Grief Triggers Quotes

I'd once been fascinated by his legend - all the stories I'd heard before I met him. Now I can feel that same sense of fascination returning. I picture his face, so beautiful even after pain and torture and grief, his blue eyes bright and sincere. I'm ashamed to admit that I enjoyed my brief time with him in his prison cell. His voice can make me forget about all the details running through my mind, bringing with it emotions of desire, or fear instead, sometimes even anger, but always triggering something. Something that wasn't there before.

The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a 'trigger'as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast.

And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so heavy for so long. At first I felt odd- as if I shouldn’t be feeling this lightness, that familiar little catch of pleasure in the heart which is inexplicable, though a lovely passage of notes or the splendidly turned petal of a tulip has triggered it. It’s my buoyancy, part of what keeps me alive: happy, suddenly with the concomitant experience of a sonata and the motion of the shadows of leaves. I have the desire to be filled with sunlight, to soak my skin in as much of it as I can drink up, after the long interior darkness of this past season, the indoor vigil, in this harshest and darkest of winters, outside and in.

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary.

Betrayal is one of the most emotionally painful experiences a person can have, with its potent cocktail of fear, grief and anger; this triggers our primitive fight/flight response," says novelist and psychologist Voula Grand

This one truth, that the few people you adore will die, is plenty difficult to absorb. But on top of it, someone’s brakes fail, or someone pulls the trigger or snatches the kid, or someone deeply trusted succumbs to temptation, and everything falls apart. We are hurt beyond any reasonable chance of healing. We are haunted by our failures and mortality. And yet the world keeps on spinning, and in our grief, rage, and fear a few people keep on loving us and showing up. It’s all motion and stasis, change and stagnation. Awful stuff happens and beautiful stuff happens, and it’s all part of the big picture.

My life is trigger after trigger. I have reached a critical mass of grief. So, no, I don’t need to avoid any triggers. The point, though, is that I am functional. I can get through each day without feeling like I’m not sure I’ll make it to midnight. I know when I wake up that today will be just like the day before, devoid of honest laughter and a genuine smile, but manageable.

It had been many months since I'd shed tears for Tomaso, but grief is like that. It's not a continuous process; it comes in waves. You can keep it at bay for a time, like a dam holding back a lake, but them something triggers an explosion inside of you, shattering the wall and letting loose a flood.

Emotional flashbacks are sudden and often prolonged regressions to the overwhelming feeling-states of being an abused/abandoned child. These feeling states can include overwhelming fear, shame, alienation, rage, grief and depression. They also include unnecessary triggering of our fight/flight instincts.

Grief can provide the fuel for greatness, but it can also be the trigger for evil.

I wasn't feeling grief: that hellish chest-crammed agony you feel - but some portion of my brain activated by the memory decided to trigger the tear ducts

The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there is usually an initial cause, a ‘trigger’ as they say in therapeutic circles, but in severe depression the feelings of sadness, grief, loneliness and despair continue long after the situation has resolved itself. It is as if depression has a life of its own, which is perhaps why so many sufferers refer to it as a living thing, as some sort of demon or beast.

Grief isn’t the only byproduct of a death. And death isn’t just subtraction. You’re left with a treasure of memories that can be triggered by sights, sounds, smells—a record of how my life enriched yours.

Comparative suffering is a function of fear and scarcity. Falling down, screwing up, and facing hurt often lead to bouts of second-guessing our judgment, our self-trust, and even our worthiness. I am enough can slowly turn into Am I really enough? If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past decade, it’s that fear and scarcity immediately trigger comparison, and even pain and hurt are not immune to being assessed and ranked. My husband died and that grief is worse than your grief over an empty nest. I’m not allowed to feel disappointed about being passed over for promotion when my friend just found out that his wife has cancer. You’re feeling shame for forgetting your son’s school play? Please—that’s a first-world problem; there are people dying of starvation every minute. The opposite of scarcity is not abundance; the opposite of scarcity is simply enough. Empathy is not finite, and compassion is not a pizza with eight slices. When you practice empathy and compassion with someone, there is not less of these qualities to go around. There’s more. Love is the last thing we need to ration in this world. The refugee in Syria doesn’t benefit more if you conserve your kindness only for her and withhold it from your neighbor who’s going through a divorce. Yes, perspective is critical. But I’m a firm believer that complaining is okay as long as we piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, and every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy and compassion, the healing that results affects all of us.

Say his name. Say both their names.” “I don’t want to.” “You don’t want to because it’s uncomfortable and hits at all of your triggers, but that’s the only way to confront grief. Grief doesn’t digest. You have to feel it until it passes through.

The reason why this is completely irrelevant to me is that root beer doesn’t remind me of Ben. Everything reminds me of Ben. Floors, walls, ceilings, white, black, brown, blue, elephants, cartwheels, grass, marbles, Yahtzee. Everything. My life is trigger after trigger. I have reached a critical mass of grief.

We have many dead of our own to pray for, and we join our sorrow to yours. Let our common grief be our bond. Let those prayers be the balm for your sorrow, not an innocent man's continued imprisonment. I state to you absolutely that, if I could possibly have prevented what happened that day, your menfolk would not have died. I would have died myself before knowingly permitting what happened to happen. And I certainly never pulled the trigger that did it. May the Creator strike me dead this moment if I lie. I cannot see how my being here, torn from my own grandchildren, can possibly mend your loss. I swear to you, I am guilty only of being an Indian. That's why I am here. Being who I am, being you you are — that's Aboriginal Sin.

Because there are few ways to memorialize the profound loss of a child who never existed, it can be an agonizingly extended grief without validation. Fresh waves of trauma are triggered by anything from watching the school bus picking up your neighbors, to a baby shower invitation in your mailbox, to the lasting legacy of not being able to brag about your grandchildren later in life. Just as Hannah pleaded with Eli, you pray people won’t harshly judge you while your heart sits shattered at your feet.

Lincoln would remain a man trapped in time, in the click of a shutter and by the trigger of a gun. In mourning him, in sepia and yellow, in black and white, beneath plates of glinting glass, Americans deferred a different grief, a vaster and more dire reckoning with centuries of suffering and loss, not captured by any camera, not settled by any amendment, the injuries wrought on the bodies of millions of men, women, and children, stolen, shackled, hunted, whipped, branded, raped, starved, and buried in unmarked graves.

One: These losses shape your psyche; they lay down patterns for all your interactions. If you don’t understand them and actively work to form new emotional habits, you’ll act them out again and again. They’ll wreak havoc on your relationships, and you won’t know why. There are many ways to confront them, some of which we’re exploring in this book. Two: No matter how much therapeutic work you do, these may be your Achilles’ heels for life: maybe a fear of abandonment, a fear of success, a fear of failure; maybe deep-seated insecurity, rejection sensitivity, precarious masculinity, perfectionism; maybe hair-trigger rage, or a hard nub of grief you can feel like a knot protruding from your otherwise smooth skin. Even once you break free (and you can break free), these siren songs may call you back to your accustomed ways of seeing and thinking and reacting. You can learn to block your ears most of the time, but you’ll have to accept that they’re always out there singing. The third answer is the most difficult one to grasp, but it’s also the one that can save you. The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had: That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape, but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.

Dreams in which the dead interact with the living are typically so powerful and lucid that there is no denying contact was real. They also fill us with renewed life and break up grief or depression. In chapter 16, on communicating with the dead, you will learn how to make such dreams come about. Another set of dreams in which the dead appear can be the stuff of horror. If you have had a nightmare concerning someone who has recently passed, know that you are looking into the face of personal inner conflict. You might dream, for instance, that your dead mother is buried alive or comes out of her grave in a corrupted body in search of you. What you are looking at here is the clash of two sets of ideas about death. On the one hand, a person is dead and rotting; on the other hand, that same person is still alive. The inner self uses the appropriate symbols to try to come to terms with the contradiction of being alive and dead at the same time. I am not sure to what extent people on the other side actually participate in these dreams. My private experience has given me the impression that the dreams are triggered by attempts of the departed for contact. The macabre images we use to deal with the contradiction, however, are ours alone and stem from cultural attitudes about death and the body. The conflict could lie in a different direction altogether. As a demonstration of how complex such dreams can be, I offer a simple one I had shortly after the death of my cat Twyla. It was a nightmare constructed out of human guilt. Even though I loved Twyla, for a combination of reasons she was only second best in the hierarchy of house pets. I had never done anything to hurt her, and her death was natural. Still I felt guilt, as though not giving her the full measure of my love was the direct cause of her death. She came to me in a dream skinned alive, a bloody mass of muscle, sinew, veins, and arteries. I looked at her, horror-struck at what I had done. Given her condition, I could not understand why she seemed perfectly healthy and happy and full of affection for me. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me over a week to understand what this nightmare was about. The skinning depicted the ugly fate of many animals in human hands. For Twyla, the picture was particularly apt because we used to joke about selling her for her fur, which was gorgeous, like the coat of a gray seal. My subconscious had also incorporated the callous adage “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” This multivalent graphic, typical of dreams, brought my feelings of guilt to the surface. But the real meaning was more profound and once discovered assuaged my conscience. Twyla’s coat represented her mortal body, her outer shell. What she showed me was more than “skin deep” — the real Twyla underneath,

THE INTERCONNECTION OF MEMORY IMPRINTS THAT FORM COLLAGES OF SHAME As shaming experiences accrue and are defended against, the images created by those experiences are recorded in a person’s memory bank. Because the victim has no time or support to grieve the pain of the broken mutuality, his emotions are repressed and the grief is unresolved. The verbal (auditory) imprints remain in the memory, as do the visual images of the shaming scenes. As each new shaming experience takes place, a new verbal imprint and visual image form a scene that becomes attached to the existing ones to form collages of shaming memories. Children record their parents’ actions at their worst. When Mom and Dad, or stepparent or caregiver, are most out of control, they are the most threatening to the child’s survival. The child’s amygdala, the survival alarm center in their brain, registers these behaviors the most deeply. Any subsequent shame experience that even vaguely resembles that past trauma can easily trigger the words and scenes of the original trauma. What are then recorded are the new experiences and the old. Over time, an accumulation of shame scenes is attached.

I often thought grief was like madness—the lack of control, the overwhelming waves of emotion with unexpected triggers, breathlessness, night sweats, nightmares, and the feeling of utter aloneness, like that of standing on a ledge in a violent wind.

I WISH THERE WAS A time limit of grief. I wish there was a biological stopwatch that would sound in our heads when it was time to snap out of it. It’d trigger something within us—resolve, strength, courage—and we’d pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and get on with living. And even if you hadn’t gone through each of the five stages, once your time with grief was up, you were done. You didn’t have to feel pain anymore.

I can't live without her, Micah. And I won't go through the hell I just went through over Carmen again. I won't." For a long, tense moment, nothing was said as the weight of reality sank in, and then Micah sighed in defeat. Tears bloomed and glistened in his eyes, and his jaw clinched in a hard line as he fought to hold his own emotions in check. This was good-bye, and Micah knew it. "I want you to pull the trigger, Micah. I want you to be the one to do it, because God knows, you won't miss." Micah's chin quivered, and his mouth worked hard as he blinked and looked away. He sniffed heavily before running his palms down his face to wipe away his tears. "Fuck," he bit out quietly between his teeth. "Don't ask me to do that. Please don't ask me to do that." He sniffed again and looked back at Malek, his eyes bloodshot with his efforts to restrain his grief. "Please, Micah. Please. Do this for me. This one last favor." Micah regarded him, clearly losing the battle to keep his composure. After a moment's hesitation, he bowed his head and clasped Malek's hand like the brothers-in-arms they were. "You can count on me. You need me, and I'm there. Just like old times.

Trigger warning: The phrases that follow may cause heartburn, hives, hot flashes, or fainting spells. “Man up!” “Act like a man!” Is there anything deemed more hateful on college campuses in America today than telling someone to “man up”? In the fall, University of San Diego held a seminar titled “Man Up? Masculinity and Pop Culture.” It was sponsored by the campus’s “Women’s Center.” It was described thusly: “This workshop invites men to engage in a cultural analysis of how masculinity is represented, and how that representation frequently has negative repercussions on men’s lives.”10 College-aged men in America were once taught how to tune up a car, skin a deer, and how to pin a flower on the strap of a date’s dress without sticking her. Today, they are taught to “engage in a cultural analysis of how masculinity is represented.” Good grief.

Sometimes it isn’t a matter of continued trauma, but the demands of our everyday lives that cause this shutdown. Sometimes we don’t have the time and space to heal from our grief experience. Because we have to keep getting up in the morning, getting to work, feeding the dog, finding our kid’s missing left shoe. There is only so much work our overtaxed brain can handle. Taking care of OURSELVES often becomes a luxury we can’t afford, rather than a necessity we can’t ignore.

It won’t be long now.” Such an odd old holy man, young Scytale thought. Even compared to the smells of disinfectant, medicine, and sickness, he’d always had an odd smell about him. Sounding compassionate, Yueh said, “There isn’t much we can do.” Gasping for air, old Scytale croaked out, “A Tleilaxu Master should not be so weak and decrepit. It is . . . unseemly.” His youthful counterpart tried again to trigger the flow of memories, to squeeze them into his brain by sheer force of will, as he had attempted to do countless times before. The essential past must be in there somewhere, buried deep. But he felt no tickle of possibilities, no glimmer of success. What if they are not there at all? What if something had gone terribly wrong? His pulse pounded as the panic began to rise. Not much time. Never enough time. He tried to cut off the thought. The body provided a wealth of cellular material. They could create more Scytale gholas, try again and again if necessary. But if his own memories had failed to resurface, why should an identical ghola have any better luck without the guidance of the original? I am the only one who knew the Master so intimately. He wanted to shake Yueh, demand to know how he had managed to remember his past. Tears were in full flow now, falling onto the old man’s hand, but Scytale knew they were inadequate. His father’s chest spasmed in an almost imperceptible death rattle. The life-support equipment hummed with more intensity, and the instrument readings fluctuated. “He’s slipped into a coma,” Yueh reported. The Rabbi nodded. Like an executioner announcing his plans, he said, “Too weak. He’s going to die now.” Scytale’s heart sank. “He has given up on me.” His father would never know if he succeeded now; he would perish wondering and worrying. The last great calamity in a long line of disasters that had befallen the Tleilaxu race. He gripped the old man’s hand. So cold, too cold. He felt the life ebbing. I have failed! As if felled by a stunner, Scytale dropped to his knees at the bedside. In his crashing despair, he knew with absolute certainly that he could never resurrect the recalcitrant memories. Not alone. Lost! Forever lost! Everything that comprised the great Tleilaxu race. He could not bear the magnitude of this disaster. The reality of his defeat sliced like shattered glass into his heart. Abruptly, the Tleilaxu youth felt something changing inside, followed by an explosion between his temples. He cried out from the excruciating pain. At first he thought he was dying himself, but instead of being swallowed in blackness, he felt new thoughts burning like wildfire across his consciousness. Memories streamed past in a blur, but Scytale locked onto each one, absorbing it again and reprocessing it into the synapses of his brain. The precious memories returned to where they had always belonged. His father’s death had opened the barriers. At last Scytale retrieved what he was supposed to know, the critical data bank of a Tleilaxu Master, all the ancient secrets of his race. Instilled with pride and a new sense of dignity, he rose to his feet. Wiping away warm tears, he looked down at the discarded copy of himself on the bed. It was nothing more than a withered husk. He no longer needed that old man.

I never quite understood grief triggers until my dad passed away.

I grow more comfortable with the fact that emotional hardship does not have an end point. Triggers will present themselves, and sometimes I don't know what the hell I am doing. But I take comfort in knowing that I have the ability to learn new ways to self-soothe when grief strikes.

Some people may have been unable to express any grief or sadness for a significant period of time while they were living with abuse. Suppressing grief may have been a survival strategy, especially if a woman's visible crying and sorrow had been a trigger for further abuse from a partner. Some women have also faced a dilemma about allowing their children to see them visibly upset, and have buried their grief for many years while the children were young or dependent. For these women, the extent and complexity of their grief and loss may feel overwhelming, even frightening.

My mind flashes back to the Shadow Garden years ago, to the pangs of envy in my stomach as I watched Sebastian and Lucia before growing a flower with my hands. I recall the overpowering grief spilling out of me the night I created the ball of fire, the desperate yearning for my mother a few weeks ago when I grew a rose, my longing for Sebastian when I changed the colors in the Maze. Heightened emotion. That must be the trigger to my gift. I squeeze my eyes shut, forcing my thoughts away from the fire in this room and back to the nightclub in Windsor. Swaying in Sebastian's arms, my head nestled beneath his chin, our faces nearly meeting--- My eyes fly open as the sizzling sensation returns to my hands. I watch win awe as tiny cracks begin to form in my fingertips--and water comes sprouting from them. Teddy howls in shock as I move may hands over the wastebasket, the water from my fingers extinguishing the fire, until all that remains is a smoky aftermath. Teddy leaps into my arms, licking my face in relief. "We're okay, buddy. We're okay." I hold his furry little body close, and after setting him down, I stare at my hands in wonder. They've returned to normal. the cracks are gone. What I've just done is completely insane... but also a miracle.

Similarly, the Russians discovered, in the 1920s, that an actor ordered to show no emotion as he looks out a window will seem to show any emotion the director wishes, if in the editing we, the audience, see something outside the window. Do we see a dying child? The expressionless actor seems to project grief so deep it cannot find expression yet. A dog playing? The same actor with the same non-expression seems to project quiet amusement . . .

There was perhaps no other school in the greater Melbourne area, perhaps no other school in Australia, that had so many children of war. Some shy, some loud, some laughing, some quiet—and every one of them on a hair trigger. Every one of them swallowing barrels and buckets of the wrath, frustration, grief, and shame that other Year 6 students sipped in juice-box amounts.

Acknowledge to yourself that the current criticism is triggering grief over a long-standing wound.

She was learning that grief was like that; it had phases but it wasn’t linear. It wasn’t as if one moved seamlessly from shock to anger to desolation and eventually to acceptance. No, it was something different. At first, it was all-consuming, an almost unbearable pain, a physical and emotional heartache. But then she’d feel lonely and bereft, and then she would forget and laugh and smile. But a smell, a word, a book, a sound – anything could trigger it, the ice wave of realisation. It was real; he was gone and

She was learning that grief was like that; it had phases but it wasn’t linear. It wasn’t as if one moved seamlessly from shock to anger to desolation and eventually to acceptance. No, it was something different. At first, it was all-consuming, an almost unbearable pain, a physical and emotional heartache. But then she’d feel lonely and bereft, and then she would forget and laugh and smile. But a smell, a word, a book, a sound – anything could trigger it, the ice wave of realisation. It was real; he was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

The loop circles back again when the mind observes what is happening in the body. Adam felt his heart pounding and worried about his health. He started imagining scenarios in which he had a heart attack and left his family abandoned. He imagined what would happen if the firm went under and he didn’t know how to start over. He imagined his sister dying and the grief they would all suffer. These thoughts triggered worse feelings in his body and the cycle only continued.

I know it's partly that recent events have stirred up more in me than I can bear - more than she can bear too. How do you temper your child's grief when it unexpectedly triggers your own?

Grieving is a messy process, and you yearn for it to just go away. You don't know when a sunset or a trip to the pharmacy is going to trigger a memory that crushes your spirit.

As you know, sir, grief is a funny thing,” Penn began. “It is like a fickle ocean, the tide ebbing and flowing at uncertain times, triggered by the smallest events or recollections.

I believe that there are wounds that never really heal over time, some even persist and become a trigger for the new grief.

Are you familiar with the ‘ball in a box’ analogy?” I shake my head, never having heard of it. He explains, “The ball is large, filling the box when grief first appears. There’s a small button on one side of the box but the ball is so big it constantly bumps against it, triggering the emotional response. As time goes on, the ball shrinks in size, moving and colliding into the walls and occasionally, the button. There’s no stopping it and no matter how small the ball gets, there’s always a chance it will hit the button. There’s no preventing it.

The grief triggered by the loss of loved ones does not appear to be an adaptation produced by natural selection as it does not appear to increase an individual's fitness in any way -at least not in non-social species. Depression caused by loss is more likely to be a by-product of the ability to form long-term attachment relationships. Grief is the price we have to pay when the attachment relationship is finally broken. This assumption is supported by the fact that a person may also experience symptoms of depression as a result of the death of their beloved dog, horse or other pet. The stronger the attachment, the longer the symptoms of depression last. On the other hand, the knowledge of the pain caused by the loss of an important person or pet makes us take more care of the people or pets that are important to us.

Core beliefs are triggered by stressful social situations and interactions. And core beliefs are highly emotional—when triggered they produce strong feelings of fear, shame, anxiety, despair, depression, loss, grief, and so on.

Then there are the secondary, mostly “social” emotions, such as anxiety, grief, guilt, pride, vengeance, and love. These may be unique to humans—hence, at the lower level in our evolutionary mountain landscape—and somewhat more liable to cultural manipulation and variation than the primary, “Darwinian” emotions. Thus, only humans seek revenge or redemption across lifetimes and generations, whatever the cost, although the nature of the deeds that trigger insult or remorse may vary considerably across societies, and the means to counter them may range even wider. Another

True grief never goes away. We learn to live with it. After a while our friends stop asking and we stop discussing our sorrows. It doesn't help us that much and we realize that almost everyone who we have confided in carries grief deep in their hearts too. We often decide that once again, our job is to cheer others up. Grief isn't just something to endure; it is also a reflection of our capacity to love. It allows us to understand the most profound human experience at the most intimate level. Facing our grief requires openness and courage. We must explore it with curiosity and patience and we must allow it to stay in our hearts until it is ready to leave. Over time, by simply abiding with our sorrows, they will lessen. Yet as poet Linda Pastan wrote, "Grief is a circular staircase," We feelin better and then we feel worse. Holidays...trigger grief reactions. we may have a rather good Year Two and then be felled by Year Three. With intention and skills, we move forward on our journey, but not without spiraling in the waters.

True grief never goes away. We learn to live with it. After a while our friends stop asking and we stop discussing our sorrows. It doesn't help us that much and we realize that almost everyone who we have confided in carries grief deep in their hearts too. We often decide that once again, our job is to cheer others up. Grief isn't just something to endure; it is also a reflection of our capacity to love. It allows us to understand the most profound human experience at the most intimate level. Facing our grief requires openness and courage. We must explore it with curiosity and patience and we must allow it to stay in our hearts until it is ready to leave. Over time, by simply abiding with our sorrows, they will lessen. Yet as poet Linda Pastan wrote, "Grief is a circular staircase," We feel better and then we feel worse. Holidays...trigger grief reactions. we may have a rather good Year Two and then be felled by Year Three. With intention and skills, we move forward on our journey, but not without spiraling in the waters.

We held a grief ritual shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Many stories of violence and violation were being evoked by the tragedy. As we listened to the intensity of the stories, we realized we needed to offer a secondary shrine for this event. The normal shrine at these rituals is a water shrine. Water is the element of healing and renewal in many traditions. On this occasion, however, the element of fire was also being called in. Fire is the energy of passion and ignition, and it is often associated with the ancestors. People needed an energy field large enough to fully receive their protests. The site where we were holding this ritual had an immense old fireplace in it. At one end of the room, we created our water shrine, and at the other, surrounding the fireplace, we built the second shrine. Once the ritual began, people spent time weeping at the water shrine and shouting their outrage to the fire. Many of them migrated back and forth, from shrine to shrine. At times, rage would trigger tears, and at others, tears would evoke rage.

My grief comes in waves and is usually triggered by something arbitrary. I can tell you with a straight face what it was like watching my mom’s hair fall out in the bathtub, or about the five weeks I spent sleeping in hospitals, but catch me at H Mart when some kid runs up double-fisting plastic sleeves of ppeongtwigi and I’ll just lose it.