Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
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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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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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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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I like to believe that once our society truly focuses on the needs of children, all form of social support for families - a policy that remains so controversial in this country - will gradually come to seem not only desirable but also doable. ... if we feel abandoned, worthless, or invisible, nothing seems to matter. Fear destroys curiosity and playfulness. In order to have a healthy society, we must raise children who can safely play and learn. Currently, more than 50 percent of children served by Head Start have had three or more adverse childhood experience like those included in the ACR study: incarcerated family members, depression, violence, abuse, or drug use in the home and periods of homelessness... Trauma is now our most urgent public health issue, and we have the knowledge necessary to respond effectively. The choice is ours to act on what we know.
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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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They learned to shut down their once overwhelming emotions, and, as a result, they no longer recognized what they were feeling. Few of them had any interest in therapy.
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EMDR, in which EMDR had better long-term results than Prozac in treating depression, at least in adult onset trauma.
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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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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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The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools where they are seen and known, where they learn to regulate themselves, and where they can develop a sense of agency.
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It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.
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Being able to move and do something to protect oneself is a critical factor in determining whether or not a horrible experience will leave long-lasting scars.
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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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As we’ve seen, the essence of trauma is feeling godforsaken, cut off from the human race.
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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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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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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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How did his brain come to derive comfort from fishing rather than from compulsive sexual behavior? At this point we simply don’t know. Neurofeedback changes brain connectivity patterns; the mind follows by creating new patterns of engagement.
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Some of them had hardly developed a sense of self—they couldn’t even recognize themselves in a mirror.
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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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Managing your terror all by yourself gives rise to another set of problems: dissociation, despair, addictions, a chronic sense of panic, and relationships that are marked by alienation, disconnections, and explosions. Patients with these histories rarely make the connection between what has happened to them a long time ago and how they currently feel and behave. Everything just seems unmanageable.
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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 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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When you're sick, who does the shopping or takes you to the doctor? Who do you talk to when you are upset?" In other words, who provides you with emotional and practical support? Some patients gave us surprising answers: "my dog" or "my therapist" – or "nobody".