Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
Exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body.
Bessel van der Kolk
Quotes to Explore
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I'm definitely interested in exploring human contradictions. Contradictions are what make us human - it's what defines us as human beings. Contradictions are what make characters interesting, and I've been lucky to be presented with characters who have a lot of contradictions.
Edgar Ramirez
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I never get tired of exploring Americana or country music, and I always have a little bit of a crooner in me that never seems to go away.
K. D. Lang
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I'm experimental by nature... always exploring my creativity.
Christina Aguilera
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Gently, I ran my hand across his chest, exploring it. My breath felt tight in my throat. He was so beautiful. His muscles were toned, defined, his skin warm and smooth. Stroking my palm up over the line of his collarbone, I felt the firmness of his shoulder, the strength of his bicep. I traced my fingers over the black AK, following the lines of the letters. Alex hardly moved as I touched him, his eyes never leaving me. Finally I sighed and dropped my hand. I tried to smile. "I've sort of been wanting to do that ever since that first night in the motel room," I admitted.
L.A. Weatherly
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Why is there space rather than no space? Why is space three-dimensional? Why is space big? We have a lot of room to move around in. How come it's not tiny? We have no consensus about these things. We're still exploring them.
Leonard Susskind
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Man is a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex, multiform creature that bears within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh is tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
Oscar Wilde
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And of course, the brain is not responsible for any of the sensations at all. The correct view is that the seat and source of sensation is the region of the heart.
Aristotle
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Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness...
George Bernard Shaw
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The enormous influence of novelty--the way in which it quickens observations, sharpens sensations, and exalts sentiment--is not half enough taken note of by us, and is to me a very sorrowful matter. And yet, if we try to obtain perpetual change, change itself will become monotonous.
John Ruskin
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I've always had the sensation that people in America are always avant-garde. Very attentive to all the new innovations. But it's very specialized.
Sergio Leone
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Whose memories were merely blunted, not integrated as an event that happened in the past, and still caused considerable anxiety—those who received EMDR no longer experienced the distinct imprints of the trauma: It had become a story of a terrible event that had happened a long time ago.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Integrating the cut-off elements of the trauma into the ongoing narrative of life, so that the brain can recognize that “that was then, and this is now.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Since then neuroscience research has shown that we possess two distinct forms of self-awareness: one that keeps track of the self across time and one that registers the self in the present moment. The first, our autobiographical self, creates connections among experiences and assembles them into a coherent story. This system is rooted in language. Our narratives change with the telling, as our perspective changes and as we incorporate new input. The other system, moment-to-moment self-awareness, is based primarily in physical sensations, but if we feel safe and are not rushed, we can find words to communicate that experience as well.
Bessel van der Kolk
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The elementary self system in the brain stem and limbic system is massively activated when people are faced with the threat of annihilation, which results in an overwhelming sense of fear and terror accompanied by intense physiological arousal. To people who are reliving a trauma, nothing makes sense; they are trapped in a life-or-death situation, a state of paralyzing fear or blind rage. Mind and body are constantly aroused, as if they are in imminent danger.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think. 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.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them. There appeared to be little in between.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.
Miguel de Unamuno
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The NFL acknowledges that repetitive trauma to the head in football... can cause a permanent, disabiling injury to the brain.
Bob Fitzsimmons
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Trauma dissociates us from the parts of our body that are wounded, so we have to leave our whole body. It's a journey you take your whole life, that coming back in, re-landing in your body, in your self, on the Earth. I think one of the reasons it's been so easy, in a way, for us to violate both women and the Earth is this profound dissociation that exists in everyone.
Eve Ensler
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Mercury is a potent toxin that interferes with the human nervous system. Reducing this hazard will be a major public health breakthrough.
Frances Beinecke
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The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke
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Exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body.
Bessel van der Kolk
