Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
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Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening.
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Taking the scattered and reactive energies of your mind and focusing them into a coherent source of energy for living, for problem solving, for healing.
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The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.
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Medicines that target the autonomic nervous system, like propranolol or clonidine, can help to decrease hyperarousal and reactivity to stress.
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Traumatic experiences are often lost in time and concealed by shame, secrecy, and social taboo, but the study revealed that the impact of trauma pervaded these patients’ adult lives.
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After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don’t. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can’t understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers.
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Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.
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The challenge is not so much learning to accept the terrible things that have happened but learning how to gain mastery over one’s internal sensations and emotions. Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside is the first step to recovery.
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To this day, after twenty years and four subsequent revisions, the DSM and the entire system based on it fail victims of child abuse and neglect—just as they ignored the plight of veterans before PTSD was introduced back in 1980.
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I realized then our display of “caring” must have felt to her much like a gang rape.
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Safety from feeling shamed, admonished, or judged, and to bolster the courage to tolerate, face, and process the reality of what has happened.
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The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.
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In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.
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Since 2001 far more Americans have died at the hands of their partners or other family members than in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. American women are twice as likely to suffer domestic violence as breast cancer.
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We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.
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Noticing sensations for the first time can be quite distressing, and it may precipitate flashbacks in which people curl up or assume defensive postures.
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I discovered that my professional training, with its focus on understanding and insight, had largely ignored the relevance of the living, breathing body, the foundation of our selves.
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Many traumatized children and adults simply cannot describe what they are feeling because they cannot identify what their physical sensations mean. They may look furious but deny that they are angry; they may appear terrified but say that they are fine. Not being able to discern what is going on inside their bodies causes them to be out of touch with their needs, and they have trouble taking care of themselves, whether it involves eating the right amount at the right time or getting the sleep they need.
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Stabilize and calm patients down, help to lay traumatic memories and reenactments to rest, and reconnect patients with their fellow men and women.
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A further step is to observe the interplay between your thoughts and your physical sensations. How are particular thoughts registered in your body? (Do thoughts like “My father loves me” or “my girlfriend dumped me” produce different sensations?) Becoming aware of how your body organizes particular emotions or memories opens up the possibility of releasing sensations and impulses you once blocked in order to survive.
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Games like Simon Says lead to lots of sniggering and giggling—signs of safety and relaxation. When teenagers balk at these “stupid games,” we nod understandingly and enlist their cooperation by asking them to demonstrate games to the little kids, who “need their help.
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Emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to experiences and thus are the foundation of reason.
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Effectively dealing with stress depends upon achieving a balance between the smoke detector and the watchtower. If you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options: You can learn to regulate them from the top down or from the bottom up.
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Marlantes tells us that his road to recovery required learning to tell the truth, even if that truth was brutally painful.