never at her face. And others who always look women in the face and only occasionally at their shoes.” -Nina George
Our Society
“Our society tends to regard as a sickness any mode of thought or behavior that is inconvenient for the system and this is plausible because when an individual doesn’t fit into the system it causes pain to the individual as well as problems for the system. Thus the manipulation of an individual to adjust him to the system is seen as a cure for a sickness and therefore as good.” ―Theodore J. Kaczynski
The Scars From Mental Cruelty
“The scars from mental cruelty can be as deep and long-lasting as wounds from punches or slaps, but are often not as obvious. In fact, even among women who have experienced violence from a partner, half or more report that the man’s emotional abuse is what is causing them the greatest harm.” -Lundy Bancroft
For a Torture To Be Effective…
“For a torture to be effective, the pain has to be spread out; it has to come at regular intervals, with no end in sight. The water falls , drop after drop after drop, like the second hand of a watch, carving up time. The shock of each individual drop is insignificant, but the sensation is impossible to ignore. At first, one might manage to think about other things, but after five hours, after ten hours, it becomes unendurable. The repeated stimulation excites the nerves to a point where they literally explode, and every sensation in the body is absorbed into that one spot on the forehead—indeed, you come to feel that you are nothing but a forehead, into which a fine needle is being forced millimeter by millimeter. You can’t sleep or even speak, hypnotized by a suffering that is greater than any mere pain. In general, the victim goes mad before a day has passed.” ―Yōko Ogawa
Dignity Is As Essential To Human Life…
“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man’s soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it.” ―Laura Hillenbrand
If you haven’t seen the movie Unbroken, which is based on the book by Laura Hillenbrand, I highly recommend it. I cried like a baby, but thought it was amazingly well done.
When You Fail To Tap Into Your Wellsprings…
“When you fail to tap into your wellsprings of inner strength due to toxic habits, environments or people, you wind up feeling trapped, stranded, and unhappy. You end up in soulless jobs, destructive relationships and empty friendships. Most of all, you find yourself unsatisfied with who you are, and you often become your own worst enemy, perpetuating the cycles of pain, anger, and fear within you – like I did.” ―Aletheia Luna
Written by LISA MARINO-Molchanova 