Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
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The different sensations that entered the brain at the time of the trauma are not properly assembled into a story, a piece of autobiography.
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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.”
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Left my CBT therapist to work with a psychodynamic psychiatrist and I joined a Pilates class.
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Agency is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have.
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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.
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As in other animals, the nerves and chemicals that make up our basic brain structure have a direct connection with our body. When the old brain takes over, it partially shuts down the higher brain, our conscious mind, and propels the body to run, hide, fight, or, on occasion, freeze. By the time we are fully aware of our situation, our body may already be on the move. If the fight/flight/freeze response is successful and we escape the danger, we recover our internal equilibrium and gradually “regain our senses.
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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.
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If you were not there, it’s difficult to describe and say how it was. How men function under such stress is one thing, and then how you communicate and express that to somebody who never knew that such a degree of brutality exists seems like a fantasy.
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It is not possible to manage life and maintain homeostatic balance without data on the current state of the organism’s body. Damasio calls these housekeeping areas of the brain the “proto-self,” because they create the “wordless knowledge” that underlies our conscious sense of self.
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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.
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Make us vulnerable to others’ negativity, so that we respond to their anger with fury or are dragged down by their depression.
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Most seem to have made an unconscious decision that it is better to keep visiting doctors and treating ailments that don’t heal than to do the painful work of facing the demons of the past.
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It is one thing to process memories of trauma, but it is an entirely different matter to confront the inner void—the holes in the soul that result from not having been wanted, not having been seen, and not having been allowed to speak the truth.
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The opening line of the grant rejection read: “It has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration.
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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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That the object of writing is to write to yourself, to let your self know what you have been trying to avoid.
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What can not be spoken to the mother cannot be told to the self.
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As my friend Ed Tronick taught me a long time ago, the brain is a cultural organ—experience shapes the brain.
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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.
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If you’ve been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you.
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Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while other are too numb to absorb new experiences – or to be alert to signs of real danger. When the smoke detectors of the brain malfunction, people no longer run when they should be trying to escape or fight back when they should be defending themselves.
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Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.
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Pendulation—gently moving in and out of accessing internal sensations.
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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.