Sensations Quotes
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The disappearance of medial prefrontal activation could explain why so many traumatized people lose their sense of purpose and direction. I used to be surprised by how often my patients asked me for advice about the most ordinary things, and then by how rarely they followed it. Now I understood that their relationship with their own inner reality was impaired. How could they make decisions, or put any plan into action, if they couldn't define what they wanted or, to be more precise, what the sensations in their bodies, the basis of all emotions, were trying to tell them?
Bessel van der Kolk
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The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind — of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed. For most people this involves finding a way to become calm and focused, learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations that remind you of the past, finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you, not having to keep secrets from yourself, including secrets about the ways that you have managed to survive.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Unlike normal memories, traumatic memories are more like fragments of sensations, emotions, reactions, and images that keep getting reexperienced in the present.
Bessel van der Kolk
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When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of what happens in human pathology. People take drugs to make it disappear, and they cut themselves to make it disappear, and they starve themselves to make it disappear, and they have sex with anyone who comes along to make it disappear and once you have these horrible sensations in your body, you’ll do anything to make it go away.
Bessel van der Kolk
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The great artist is a formulation of the greatest intelligence: he is the recipient of sensations which are the most delicate and consequently the most invisible expressions of the brain.
Paul Gauguin
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It opens up new perspectives on how actions that involve noticing and befriending the sensations in our bodies can produce profound changes in both mind and brain.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Not bodies produce sensations, but element-complexes (sensation-complexes) constitute the bodies. When the physicist considers the bodies as the permanent reality, the 'elements' as the transient appearance, he does not realise that all 'bodies' are only mental symbols for element-complexes (sensation-complexes).
Ernst Mach
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Japanese things - laquers, netsuke, prints - conjure a picture of a place where sensations are always new, where art pours out of daily life, where everything exists in a dream of endless beautiful flow.
Edmund de Waal
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Habitual drug use in teens is that they cannot stand the physical sensations that signal fear, rage, and helplessness.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Reading was artificial borrowed life, benefiting from ideas and sensations transmitted cerebrally, acquiring the treasures of human truth by purchase or swindle, not by work.
Benito Perez Galdos
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It seems as though the goal of my work has always been to dissolve myself completely into the sensations of the surroundings in order to then integrate this into a coherent painterly form.
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
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In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
Bessel van der Kolk