Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
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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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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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Focus on that sensation and see how it changes when you take a deep breath out.
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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?
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We can assume that parents do the best they can, but all parents need help to nurture their kids. Nearly every industrialized nation, with the exception of the United States, recognizes this and provides some form of guaranteed support to families.
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Acting is an experience of using your body to take your place in life.
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As long as a memory is inaccessible, the mind is unable to change it. But as soon as a story starts being told, particularly if it is told repeatedly, it changes – the act of telling itself changes the tale. The mind cannot help but make meaning out of what it knows, and the meaning we make of our lives changes how and what we remember.
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While you need to be able to stand up for yourself, you also need to recognize that other people have their own agendas. Trauma can make all that hazy and grey.
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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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We can hope to solve the problems of these children only if we correctly define what is going on with them and do more than developing new drugs to control them or trying to find “the” gene that is responsible for their “disease.” The challenge is to find ways to help them lead productive lives and, in so doing, save hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. That process starts with facing the facts.
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Almost all had in some way been trapped or immobilized, unable to take action to stave off the inevitable. Their fight/flight response had been thwarted, and the result was either extreme agitation or collapse.
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Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. Numerous studies of disaster response around the globe have shown that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seek by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else's mind and heart.
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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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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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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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two critical aspects of the adaptive response to threat that is basic to human survival.
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What differentiated our patients was the abuse they had suffered within their families. They included a boy who was severely bruised from repeated beatings by his mother; a girl whose father had molested her at the age of four; two boys who had been repeatedly tied to a chair and whipped; and a girl who, at the age of five, had seen her mother (a prostitute) raped, dismembered, burned, and put into the trunk of a car. The mother’s pimp was suspected of sexually abusing the girl.
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Danger is a normal part of life, and the brain is in charge of detecting it and organizing our.
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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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It is amazing how many psychological problems involve difficulties with sleep, appetite, touch, digestion, and arousal. Any effective treatment for trauma has to address these basic housekeeping functions of the body.
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It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.
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Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, revised edition.
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If you’ve been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you.
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Those new disciplines are neuroscience, the study of how the brain supports mental processes; developmental psychopathology, the study of the impact of adverse experiences on the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, the study of how our behavior influences the emotions, biology, and mind-sets of those around us. Research from these new