Trauma Quotes
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Trauma interferes with the proper functioning of brain areas that manage and interpret experience.
Bessel van der Kolk
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A trauma can be successfully processed only if all those brain structures are kept online. In Stan’s case, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) allowed him to access his memories of the accident without being overwhelmed by them. When the brain areas whose absence is responsible for flashbacks can be kept online while remembering what has happened, people can integrate their traumatic memories as belonging to the past.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Trauma is hell on earth. Trauma resolved is a gift from the gods.
Peter A. Levine
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Thalamus also acts as a filter or gatekeeper. This makes it a central component of attention, concentration, and new learning—all of which are compromised by trauma. As you sit here reading.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Whose memories were merely blunted, not integrated as an event that happened in the past, and still caused considerable anxiety—those who received EMDR no longer experienced the distinct imprints of the trauma: It had become a story of a terrible event that had happened a long time ago.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. Most rape victims, combat soldiers, and children who have been molested become so upset when they think about what they experienced that they try to push it out of their minds, trying to act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability.
Bessel van der Kolk
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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.
Bessel van der Kolk
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We are a hopeful species. Working with trauma is as much about remembering how we survived as it is about what is broken.
Bessel van der Kolk
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The writing that most interests me isn't about narcos or sicarios or police or whatever. It's about the victims and the survivors, and about the suffering and trauma that so many in Mexico and Central America endure, and that is all around us whether we notice it or not.
Francisco Goldman
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Exploring physical sensations and discovering the location and shape of the imprints of past trauma on the body.
Bessel van der Kolk
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The trauma may be over, but it keeps being replayed in continually recycling memories and in a reorganized nervous system.
Bessel van der Kolk
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Trauma dissociates us from the parts of our body that are wounded, so we have to leave our whole body. It's a journey you take your whole life, that coming back in, re-landing in your body, in your self, on the Earth. I think one of the reasons it's been so easy, in a way, for us to violate both women and the Earth is this profound dissociation that exists in everyone.
Eve Ensler
