How Deep Is the Wound? Quotes

“Safety isn’t a fortress you live in—it’s a resting place you learn to return to.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The pain that we cannot control may be the one that could teach us the strength we never knew we had.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The pain we cannot control may be the very experience that teaches us about the strength we never knew we possessed.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Repair doesn’t mean rushing into closeness. It means learning to feel safe enough to stay.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The most powerful relationships are those that lift us up, not those that hold us captive.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Narcissistic harm is a theft of clarity—it turns love into confusion and loyalty into self-doubt.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The most damaging wounds are often the ones we’re told don’t count.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The heart that opens wide is the same heart that bleeds profusely.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Your willingness to heal transforms warning signs into guidance systems.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Development doesn’t pause for pain. It grows around it—sometimes like scaffolding, sometimes like poison ivy.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Not being seen doesn’t hurt all at once. It hurts slowly, in the spaces where love should have lived.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Most emotional wounds live in the space between what we wanted, we
needed, and what we received.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“We crave connection, yet those we love most can wound us deepest.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Integrating your pain becomes the foundation for something greater.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Fear teaches the brain to expect pain—until hope and trust teach it to expect peace.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Trauma lasts only as long as fear keeps us from feeling capable. Once safety returns, any injury transforms into a scar—just a mark of what we went through, a testimony of life!”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Trauma is an active, ongoing injury—one that continues disrupting our regular capacity even after a perceived danger has passed because the threat remains emotionally alive.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“We have a responsibility, and indeed a profound obligation, to heal our
wounds.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Pain yells when we stop hearing what it’s trying to say.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Emotions are not what disrupt our system—they are part of a system we’ve failed to understand.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“To understand our emotions is to reclaim authorship over our own story.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The more we learn how emotions work, the more they work for us.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Healing starts with a single, hopeful decision to move forward. As you heal, your light touches everyone around you—family, friends, strangers—creating waves of change that reach far beyond what you can see.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“We can’t escape pain, but we can decide what story it tells.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Emotional pain is meant to be a temporary response tied to a specific occurrence, asking to be resolved as it happens.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“The same experience can become either wisdom or burden, depending on the story we tell ourselves about what it means.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Trauma is the painful failure to adapt; emotional wounds are adaptation in progress.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain

“Emotions aren’t random reactions—they’re constructed scripts built from sensation, memory, and meaning.”
― Antonieta Contreras, How Deep Is the Wound?: A Guide to Investigating, Understanding, and Resolving Your Emotional Pain