Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
-
Many of my patients have survived trauma through tremendous courage and persistence, only to get into the same kinds of trouble over and over again. Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better.
-
Trauma interferes with the proper functioning of brain areas that manage and interpret experience.
-
Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.
-
Maltreatment is a chisel that shapes a brain to contend with strife, but at the cost of deep, enduring wounds. Childhood abuse isn’t something you “get over.”
-
Focus on that sensation and see how it changes when you take a deep breath out.
-
What can not be spoken to the mother cannot be told to the self.
-
The greater the doubt, the greater the awakening; the smaller the doubt, the smaller the awakening. No doubt, no awakening.
-
The trauma may be over, but it keeps being replayed in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system.
-
Exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body.
-
When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.
-
Are traumatized people condemned to seek refuge in what is familiar? If so, why, and is it possible to help them become attached to places and activities that are safe and pleasurable?
-
On YouTube you can still watch the documentary Let There Be Light, by the great Hollywood director John Huston, which shows men undergoing hypnosis to treat “war neurosis.
-
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.
-
As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.
-
When you don’t feel real nothing matters, which makes it impossible to protect yourself from danger.
-
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.
-
Make us vulnerable to others’ negativity, so that we respond to their anger with fury or are dragged down by their depression.
-
Left my CBT therapist to work with a psychodynamic psychiatrist and I joined a Pilates class.
-
Antipsychotic drugs were a major factor in reducing the number of people living in mental hospitals in the United States, from over 500,000 in 1955 to fewer than 100,000 in 1996.
-
The most important predictor of how well his subjects coped with life’s inevitable disappointments was the level of security with their primary caregiver during the first two years of life. Resilience could be predicted by how lovable mothers rated their kids at age two.
-
One study, based on Medicaid data in thirteen states, found that 12.4 percent of children in foster care received antipsychotics, compared with 1.4 percent of Medicaid-eligible children in general.
-
EMDR, in which EMDR had better long-term results than Prozac in treating depression, at least in adult onset trauma.
-
One tragic example of this orientation is the rampant prescription of painkillers, which now kill more people each year in the United States than guns or car accidents.
-
He was afraid that he was becoming just like his father, who was always angry and rarely talked with his children—except to compare them unfavorably with his comrades who had lost their lives around Christmas 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.