Healing from Trauma Quotes

“When you feel that you aren’t like everyone else or feel tainted by what has happened to you, it’s hard to be optimistic about the future. In fact, for many survivors, it’s nearly impossible to imagine the future at all. Many of us are caught in a state where we’re still just trying to survive (our sole focus during trauma) and can’t think much beyond that. Time for us is frozen and the future feels hazy at best.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“One of the most touching aspects of the healing process for me has been the realization that the world is much kinder and more beautiful than I thought it was. Somewhere in my unconscious, here was always someplace to get out of; as I healed, I was shocked to discover that, au contraire, being here is the prize.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Breaking free of limiting beliefs is like breaking the chains that bind you.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Without a belief in a fair and moral universe, a sense of control of one’s fate, a coherent sense of self, and a continuous personal narrative, life makes no sense. Living becomes a pointless exercise of getting through the day. People reeling from trauma are thrown into a crisis of meaning that goes far beyond disillusionment; they are plunged into an abyss of despair.”18”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“The above list is mostly about erasing the negative impacts of trauma. But just as health is not merely the absence of disease, wholeness is more than the absence of psychological symptoms. Wholeness includes the presence of certain qualities, such as a sense of well-being; joy; humor; the heart qualities of kindness, compassion, and gratitude; effective life skills; a sense of empowerment; a capacity to love; a feeling of purpose; an ability to take care of yourself; and a sense of who you are on a very deep level.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“You experience a change in how you see yourself, transitioning from feeling like a victim to someone who has not only survived but has healed.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Our goal is to move from being stuck in survival mode back into blossoming and into life. We want to thrive, not just survive.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Connecting to our own pain and the unique reality of our lives is a large part of the journey to spiritual maturity.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“when he says that most of us find adversity unacceptable; we live in child’s fantasy that everything should work out as we want it to. Like so many Buddhists before him, Fischer recognizes that suffering is universal. It happens to everybody. Yet embracing it offers us a key. “It is exactly in digesting the profundity of our difficulties that life opens up to us,” Fischer says.6”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“If you can access the sense of your inherent preciousness, you can rise above shame. If you can meditate and feel equanimity, you may be able to rise above your distress.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“You could even say it was the trauma that was the call for help, and of course if there are any spiritual beings who respond to such need, it is angels.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Bringing something into physical form can be a way not only of expressing but also integrating what’s inside.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“The more you have a sense that you can and will take care of your needs, the less you need these kinds of defensive ways of maintaining boundaries.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Authentically positive self-talk is your most important ally in the healing process. You cannot heal completely without it.”1 She describes this nurturing self-talk as growing out of a close relationship with yourself, learning to become your own best friend.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“So many of us—trauma or no trauma—respond to ourselves from a place of criticism rather than a place of love and support. Support is essential for healing and for normal development. Especially if you did not receive enough nurturing-parent messages as a young child, learning to say them to yourself now can be reparative. Some nurturing-parent messages help build a sense of confidence and self-esteem, while others help comfort us when distressed. Here is a short list of both of these categories.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“The more you can see options, the quicker you can regain a sense of control.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Traumatic experiences are so powerful that they often affect your entire worldview. It’s like wearing glasses that distort your vision.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Cognitively oriented therapists believe that we contribute to our own suffering by holding on to outdated beliefs and conclusions that keep us stuck in a particular story.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Recovery is treacherous but the peace and contentment that awaits us is beyond description. Trust your gut. Stay the course.”2”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“It would be like climbing up a winding mountain where you can’t really see much ahead, then finally realizing you’re at the top.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“When we heal from trauma, what was shattered becomes whole again. We learn to claim aspects of self that got lost or frozen and integrate these with our growing capacities. Part of this will involve a new identity that grows out of this process. As we recognize our resources and our wholeness, a new me is born, one whose sense of value has been restored.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“These might include the ability to form close and trusting bonds, to reach out, to initiate, to achieve, to belong to a group, to develop self-confidence, to receive help and encouragement, even to have a happy childhood.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“You grieve what you lost and what you never had. If you try to short-circuit the grief, the grief will find a way to short-circuit you.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“If you are plagued by trauma symptoms but have no memories, that itself becomes an issue to make peace with.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Regulating emotions is an important skill advanced both by therapies that help reset the nervous system and by using various psychotherapeutic tools, including working with the irrational beliefs that fuel emotions.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Your capacity to stay present will increase as you (1) practice grounding, (2) defuse traumatic triggers and learn to self-regulate, (3) learn to recognize dissociation right away and how to come out of it, (4) develop more sense of safety, reinforced by good boundaries, and (5) cultivate witness consciousness, the capacity to notice your thoughts and feelings without being caught inside them.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“Another great boon occurred when Kelly discovered an effective trauma approach that taught her how to regulate her arousal (which triggered the dissociative episodes), get grounded, and come into the present. Her therapist was kind and reflected back to Kelly the good things she saw in her. Slowly Kelly began to experience herself as a person who was separate from everyone else and who had numerous positive qualities. Kelly learned that this adult self, who was present right now, was proof that the wispy, barely existing child had existed and had survived. She describes how shocked she was to discover this. Perhaps it is a similar shock when the butterfly breaks out of the cocoon and discovers that it is not the caterpillar it remembered.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“We find the heaven within us when we recover our own preciousness; we find the heaven between us when another tenderly helps us heal; we find the heaven around us when, moving from hell to well, we find in the ordinary world the beauty and meaning that was earlier bleached out of it. And some, too, find a heaven of angels, which may pierce through the veils of our lives in moments of need or when our spiritual search takes us there.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“As it relates to healing the wounds of trauma, it is a journey from helplessness (which is the essence of trauma) to mastery.”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life

“To make matters worse, they are often further traumatized by their present circumstances (for example, prisoners are raped, street people are attacked, mental health patients may experience helplessness during forms of treatment perceived as violent, and so on).”
― Jasmin Lee Cori, Healing from Trauma: A Survivor's Guide to Understanding Your Symptoms and Reclaiming Your Life