From the book called, 'Body Keeps The Score' By Bessel Van Der Kolk:

'The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop.'

'After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don't. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can't understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers.'

'...he was suffering from a condition much more complex than simply having bad memories or damaged brain chemistry - or altered fear circuits in the brain. Before...Tom had been a devoted and loyal friend, someone who enjoyed life, with many interests and pleasures....trauma had transformed everything.'

'They also alternated between occasional bouts of explosive rage and long periods of being emotionally shut down. Most of them had great difficulty getting along with other people and had trouble maintaining meaningful relationships'

'Another characteristic they shared was that even their most relaxed conversations seemed stilted, lacking the natural flow of gestures and facial expressions that are typical among friends....how trauma is held in people's bodies.'

'Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about...all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities - it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true....When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.'

'...taught us that traumatized people look at the world in a fundamentally different way from other people.'

'We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually it is not enough. The act of telling the story doesn't necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time. For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present. Our search to understand trauma has led us to think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also about the processes by which it heals.'

For people like me who may have needed this book too this weekend: 
Hope the book helps you get closer to healing abit, even temporarily give you a sense of relief from your inner struggles no one can seem to help with or gain new hope after another disappointment, to try again with different therapy method and not give up until you've found the right type of therapy for you.

For mental health professionals: Chapter 2
'If you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating a trauma from the patient's past.'
