Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
-
This research confirms what our patients tell us: that the self can be detached from the body and live a phantom existence on its own. Similarly, Lanius and Frewen, as well as a group of researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands,26 did brain scans on people who dissociated their terror and found that the fear centers of the brain simply shut down as they recalled the event.
-
Like the DSM-V, the RDoC framework conceptualizes mental illnesses solely as brain disorders. This means that future research funding will explore the brain circuits “and other neurobiological measures” that underlie mental problems. Insel sees this as a first step toward the sort of “precision medicine that has transformed cancer diagnosis and treatment.” Mental illness, however, is not at all like cancer: Humans are social animals, and mental problems involve not being able to get along with other people, not fitting in, not belonging, and in general not being able to get on the same wavelength.
-
The opening line of the grant rejection read: “It has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration.
-
Anyone who has come into contact with extreme pain, suffering or death has no trouble understanding Greek drama.
-
I grew up thinking that my family was normal. But I always was terrified of my dad. I never felt cared for by him. He never hit me as hard as he did my siblings, but I have a pervasive sense of fear.
-
Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. If we are aware of the constant changes in our inner and outer environment, we can mobilize to manage them. But we can’t do this unless our watchtower, the MPFC, learns to observe what is going on inside us.
-
The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop.
-
Pendulation—gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations.
-
People can learn to control and change their behavior, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. The body keeps the score: If trauma is encoded in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatized children are concerned, the last things we should be cutting from school schedules are the activities that can do precisely that: chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, and other forms of joyful engagement.
-
The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening; the smaller the doubt, the smaller the awakening. No doubt, no awakening.
-
Erratic caregiving produced kids who were chronically physiologically aroused. The children of unpredictable parents often clamored for attention and became intensely frustrated in the face of small challenges. Their persistent arousal made them chronically anxious. Constantly looking for reassurance got in the way of playing and exploration, and, as a result, they grew up chronically nervous and nonadventurous.
-
Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming “spaced out” or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization23 and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning. People with alexithymia can get better only by learning to recognize the relationship between their physical sensations and their emotions, much as colorblind people can only enter the world of color by learning to distinguish and appreciate shades of gray.
-
The trauma may be over, but it keeps being replayed in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system.
-
We now know that more than half the people who seek psychiatric care have been assaulted, abandoned, neglected, or even raped as children, or have witnessed violence in their families.
-
As in EMDR the resolution of the trauma was the result of her ability to access her imagination and rework the scenes in which she had become frozen so long ago.
-
It was already well known that intense emotions activate the limbic system, in particular an area within it called the amygdala. We depend on the amygdala to warn us of impending danger and to activate the body’s stress response.
-
Trauma interferes with the proper functioning of brain areas that manage and interpret experience.
-
Treatment needs to reactivate the capacity to safely mirror, and be mirrored, by others, but also to resist being hijacked by others’ negative emotions.
-
Three responses to threat. 1. The social engagement system: an alarmed monkey signals danger and calls for help. VVC. 2. Fight or flight: Teeth bared, the face of rage and terror. SNS. 3. Collapse: The body signals defeat and withdraws. DVC.
-
That happens only when you feel safe at a visceral level and allow yourself to connect that sense of safety with memories of past helplessness.
-
Traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them.
-
Recent research has swept away the simple idea that “having” a particular gene produces a particular result. It turns out that many genes work together to influence a single outcome.
-
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.
-
We are a hopeful species. Working with trauma is as much about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken.