Ptsd Nightmares Quotes

Every day is a battle. Still. She doesn’t need this…this mess. The nightmares. She doesn’t deserve what I’d put her through. And she probably wouldn’t stick around anyway. Who would?

I'm not crazy, I was abused. I'm not shy, I'm protecting myself. I'm not bitter, I'm speaking the truth. I'm not hanging onto the past, I've been damaged. I'm not delusional, I lived a nightmare. I'm not weak, I was trusting. I'm not giving up, I'm healing. I'm not incapable of love, I'm giving. I'm not alone. I see you all here. I'm fighting this.

The traumatic moment becomes encoded in an abnormal form of memory, which breaks spontaneously into consciouness, both as flashbacks during waking states and as traumatic nightmares during sleep. Small, seemingly insignificant reminders can also evoke these memories, which often return with all the vividness and emotional force of the original event. Thus, even normally safe environments may come to feel dangerous, for the survivor can never be assured that she will not encounter some reminder of the trauma.

I spent many years trying to make up reasons about why I had the flashbacks, memories, continuous nightmares. When I finally decided to quit trying to hide from truth, I began to heal.

Something I'm not ready to name works itself under the grip of Charlies death and loosens it, and keeps the nightmare at bay when I fall back asleep.

A nightmare has taken hold of my body. Lunacy has dug its way inside my mind.

Carla's description was typical of survivors of chronic childhood abuse. Almost always, they deny or minimize the abusive memories. They have to: it's too painful to believe that their parents would do such a thing. So they fragment the memories into hundreds of shards, leaving only acceptable traces in their conscious minds. Rationalizations like "my childhood was rough," "he only did it to me once or twice," and "it wasn't so bad" are common, masking the fact that the abuse was devastating and chronic. But while the knowledge, body sensations, and feelings are shattered, they are not forgotten. They intrude in unexpected ways: through panic attacks and insomnia, through dreams and artwork, through seemingly inexplicable compulsions, and through the shadowy dread of the abusive parent. They live just outside of consciousness like noisy neighbors who bang on the pipes and occasionally show up at the door.

Their manipulation is psychological and emotionally devastating – and very dangerous, especially considering the brain circuitry for emotional and physical pain are one and the same (Kross, 2011). What a victim feels when they are punched in the stomach can be similar to the pain a victim feels when they are verbally and emotionally abused, and the effects of narcissistic abuse can be crippling and long-lasting, even resulting in symptoms of PTSD or Complex PTSD.

the post-traumatic-stress-disordered often vacillate between phases of symptoms, moving from intrusion—the crying and howling nightmares and other asylum-worthy behaviors—to constriction and back, without predictability or reason. It’s one of the many things that undermine their credibility with the outside world: People seem fine for a while, but then they’re not fine, or they go from one extreme set of symptoms to an opposite one.

What I had was classic short-term PTSD. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s exactly the response you want to have when your life is in danger: you want to be vigilant, you want to avoid situations where you are not in control, you want to react to strange noises, you want to sleep lightly and wake easily, you want to have flashbacks and nightmares that remind you of specific threats to your life, and you want to be, by turns, angry and depressed. Anger keeps you ready to fight, and depression keeps you from being too active and putting yourself in more danger. Flashbacks also serve to remind you of the danger that’s out there—a “highly efficient single-event survival-learning mechanism,” as one researcher termed it. All humans react to trauma in this way, and most mammals do as well. It may be unpleasant, but it’s preferable to getting killed. Like

Their manipulation is psychological and emotionally devastating – and very dangerous, especially considering the brain circuitry for emotional and physical pain are one and the same (Kross, 2011). What a victim feels when they are punched in the stomach can be similar to the pain a victim feels when they are verbally and emotionally abused, and the effects of narcissistic abuse can be crippling and long-lasting, even resulting in symptoms of PTSD or Complex PTSD.

He's tried to explain this a couple of times to a few of his buddies after about five beers. Like listen, listen. Imagine you live in this country, right? And there's a brutal war, and you witness and maybe participate in a horrific amount of violence, and you lose absolutely everyone you care about. Then you end up in this other country, where the culture and ways of doing things are completely foreign to you, and random assholes make fun of you for how you dress and act and talk while you're still coming to grips with the fact that everyone you love is gone and you can never go home again. Meanwhile, everyone around you is like "smile, motherfucker, you're in the Land of Plenty now, where there's a Starbucks on every corner and 500 channels on TV. You should be grateful! Why aren't you acting more grateful?" So you have to pretend to be grateful while you're dying inside. Sound like an traumatized, orphaned refugee? Also sounds like Steve fucking Rogers, Captain Goddamn America. Except that most refugees were part of a community of other people who were going through the same thing. Steve is all alone, the last damn unicorn, if the last unicorn had horrible screaming nightmares about the time when it helped to liberate Buchenwald.

HYPERAROUSAL After a traumatic experience, the human system of self-preservation seems to go onto permanent alert, as if the danger might return at any moment. Physiological arousal continues unabated. In this state of hyerarousal, which is the first cardinal symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, the traumatized person startles easily, reacts irritably to small provocations, and sleeps poorly. Kardiner propsed that "the nucleus of the [traumatic] neurosis is physioneurosis."8 He believed that many of the symptoms observed in combat veterans of the First World War-startle reactions, hyperalertness, vigilance for the return of danger, nightmares, and psychosomatic complaints-could be understood as resulting from chronic arousal of the autonomic nervous system. He also interpreted the irritability and explosively aggressive behavior of traumatized men as disorganized fragments of a shattered "fight or flight" response to overwhelming danger.

I thought when the abuse stopped I could move on with my life. Instead I am still running from Brian. The only difference is now I am running from him in my dreams.

Do they matter?—those dreams from the pit?... You can drink and forget and be glad, And people won’t say that you’re mad; For they’ll know you’ve fought for your country And no one will worry a bit.

The experience of psychological trauma, as is typically diagnosed (posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]), has at least some of the following symptoms: • Reliving the trauma: This can happen through nightmares, flashbacks, or reexperiencing as a result of being in the presence of stimuli reminiscent of the traumatic event. • Efforts to avoid thoughts or feelings that are associated with the trauma. • Efforts to avoid activities or situations that arouse memories of the trauma. • Inability to remember some important aspect of the trauma (psychogenic amnesia). • Marked reduced interest in important activities. • Feeling of a lack of interest or expulsion by others. • Limited affect; such as inability to cherish loving feelings. • A feeling of not having any future (foreshortened future); not expecting to have a career, get married, have children, or live a long life. • Hypervigilance (heightened sensitivity to possible traumatic stimuli).

Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS).. Secondary structural dissociation is characterized by divideness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EPs that are devoted to flight, fight or freeze, total submission, and so on. (Van der Hart et al., 2004). Gail, a patient of mine, does not have a personality disorder, but describes herself as a "changed person." She survived a horrific car accident that killed several others, and in which she was the driver. Someone not knowing her history might see her as a relatively normal, somewhat anxious and stiff person (ANP). It would not occur to this observer that only a year before, Gail had been a different person: fun-loving, spontaneous, flexible, and untroubled by frightening nightmares and constant anxiety. Fortunately, Gail has been willing to pay attention to her EPs; she has been able to put the process of integration in motion; and she has been able to heal. p134

If we ignore our abuse and trauma, it will continue to reveal itself to us. It may be subtle or it may be intense. Trauma can show up in our sleep. We may battle insomnia and nightmares. We can experience physical pain and emotional distress. We may struggle with anxiety and depression. Or we may suffer hypervigilance, dissociation, and Complex PTSD/PTSD. We may have flashbacks. We may battle triggers. Or we can suddenly be slammed with fight, flight, freeze, or fawn mode. Each of these signs are a normal trauma response. Even if we are unaware that it’s linked to our emotional trauma.

Raskind had been treating his war veteran patients with a generic drug called prazosin to manage their high blood pressure. While the drug was somewhat effective for lowering blood pressure in the body, Raskind found it had a far more powerful yet entirely unexpected benefit within the brain: it alleviated the reoccurring nightmares in his PTSD patients.

The door suddenly jerks open. A wide-eyed teenager bursts out. She stares at me in dazed horror. In a strange way, I both know and don’t know what has just happened. As the fragments begin to converge, they convey a horrible reality: I must have been hit by this car as I entered the crosswalk. In confused disbelief, I sink back into a hazy twilight. I find that I am unable to think clearly or to will myself awake from this nightmare. A man rushes to my side and drops to his knees. He announces himself as an off-duty paramedic. When I try to see where the voice is coming from, he sternly orders, “Don’t move your head.” The contradiction between his sharp command and what my body naturally wants—to turn toward his voice—frightens and stuns me into a sort of paralysis. My awareness strangely splits, and I experience an uncanny “dislocation.” It’s as if I’m floating above my body, looking down on the unfolding scene. I am snapped back when he roughly grabs my wrist and takes my pulse. He then shifts his position, directly above me. Awkwardly, he grasps my head with both of his hands, trapping it and keeping it from moving. His abrupt actions and the stinging ring of his command panic me; they immobilize me further. Dread seeps into my dazed, foggy consciousness: Maybe I have a broken neck, I think. I have a compelling impulse to find someone else to focus on. Simply, I need to have someone’s comforting gaze, a lifeline to hold onto. But I’m too terrified to move and feel helplessly frozen.

The number one cause of PTSD in the United States is motor vehicle accidents.14 As many as 25 to 33 percent of people show signs of PTSD—such as sleep disturbances, heightened anxiety, hypervigilance, nightmares, and avoidant behavior—30 days after an accident. It’s so common that 2.5 million to 7 million people in the United States suffer from it. Their risk of substance abuse is five times greater than normal. And well over half of people in car accidents (60 to 66 percent) have chronic pain, just like Emily did.15

The whole town is in a daze. Satanism, child molestation, missing children, mind control, injustice through the courts. I’m telling you, these people need help just to cope with the PTSD. You could give them coping skills, Mark. And the information you have could clarify why cover-up is so prevalent and why Aquino is allowed on their Daycare Board. Understanding might help them survive and solve their nightmare.” “I’m told Aquino owns the building that houses the Marin County Daycare Board,” Mark injected. “The Presidio is pretty close to the Grove3,” I said, the picture becoming even clearer from my perspective.

As bad as were the physical consequences of captivity, the emotional injuries were much more insidious, widespread, and enduring. In the first six postwar years, one of the most common diagnoses given to hospitalized former Pacific POWs was psychoneurosis. Nearly forty years after the war, more than 85 percent of former Pacific POWs in one study suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), characterized in part by flashbacks, anxiety, and nightmares. And in a 1987 study, eight in ten former Pacific POWs had "psychiatric impairment," six in ten had anxiety disorders, more than one in four had PTSD, and nearly one in five was depressed. For some, there was only one way out: a 1970 study reported that former Pacific POWs committed suicide 30 percent more often than controls.

She doesn’t mean to make me feel like a freak, not on purpose. It’s when she says I’m drawn to you, because you’re a strong man, like Caleb. When she says I kissed you because sex is the way I’ve been conditioned to get my way, that it’s all psychological, and it’s all because Caleb fucked with my head. I can’t stand it. I can’t have everything I feel, reduced to a textbook description that fits me, and millions of other broken idiots. More than that, I can’t stand thinking that maybe…she’s right. Maybe I don’t really love Caleb, maybe my brain made it up so I wouldn’t kill myself or feel so scared and alone. Maybe I’ll accept that one day and I won’t be able to stop having nightmares. Maybe I’ll never trust another emotion I ever have again. Who’s going to love a girl like that, Reed? Who’s ever going to love a freak like me?” She collapsed onto her bed and rolled into a ball, crying and rocking.

I had always thought that having a flashback meant fully hallucinating your past. In the movies, soldiers would be transported back to Afghanistan—they’d see desert sand and automatic rifles in a waking nightmare. But even when I remembered moments of abuse, I knew where I was. I knew I was on the couch. I knew I was not going to die. But I soon learned that in trauma lingo, people often aren’t talking about the movie version of flashbacks. They’re talking about emotional flashbacks. For example, before I quit my job, my boss often came into my office to tell me I’d made some minor mistake. If my body and brain were totally in the present, I would have felt embarrassed for messing up but would recognize that it wasn’t a huge deal, acknowledge my faults, and get back to it. Instead, after my boss left, I always felt guilt and anxiety and shame and terror. I’d run downstairs to have a cigarette, text a friend about how I was a moron, and spend half an hour freaking out about how nobody respected me and I’d probably end up fired. Even though consciously I was completely in the present, my emotions were back in 1997, back when I was a little kid and making a mistake on a spelling test could literally be a matter of life and death. This return was an emotional flashback.

PTSD is a severe and ongoing emotional reaction to an extreme psychological trauma. It often involves reexperiencing the traumatic event through flashbacks or nightmares, having disturbed sleep patterns, and persistent fear or anger. One of the key symptoms of PTSD is experiential avoidance, which means that trauma victims tend to push away uncomfortable emotions associated with what happened. Unfortunately, such avoidance only makes PTSD symptoms worse, given that suppressed emotions tend to grow stronger as they vie to break through to conscious awareness. The effort needed to keep suppressed emotions at bay can also sap the energy needed to deal with frustration, meaning that PTSD sufferers are often irritable.

The incident plaguing him on this very night, did not have any relation to the jungles, the killing fields, the faces of villagers and the Vietcong, nor the hours of trekking through the mud, to destinations never revealed over the radios.

People with PTSD cannot find refuge even in sleep, their rest ravaged by nightmares and flashbacks. Their bodies become so overrun by danger signals that they can no longer trust their physical responses for cues as to how they should react. As Cindy described, they go immediately from stimulus to response without being able to think through or often even be aware of what triggered them.

Most compelling to me, however, were the repetitive nightmares reported in PTSD patients—a symptom so reliable that it forms part of the list of features required for a diagnosis of the condition. If the brain cannot divorce the emotion from memory across the first night following a trauma experience, the theory suggests that a repeat attempt of emotional memory stripping will occur on the second night, as the strength of the “emotional tag” associated with the memory remains too high. If the process fails a second time, the same attempt will continue to repeat the next night, and the next night, like a broken record. This was precisely what appeared to be happening with the recurring nightmares of the trauma experience in PTSD patients.

A patient with PTSD who gave me nightmares.

A testable prediction emerged: if I could lower the levels of noradrenaline in the brains of PTSD patients during sleep, thereby reinstating the right chemical conditions for sleep to do its trauma therapy work, then I should be able to restore healthier quality REM sleep. With that restored REM-sleep quality should come an improvement in the clinical symptoms of PTSD, and further, a decrease in the frequency of painful repetitive nightmares. It was a scientific theory in search of clinical evidence. Then came the wonderful stroke of serendipity.

How do I wake feeling sore and in pain again as I did after the attack but to a lesser degree? The mind is a very powerful thing, Colton. It’s been proven time and time again that PTSD isn’t a normal nightmare, but horrors people relive.

I slid my arms around his waist, gripping tightly as he pressed a silent kiss to my hair, reminding myself over and over that we were out. We had survived. Never again- never again would I let someone hurt him like that. Hurt my sisters like that. Never again.

Complex PTSD is a result of prolonged or repeated trauma over a period of months or years. Here are some common symptoms of Complex PTSD: reliving trauma through flashbacks and nightmares dizziness or nausea when recalling memories avoiding situations or places that remind you of the trauma or abuser hyperarousal, which means being in a continual state of high alert the belief that the world is a dangerous place, a loss of faith and belief in the goodness of others a loss of trust in yourself or others difficulty sleeping being jumpy—sensitive to stimuli hypervigilance—constantly observing others’ behavior, searching for signs of bad behavior and clues that reveal bad intentions low self-esteem, a lack of self-confidence emotional regulation difficulties—you find yourself being more emotionally triggered than your usual way of being; you may experience intense anger or sadness or have thoughts of suicide preoccupation with an abuser—it is not uncommon to fixate on the abuser, the relationship with the abuser, or getting revenge for the abuse detachment from others—wanting to isolate yourself, withdraw from life challenges in relationships, including difficulty trusting others, possibly seeking out a rescuer, or even getting into another relationship with an abuser because it is familiar disassociation—feeling detached from yourself and your emotions depression—sadness and low energy, a lack of motivation toxic guilt and shame—a feeling that somehow you deserved to be abused, or that your failure to leave earlier is a sign of weakness destructive self-harming behavior—abusing drugs and alcohol is a common result of ongoing trauma; this can also include overeating to soothe and self-medicate. The flip side can be harming yourself through not eating. These behaviors develop during the period of trauma as a way to deal with or forget about the trauma and emotional pain.

I awoke each night, shaking and panting. And became glad when Tamlin wasn't there to witness it. When I, too, didn't witness him being yanked from his dreams, cold sweating coating his body. Or shifting into that beast, and staying awake until dawn, monitoring the estate for threats. What could I say to calm those fears, when I was the source of so many of them?

The true story of David "mad piper" Kirkpatrick, the Scottish soldier who parachuted with his kilt on in Italy march 1945. Playing his bagpipe during a secret mission of 2nd SAS and Italian partisan against a german Head Quarter, he helped to save an Italian village from a terrible nazi reprisal. But for 65 years he suffered the ghost of war (PTSD) for the nightmares of that night and lived without knowing he was a hero...until a day in 2010 an Italian journalist found him and let him know the truth... BLOG / PAGE FACEBOOK / BOOK TRAILER YOUTUBE / BOOK TRAILER FB (in Italian)

In fact, a widely used drug in nightmares associated with PTSD, prazosin, acts mainly as a blocker of noradrenaline in the brain. Although a recent study suggests prazosin is no more effective than a placebo, I and my colleagues have seen several patients successfully treated with this drug.

Some people talk about their PTSD as if it's a badge of honor, and I roll my fucking eyes. I'm not trying to be the PDST-esy of them all. I ignored it for a really long time. I overdosed at seventeen. I had no home for a little while. Every night I have nightmares. It's gonna end my marriage, too. I want it to end. He can't stomach my suffering and hates that he can't help me and doesn't want to do what will actually end this era. I think he loves me too much to see me in pain, and the pain he does see reminds him of his own, which is just as fucked as mine. Why can't just fucking let me cry? When the men came over, they would drug me, and I still crave those drugs to this day. Every man I look at either reminds me if those men or they don't. All men are mirrors. Whether they want to be or not. I think about those men all the time. (117)

When traumatic events remain unhealed, it is common to replay these events in your mind as recurrent memories, flashbacks, nightmares, or disturbing feelings that invade your current life and relationships. Moreover, your ability to care for yourself as an adult is often a reflection of how well you were cared for as a child.

PTSD was a given. Flashbacks, nightmares, and high anxiety would haunt him for years to come. He’d lost weight and was decorated with scars. Most of them were faint and would disappear over time, but it didn’t matter. The deepest cuts were internal.

Real- this was real. The horrors- those were nightmares. I was out; I was alive; I was safe.

Hands- there were hands on my shoulders, shaking me, squeezing me. I thrashed against them, screaming, screaming- 'FEYRE.' The voice was at once the night and the dawn and the stars and the earth, and every inch of my body calmed at the primal dominance in it. 'Open your eyes,' the voice ordered. I did. My throat was raw, my mouth full of ash, my face soaked and sticky, and Rhysand- Rhysand was hovering above me, his eyes wide. 'It was a dream,' he said, his breathing as hard as mine. The moonlight trickling through the windows illuminated the dark lines of swirling tattoos down his arm, his shoulders, across his sculpted chest. Like the ones I bore on my arm. He scanned my face. 'A dream,' he said again. Velaris. I was in Velaris, at his house. And I had- my dream- The sheets, the blankets were ripped. Shredded. But not with a knife. And that ashy, smoky taste coating my mouth... My hand was unnervingly steady as I lifted it to find my fingers ending in simmering embers. Living claws of flame that had sliced through my bed linens like they were cauterising wounds-

I have this dream,' Rhys said as I retched again, holding my hair. 'Where it's not me stuck under her, but Cassian or Azriel. And she's pinned their wings to the bed with spikes, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. She's commanded me to watch, and I have no choice but to see how I failed them.' ... His fingers were gentle, but firm where he'd fisted them in my hair. 'You never failed them,' I rasped. 'I did... horrible things to ensure that.' Those violet eyes near-glowed in the dim light.' 'So did I.' My sweat clung like blood- the blood of those two faeries- I pivoted, barely turning in time. His other hand stroked long soothing lines down the curve of my back, as over and over I yielded my dinner.

We don’t have nightmares, Fin. We live them. They just become more vivid at night. Ask Bailey. Ask her if she doesn’t see the ghosts hiding around corners every day.

People who suffered nightmares frequently were three times more likely to commit suicide, and that was regardless of whether they were clinically depressed or suffering from PTSD.

One of life's greatest blessings, Lita had once realized, goes completely unnoticed until it's gone. It is forgetting. Forgetting a terrible memory so completely that you forget there was anything to forget in the first place. It's just gone. Vanished. That is, until it comes back. And the memories always come back, one way or another, but most especially in dreams.