Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
We soothe newborns, but parents soon start teaching their children to tolerate higher levels of arousal, a job that is often assigned to fathers. (I once heard the psychologist John Gottman say, “Mothers stroke, and fathers poke.”) Learning how to manage arousal is a key life skill, and parents must do it for babies before babies can do it for themselves. If that gnawing sensation in his belly makes a baby cry, the breast or bottle arrives. If he’s scared, someone holds and rocks him until he calms down. If his bowels erupt, someone comes to make him clean and dry. Associating intense sensations with safety, comfort, and mastery is the foundation of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-nurture, a theme to which I return throughout this book.
Quotes to Explore
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I never was for telephones. Just don't like them, that's all. Anybody wants to talk to you, they can come to see you.
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Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.
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A sack is way better than any nightclub. A touchdown is way better than any bar experience I've ever had.
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What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths.
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I got drunk when I was five. Everybody gets drunk before they're 21.
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My role models were always the Pacinos and the Oldmans, the guys who get dirty with their characters, and I arrived in L.A. during the big boom of 'Dawson's Creek.' I was getting cast as the boy next door, or the friend of the jock. I thought, 'Did I really have to do all that studying?'
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Maybe it will be a great thing when the Baby Boomers finally die out. In real life, it's not a matter of the good guys or the bad guys. Rather, it's big numbers and small numbers that do the counting.
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I personally don't even try to compare New York and L.A. To me, they are just way too different.
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Blackbeard is probably the most infamous pirate who ever lived. He's one of those characters for which most of your work is done before you start.
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You don't get happy by sitting around going on, 'Oh this is a horrible situation, what to do?' You've got to find the courage to change that. I think change is extremely hard for people.
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I don't believe in the no-carb diet... I have a theory. I think if you give up carbs, you get cranky. You must include them in your daily diet.
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I have to go through auditions, and my surname has got me into rooms, but I'll never know if it gets me any jobs. There's a lot of sexism and objectification, and a lot of people put you down.
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Corruption is rife in the Muslim world, and when it is coupled with the marginalization of religion, it manifests itself as frustration and becomes a fertile recruiting ground for extremism.
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We are not communists.
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Many of my early Vines and collaborations were with gay people.
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My priority is always playing tennis and practising and doing my schedule with my tennis.
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All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.
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There are interesting forms of difficulty, and there are unprofitable forms of difficulty. I mean, I enjoy some difficult poetry, but some of it is impenetrable and I actually wouldn't want to penetrate it if I could, perhaps.
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Authorised royal biographers are so straitjacketed, deferential, fawning, and unadventurous that they can only be after a knighthood. Or they're completely scurrilous and insolent, like Andrew Morton or Paul Burrell.
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The Democratic policy is any abortion, any time, for any reason at any point in a woman's pregnancy, right up until the last minute, to be paid by taxpayers. Barbara Boxer described this policy as, 'It's not a life until it leaves the hospital.'
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No man has all the wisdom in the world; everyone has some.
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Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.
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I feel that if I'm writing a book, it has to be an honest book: it has to say what I believe to be the truth, so that's kind of warts and all.
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We soothe newborns, but parents soon start teaching their children to tolerate higher levels of arousal, a job that is often assigned to fathers. (I once heard the psychologist John Gottman say, “Mothers stroke, and fathers poke.”) Learning how to manage arousal is a key life skill, and parents must do it for babies before babies can do it for themselves. If that gnawing sensation in his belly makes a baby cry, the breast or bottle arrives. If he’s scared, someone holds and rocks him until he calms down. If his bowels erupt, someone comes to make him clean and dry. Associating intense sensations with safety, comfort, and mastery is the foundation of self-regulation, self-soothing, and self-nurture, a theme to which I return throughout this book.
