Brianna

“What is trauma? As I use the word, "trauma" is an inner injury, a lasting rupture or split within the self due to difficult or hurtful events. By this definition, trauma is primarily what happens within someone as a result of the difficult or hurtful events that befall them; it is not the events themselves. "Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you' is how I formulate it.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Work pressures, multitasking, social media, news updates, multiplicities of entertainment sources—these all induce us to become lost in thoughts, frantic activities, gadgets, meaningless conversations. We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“Time after time it was the “nice” people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness in my family practice, or who came under my care at the hospital palliative ward I directed.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture