Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
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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.
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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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This suggested that for many traumatized people, reexposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety.
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Anyone who has come into contact with extreme pain, suffering or death has no trouble understanding Greek drama.
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Exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body.
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Some people’s lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.
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In April 2013, a few weeks before DSM-V was formally released, NIMH director Thomas Insel announced that his agency could no longer support DSM’s “symptom-based diagnosis.”32 Instead the institute would focus its funding on what are called Research Domain Criteria (RDoC)33 to create a framework for studies that would cut across current diagnostic categories.
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Great detail will help people to leave it behind. That is also a basic premise of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which today is taught in graduate psychology courses around the world.
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Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage—a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.
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Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a world that longs to forget.
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When you don’t feel real nothing matters, which makes it impossible to protect yourself from danger.
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Hypersensitized to her memories of the past and that the best treatment would be some form of desensitization.
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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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Trauma radically changes people: that in fact they no longer are “themselves.” It is excruciatingly difficult to put that feeling of no longer being yourself into words.
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It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.
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When I go to Europe to teach, I often am contacted by officials at the ministries of health in the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, or the Netherlands and asked to.
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Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us. (For example, your fear at being flagged down by the police can turn instantly to gratitude when the cop warns you that there’s an accident ahead.) But the moment we feel trapped, enraged, or rejected, we are vulnerable to activating old maps and to follow their directions. Change begins when we learn to "own" our emotional brains. That means learning to observe and tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.
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As we’ve seen, the essence of trauma is feeling godforsaken, cut off from the human race.
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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.
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Most human beings simply cannot tolerate being disengaged from others for any length of time. People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds.
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It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension.
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Looking at this spectrum of angry to sad expressions, the abused kids were hyperalert to the slightest features of anger.
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If you’ve been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you.
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Primordial feelings provide a direct experience of one’s own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer existence. These primordial feelings reflect the current state of the body along varied dimensions, . . . along the scale that ranges from pleasure to pain, and they originate at the level of the brain stem rather than the cerebral cortex. All feelings of emotion are complex musical variations on primordial feelings.