Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. 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.
Quotes to Explore
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Time is the devourer of all things.
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The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century.
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Twenty years ago, I said there was going to be something that would stop the Soviet Union from taking over the world. And now we see that the Soviet Union has been stopped, through its own disintegration.
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I guess actors are very sensitive people. We're porous.
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I'm in favour of religion as a tamer of arrogance. For a Greek Orthodox, the idea of God as creator outside the human is not God in God's terms. My God isn't the God of George Bush.
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Stages are getting higher and higher, and I'm getting older and older.
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I go out and speak to women's groups all the time, and I say, 'Guys, you gotta laugh and find the humor in things. You gotta pass it on.'
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It's mystifying to me why the House leadership will not allow a straight up-or-down vote on a pay raise. I vote against every pay raise because taxpayers deserve better.
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I only hope that one day, America will recognize what the rest of the world already has known, that our indigenous music - gospel, blues, jazz and R&B - is the heart and soul of all popular music; and that we cannot afford to let this legacy slip into obscurity, I'm telling you.
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When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven't developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don't know how to eliminate them effectively.
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When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.
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Money is not important to me. What makes me feel successful is making the people I love happy.
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If falling into desperation worked to make things better, then I would say, 'Let's all jump into despair.' But it doesn't help. The only way to truly find meaning and fulfillment is to look at the disaster, the pain, the difficulty, and know with complete certainty that good can come from this.
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Never give up.
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I'm never really happy with anything I do.
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I think in some ways what Snowden is, is he's a mix of a cold war spy novel and post-9/11 spy novel.
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President Obama had a few historians at the White House for a couple of dinners. I was lucky enough to be one of those asked, and he was very interested in Ronald Reagan, and I came away feeling that.
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Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.
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The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
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I believe in the ethos of the remix, like Andy Warhol making a painting of a Campbell's soup label.
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I think movies have much more magic than the theater. Theater can be a magical experience, but movies thrust their subjectivity on you in a more profound way.
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My favorite animal to hunt is probably elk. There's nothing like the sound of a bugling bull splitting the cold air at first light. And that smell is unmistakable. Once you experience their musk in the wild there's no going back! A close second would be a varmint hunt.
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What is required to face trauma is the ability to mourn, fully and deeply, all that has been taken from us. Only through mourning everything we have lost can we discover that we have in fact survived; that our spirits are indestructible.
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We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. 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.
