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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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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We deliberately tried to collect just isolated fragments of their experience—particular images, sounds, and feelings—rather than the entire story, because that is how trauma is experienced.
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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
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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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Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, revised edition.
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For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.
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It takes enormous trust and courage to allow yourself to remember.
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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 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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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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Is it possible to help the minds and brains of brutalized children to redraw their inner maps and incorporate a sense of trust and confidence in the future?
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The organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe. The past is impressed not only on their minds, and in misinterpretations of innocuous events (as when Marilyn attacked Michael because he accidentally touched her in her sleep), but also on the very core of their beings: in the safety of their bodies.
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Our sense of Self depends on being able to organize our memories into a coherent whole.
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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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In a statement released in June 2011, the British Psychological Society complained to the APA that the sources of psychological suffering in the DSM.
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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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Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.
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It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.
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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.”9 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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There is something very empowering about having the experience of changing your brain’s activity with your mind.
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Porges coined the word “neuroception” to describe the capacity to evaluate relative danger and safety in one’s environment.
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How do horrific experiences cause people to become hopelessly stuck in the past?
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Because humans are meaning-making creatures, we have a tendency to create some sort of image or story.