{"quotes":[{"text":"A silence absorbed them both – a lack of sound so potent it blackened the place with something richer than hate.","author":"Carla H. Krueger","tags":["-carla-h-krueger","childhood-trauma","fear","hate","hatred","silence","sleeping-with-the-sun"],"id":10679,"author_id":"Carla+H.+Krueger"},{"text":"There’s a weight in the room now, a remembrance of childhood. It sinks like a stone, or a heart, or my weight on a good day.","author":"Kris Kidd","tags":["childhood-trauma","depression","eating-disorders"],"id":25225,"author_id":"Kris+Kidd"},{"text":"My mother is a certainty. I can count on the watercolour pain in her voice when she calls to say she hasn't heard from me in months. The precarious laughter as she comes from the kitchen, when I finally do appear on her doorstep, the laughter that says I might be a chickadee that's alighted unexpectedly on her thumb.","author":"Trevor Cole","tags":["childhood-trauma","forgiveness","guilt","mothers-and-daughters","parent","recovery","regrets"],"id":31635,"author_id":"Trevor+Cole"},{"text":"Perhaps this was the wisdom with which a child in her position survived: by minimizing her wounds—staying as small as possible, as nearly transparent as possible.","author":"Haruki Murakami","tags":["childhood-trauma","survival"],"id":71473,"author_id":"Haruki+Murakami"},{"text":"First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.","author":"Frances Mayes","tags":["childhood-memories","childhood-trauma","father","frances-mayes","memoir","mother","shooting","southern","southerners"],"id":72416,"author_id":"Frances+Mayes"},{"text":"You survived by seizing every tiny drop of love you could find anywhere, and milking it, relishing it, for all it was worth. And as you grew up, you sought love, anywhere you could find it, whether it was a teacher or a coach or a friend or a friend's parents. You sought those tiny droplets of love, basking in them when you found them. They sustained you. For all these years, you've lived under the illusion that somehow, you made it because you were tough enough to overpower the abuse, the hatred, the hard knocks of life. But really you made it because love is so powerful that tiny little doses of it are enough to overcome the pain of the worst things life can dish out. Toughness was a faulty coping mechanism you devised to get by. But, in reality, it has been your ability to never give up, to keep seeking love, and your resourcefulness to make that love last long enough to sustain you. That is what has gotten you by.","author":"Rachel Reiland","tags":["borderline-personality-disorder","bpd","childhood-trauma","inspirational","love","mental-illness"],"id":91630,"author_id":"Rachel+Reiland"},{"text":"I lie there for a while in the dusk, then make a decision, little knowing how it will affect every facet of my life and fiber of my being for the rest of my life: I say no to shame.","author":"Alan Cumming","tags":["childhood-trauma","shame","surviving-spirit"],"id":105870,"author_id":"Alan+Cumming"},{"text":"After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. Then reimagine the world.","author":"Mary Oliver","tags":["childhood-trauma","healing","rebirth","reinvention","suffering"],"id":112046,"author_id":"Mary+Oliver"},{"text":"Keep your heart wide open and you’ll be received with open hearts — not by everyone, but to be received by one open heart is more than worth the journey.","author":"Marnie Grundman","tags":["abandonment","abandonment-issues","childhood-trauma","dysfunctional-family","family-relationships","fatherless","fathers-and-daughters","inspirational","love","marnie-grundman","open-heart"],"id":114315,"author_id":"Marnie+Grundman"},{"text":"A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel them as sensation, like a texture that was once at his fingers every day but now is gone and no matter how he gropes or reaches his hand he cannot touch what’s no longer there.","author":"Larry Watson","tags":["childhood","childhood-trauma","experience","grief","grieving","love","youth"],"id":114755,"author_id":"Larry+Watson"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":35,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}