“As functioning members of society, we’re supposed to be ‘cool’ in our day-to-day interactions and subordinate our feelings to the task at hand. When we talk with someone with whom we don’t feel completely safe, our social editor jumps in on full alert and our guard is up. Writing is different. If you ask your editor to leave you alone for a while, things will come out that you had no idea were there. You are free to go into a sort of a trance state in which your pen (or keyboard) seems to channel whatever bubbles up from inside. You can connect those self-observing and narrative parts of your brain without worrying about the reception you’ll get.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 240) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Finding words where words were absent before and, as a result, being able to share your deepest pain and deepest feelings with another human being… This is one of the most profound experiences we can have, and such resonance, in which hitherto unspoken words can be discovered, uttered, and received, is fundamental to healing the isolation of trauma—especially if other people in our lives have ignored or silenced us. Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 237) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy, it saps your motivation to pursue worthwhile goals, and it leaves you feeling bored and shut down. Meanwhile, stress hormones keep flooding your body, leading to headaches, muscle aches, problems with your bowels or sexual functions—and irrational behaviors that may embarrass you and hurt the people around you. Only after you identify the source of these responses can you start using your feelings as signals of problems that require your urgent attention.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 235) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“If you’ve been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you. I know that from personal experience: As long as I had no place where I could let myself know what it was like when my father locked me in the cellar of our house for various three-year-old offenses, I was chronically preoccupied with being exiled and abandoned. Only when I could talk about how that little boy felt, only when I could forgive him for having been as scared and submissive as he was, did I start to enjoy the pleasure of my own company. Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology; being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feeling recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an ‘aha moment.’ In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit. Or, as John Bowlby so memorably put it: ‘What can not be spoken to the [m]other cannot be told to the self.'”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 234) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Activists in the early campaign for AIDS awareness created a powerful slogan: ‘Silence = Death.’ Silence about trauma also leads to death—the death of the soul. Silence reinforces the godforsaken isolation of trauma. Being able to say aloud to another human being, ‘I was raped’ or ‘I was battered by my husband’ or ‘My parents called it discipline, but it was abuse’ or ‘I’m not making it since I got back from Iraq,’ is a sign that healing can begin.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 234) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Drugs cannot ‘cure’ trauma; they can only dampen the expressions of a disturbed physiology. And they do not teach the lasting lessons of self-regulation. They can help to control feelings and behavior, but always at a price—because they work by blocking the chemical systems that regulate engagement, motivation, pain, and pleasure.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 226) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Desensitization to our own or to other people’s pain tends to lead to an overall blunting of emotional sensitivity.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 224)
“Patients who have been brutalized by their caregivers as children often do not feel safe with anyone. I often ask my patients if they can think of any person they felt safe with while they were growing up. Many of them hold tight to the memory of that one teacher, neighbor, shopkeeper, coach, or minister who showed that he or she cared, and that memory is often the seed of learning to reengage. 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, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 215) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The critical question is this: Do you feel that your therapist is curious to find out who you are and what you, not some generic ‘PTSD patient,’ need? Are you just a list of symptoms on some diagnostic questionnaire, or does your therapist take the time to find out why you do what you do and think what you think? Therapy is a collaborative process—a mutual exploration of your self.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 214) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“After an acute trauma, like an assault, accident, or natural disaster, survivors require the presence of familiar people, faces, and voices; physical contact; food; shelter and a safe place; and time to sleep. It is critical to communicate with loved ones close and far and to reunite as soon as possible with family and friends in a place that feels safe. Our attachment bonds are our greatest protection against threat.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 212) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Study after study shows that having a good support network constitutes the single most powerful protection against becoming traumatized. Safety and terror are incompatible. When we are terrified, nothing calms us down like the reassuring voice or the firm embrace of someone we trust. Frightened adults respond to the same comforts as terrified children: gentle holding and rocking and the assurance that somebody bigger and stronger is taking care of things, so you can safely go to sleep. In order to recover, mind, body, and brain need to be convinced that it is safe to let go. That happens only when you feel safe at a visceral level and allow yourself to connect that sense of safety with memories of past helplessness.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 212) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 211)
“Most of our conscious brain is dedicated to focusing on the outside world: getting along with others and making plans for the future. However, that does not help us manage ourselves. Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 208)
“In order to regain control over your self, you need to revisit the trauma: Sooner or later you need to confront what has happened to you, but only after you feel safe and will not be retraumatized by it. The first order of business is to find ways to cope with feeling overwhelmed by the sensations and emotions associated with the past.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 206) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself. The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind—of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed. For most people this involves (1) finding a way to become calm and focused, (2) learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations that remind you of the past, (3) finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you, (4) not having to keep secrets from yourself, including secrets about the ways that you have managed to survive.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 205) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Nobody can ‘treat’ a war, or abuse, rape, molestation, or any other horrendous event, for that matter; what has happened cannot be undone. But what can be dealt with are the imprints of the trauma on body, mind, and soul: the crushing sensations in your chest that you may label as anxiety or depression; the fear of losing control; always being on alert for danger or rejection; the self-loathing; the nightmares and flashbacks; the fog that keeps you from staying on task and from engaging fully in what you are doing; being unable to fully open your heart to another human being.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 205) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Social support is a biological necessity, not an option, and this reality should be the backbone of all prevention and treatment. Recognizing the profound effects of trauma and deprivation on child development need not lead to blaming parents. We can assume that parents do the best they can, but all parents need help to nurture their kids.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 169) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Everything about us—our brains, our minds, and our bodies—is geared toward collaboration in social systems. This is our most powerful survival strategy, the key to our success as a species, and it is precisely this that breaks down in most forms of mental suffering. The neural connections in brain and body are vitally important for understanding human suffering, but it is important not to ignore the foundations of our humanity: relationships and interactions that shape our minds and brains when we are young and that give substance and meaning to our entire lives.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 168) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Our brains are sculpted by our early experiences. Maltreatment is a chisel that shapes a brain to contend with strife, but at the cost of deep, enduring wounds. Childhood abuse isn’t something you ‘get over.’ It is an evil that we must acknowledge and confront if we aim to do anything about the unchecked cycle of violence in this country.”
Martin Teicher, MD, PhD, via The Body Keeps The Score (Page 151)
“I gradually came to realize that the only thing that makes it possible to do the work of healing trauma is awe at the dedication to survival that enabled my patients to endure their abuse and then to endure the dark nights of the soul that inevitably occur on the road to recovery.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 137) | ★ Featured on this book list.