Body Psychotherapy Quotes

For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. I am continually impressed by how difficult it is for people who have gone through the unspeakable to convey the essence of their experience. It is so much easier for them to talk about what has been done to them—to tell a story of victimization and revenge—than to notice, feel, and put into words the reality of their internal experience. Our scans had revealed how their dread persisted and could be triggered by multiple aspects of daily experience. They had not integrated their experience into the ongoing stream of their life. They continued to be “there” and did not know how to be “here”—fully alive in the present.

Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered.

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".

People who seek psychotherapy for psychological, behavioral or relationship problems tend to experience a wide range of bodily complaints...The body can express emotional issues a person may have difficulty processing consciously...I believe that the vast majority of people don't recognize what their bodies are really telling them. The way I see it, our emotions are music and our bodies are instruments that play the discordant tunes. But if we don't know how to read music, we just think the instrument is defective.

In simple, the past is a time gone by and no longer exists in the present moment, but we choose to allow this past to occupy our minds, our bodies and our very existence.

The mind-body clash has disguised the truth that psychotherapy is physiology. When a person starts therapy, he isn't beginning a pale conversation; he is stepping into a somatic state of relatedness.

The more progress we make up the economic ladder the less freedom we have and without freedom, there is no joy. We can be fulfilled as human beings only when our lives are rooted in our bodies, our animal nature and the earth. Unfortunately, our technological culture cuts us off more and more from these fundamental connections.

My work is to love my body, all of it. Whole and entire. The whole aging mortal troublesome failing miraculous intricate breathing doomed cancerous warm mortifying unreliable hard-working imperfect beautiful appalling living struggling tender frightened frightening living dying living breathing temporary wondrous mystifying afflicted mortally-ill assemblage of the atoms of the universe that is my self, is me, for this space of time.

The maintenance of a facade predisposes a person to somatic illness because it imposes a constant stress upon the body. One tries to be what one isn't which deforms the personality and the body. When the deformation (stress) persists long enough, the internal structure of the body breaks down.

If you criticize others, they don't dare to hurt you. If you are perfect, nobody can criticize you.

Another form of resistance in psychotherapy is a desire to turn toward addictive habits such as emotional eating, drinking, or using drugs. Addictions are another way of avoiding pain.

Although most psychotherapeutic approaches "agree that therapeutic work in the 'here and how' has the greatest power in bringing about change" (Stern, 2004, p. 3), talk therapy has limited direct impact on maladaptive procedural action tendencies as they occur in the present moment. Although telling "the story" provides crucial information about the client's past and current life experience, treatment must address the here-and-now experience of the traumatic past, rather than its content or narrative, in order to challenge and transform procedural learning. Because the physical and mental tendencies of procedural learning manifest in present-moment time, in-the-moment trauma-related emotional reactions, thoughts, images, body sensations, and movements that emerge spontaneously in the therapy hour become the focal points of exploration and change.

Top-down cortically mediated techniques typically use cognition to regulate affect and sensorimotor experience, focusing on meaning making and understanding. The entry point is the story, and the formulation of a coherent narrative is of prime importance. A linguistic sense of self is fostered this process, and experience changes through understanding

As connection to the therapist is established, the therapeutic relationship offers an opportunity for the client to experience a present attachment, but it also brings up transferential tendencies associated with past attach ment relationships (Sable, 2000). Informed by the experience of interperesonal trauma and betrayal, posttraumatic transferential relationships can be exceptionally potent and volatile. In response to the therapist, clients experience fear, anger, mistrust, and suspicion, as well as hope, vulnerability, and yearning, and they are acutely attuned to subtle signals of disinterest or interest, compassion or judgment, abandonment or consistency (Herman 1992; Pearlman & Saakvitne, 1995).

So far, very few treatments have been scientifically proven to be effective. One of those is hypnotherapy. Really good psychotherapy is like physiotherapy for the nerves. It eases tensions, and teaches us how to move in a more healthy way — at the neural level. Because

In bottom-up approaches [to processing trauma], the body's sensation and movement are the entry points and changes in sensorimotor experience are used to support self-regulation, memory processing, and success in daily life. Meaning and understanding emerge from new experiences rather than the other way around. Through bottom-up interventions, a shift in the somatic sense of self in turn affects the linguistic sense of self.

Pat Ogden and Peter Levine have each developed powerful body-based therapies, sensorimotor psychotherapy29 and somatic experiencing

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126

When clients are hyperaroused or overwhelmed emotionally, voluntarily narrowing their field of consciousness allows them to assimilate a limited amount of incoming information, thereby optimizing the chance for successful integration. For example, as one client began to report her traumatic experience, her arousal escalated: Her heart started to race, she felt afraid and restless, and had trouble thinking. She was asked to stop talking and thinking about the trauma, to inhibit the images, thoughts, and emotions that were coming up, and orient instead to her physical sensation until her arousal returned to the window of tolerance. With the help of her therapist, she focused on her body and described how her legs felt, the phyisical feeling of anxiety in her chest, and the beating of her heart. These physical experiences gradually subsided, and only then was she encouraged to return to the narrative.

Not only Christianity with its symbols of salvation, but all religions, including the primitive with their magical rituals are forms of psychotherapy which treat and heal the suffering of the soul, and the suffering of the body caused by the soul.

Like Paula, the members were eager for students; they felt that they had much to teach, and that their death sentences had made them wise. They had learned one lesson particularly well: that life cannot be postponed; it must be lived now, not suspended until the weekend, until vacation, until the children leave for college, until the diminished years of retirement. More than once I heard the lament, “What a pity it is that I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.

If there is a medical analogy which applies to psychiatric problems, it is not illness but weakness.While illness can be cured by removing the causative agent, weakness can be cured only by strengthening the existing body to cope with the stress of the world, large or small as this stress may be,

I believe that the Earth is the most likely place for love to flourish. We are surrounded by life and beauty, and we have the capacity to experience deep connection and intimacy. Of course, there will always be challenges and difficulties, but I believe that the rewards of love far outweigh the risks.

So we come upon the radical idea that happiness is not about how many good times we've had and bummers we haven't had, but from being willing to greet life as it occurs, to meet it and respond in its gush and flow. We don't attach ourselves to the contents of life, but we celebrate the very process of being alive.

She couldn’t have known that what she had needed all along—more than medical attention or psychotherapy, more than choosing happiness or adjusting her attitude—was to sink her sharp teeth into something living and bloody and feel its essence drain away until it was simply a rotting and unmoving thing. Not iron deficiency or episode. Nothing “wrong” with her. Just one night. One night of violence was what she needed. One night to not care what anyone thought, to shit where she pleased, to not be needed by any living thing, and to be only a body in motion in the dark, a shadow, a ghost of herself, who listened to only the mandates of her body.

the effects the denial of our true and strong emotions have on our bodies. Such denial is demanded of us not least by morality and religion. On the basis of what I know about psychotherapy, both from personal experience and from accounts I have been given by very many people, I have come to the conclusion that individuals abused in childhood can attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment* only by recourse to a massive repression and detachment of their true emotions. They cannot love and honor their parents because unconsciously they still fear them. However much they may want to, they cannot build up a relaxed and trusting relationship. Instead, what usually materializes is a pathological attachment, a mixture of fear and dutiful obedience that hardly deserves the name of love in the genuine sense of the word. I call this a sham, a façade. In addition, people abused in childhood frequently hope all their lives that someday they will experience the love they have been denied. These expectations reinforce their attachment to their parents, an attachment that religious creeds refer to as love and praise as a virtue. Unfortunately, the same thing happens in most therapies, as most people are still dominated by traditional morality. There is a price to be paid for this morality, a price paid by the body. Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel will ultimately fall ill—unless, that is, they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves. This

This reorienting is not an attempt to avoid or discount clients' pain and ongoing suffering. Rather, it is a means to help them observe, firsthand, how their chronic orienting tendencies toward reminders of the past recreate the trauma-related experience of danger and powerlessness, whereas choosing to orient to a good feeling can result in an experience of safety and mastery. As clients become able to do so the new objects of orientation often become more defined and & Goodman 1951). Rather than attention being drawn repeatedly to physical pain or traumatic activation, the good feeling becomes more prominent in the client's awareness. This exercise of reorienting toward a positive stimulus can surprise and reassure clients that they are not imprisoned indefinitely in an inner world of chronic traumatic reexperiencing, and that they have more possibilities and control than they had imagined. These orienting exercises need to be practiced again and again for mastery.

Bruce has wrestled with his moods, and a psyche genetically prone to extremes, for most of his adult life. Decades of psychotherapy helped reveal and cast light on some of his most primal traumas and conflicts, but his raw moods, and occasional descents into full-blown depression, never quite went away. "You go through periods of being good, then something stimulates it," he says. "The clock, some memory. You never know. The mind wants to link all your feelings to a cause. I'm feeling that because I'm doing this, or because that happened." Eventually Bruce realized that his worst moods had nothing to do with what was actually taking place in his life. Awful, stressful things could happen - conflicts, stress, disappointments, death - and he'd be unflappable. Then things would be peaceful and easy and he'd find himself on his knees. "You're going along fine, and then boom, it hits you. Things that just come from way down in the well. Completely noncasual, but it's part of your DNA, part of the way your body cycles." Bruce knows his particular brain chemistry will never leave him completely in the clear. "You manage it, you learn and evolve, but another recognition you gotta have is that these are the cards you were dealt," he says. "These things are never going to be out of your life. You gotta be constantly vigilant and realistic about these things.

Eating pork, eel and catfish while doing this meditation regularly may result in Kundalini syndrome. Pork oil or lard should definitely be avoided. Kundalini syndrome may manifest as: 1. Chronic fatigue (or chronic extreme general weakness) 2. Overheating of the body 3. Chronic insomnia 4. Depression 5. Skin rashes 6. Hypertension and others

The redirection of orientation and attention can be as simple as asking clients to become aware of a "good" or "safe" feeling in the body instead of focusing on their physical pain or elevated heart rate. Or the therapist can ask clients to experiment with focusing attention away from the traumatic activation in their body and toward thoughts or images related to their positive experiences and competencies, such as success in their job. This shift is often difficult for clients who have habituated to feeling pulled back repetitively into the most negative somatic reminders of their traumatic experiences. However, if the therapist guides them to practice deeply immersing themselves in a positive somatic experience (i.e., noting the changes in posture, breath, and muscular tone that emerge as they remember their competence), clients will gain the ability to reorient toward their competencies. They experience their ability to choose to what they pay attention and discover that it really is possible to resist the somatic claims of the past.

Every waking moment, our brains and bodies assimilate a myriad of sensory stimulation from the environment, as well as images, thoughts, emotions, body sensations, and movements from our internal state. In a millisecond, through operations so complex that they elude the full understanding of even the most brilliant minds, our brains compare this wealth of current data to memories of past experience. The most critical purpose of this comparison is to predict the next moment with sufficient accuracy so that we can make an adaptive physical action (Llinas, 2001). What we expect to happen in the very next instant determines the immediate action we make, whether it is reaching out to another person or for an object, such as a cup of tea.

One of the blessings of easy communication between the great cultures of the world is that partisanship in religion and philosophy is ceasing to be intellectually respectable. Pure religions are as rare as pure cultures, and it is mentally crippling to suppose that there must be a number of fixed bodies of doctrine among which one must choose, where choice means accepting the system entirely or not at all. [...]. Those who rove freely through the various traditions, accepting what they can use and rejecting what they cannot, are condemned as undisciplined syncretists. But the use of one's reason is not a lack of discipline, not is there any important religion which is not itself a syncretism, a "growing up together" of ideas and practices of diverse origin.

Although Megan "knew" she was not in danger, her body told her that she was. If sensorimotor habits are firmly entrenched, accurate cognitive interpretations may not exert much influence on changing bodily orgamzation and arousal responses. Instead, the traumatized person may experience the reality of the body rather than that of the mind. To be most effective, the sensorimotor psychotherapist works on both the cognitive and sensorimotor levels. With Megan, a purely cognitive approach might foster some change in her integrative capacity, but the change would be only momentary if the cowering response were reactivated each time she received feedback at work... However, if she is encouraged to remember to "stand tall" in the face of criticism, her body and her thoughts will be congruent with each other and with current reality.

These initially adaptive responses to immediate danger turn into inflexible and pervasive procedural tendencies when trauma is unresolved. Once these actions have been procedurally encoded, individuals are left with regulatory deficits and “suffer both from generalized hyperarousal [and hypoarousal] and from physiological emergency reactions to specific reminders” (van der Kolk, 1994, p. 254). Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.

Although often with good intentions, our parents and teachers attribute negative definitions to us, which last for many years and prevent us from developing ourselves with pleasure. In psychomagic, we call these definitions “labels” because they stick to the self. So that the consultant can free herself from them, I advise: ▶ The consultant writes on adhesive labels as many definitions as they gave her, for example: “You have no ear for music,” “You don’t know how to use your hands,” “You’re a freeloader, liar, thief,” “You’re egotistical, weak, dumb, fat, skinny, vain, ungrateful,” and so on. The consultant glues these labels to every part of the body— many of them to the face—and goes out in public that way for as many hours as possible. When the consultant returns home, she should remove the labels, roll them into a ball, take the ball to the city dump, and throw it on top of the garbage pile, having beforehand caressed her body with hands soaked in pleasant perfume.

having clients orient to the stimulus on which they are very fixated helps them consciously and directly attend to reminders of past trauma. This provides the opportunity for the reactions to the trauma-related stimulus to change from involuntary and reflexive to reflective awareness and assimilation. The client's sense of control and efficacy is often enhanced, whereas simply orienting to new, neutral, or pleasurable stimuli may not accomplish this (Ford, personal communication, August 12, 2005).

Buddhist meditation takes this untrained, everyday mind as its natural starting point, and it requires the development of one particular attentional posture—of naked, or bare, attention. Defined as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,”1 bare attention takes this unexamined mind and opens it up, not by trying to change anything but by observing the mind, emotions, and body the way they are. It is the fundamental tenet of Buddhist psychology that this kind of attention is, in itself, healing: that by the constant application of this attentional strategy, all of the Buddha’s insights can be realized for oneself. As mysterious as the literature on meditation can seem, as elusive as the koans of the Zen master sometimes sound, there is but one underlying instruction that is critical to Buddhist thought. Common to all schools of thought, from Sri Lanka to Tibet, the unifying theme of the Buddhist approach is this remarkable imperative: “Pay precise attention, moment by moment, to exactly what you are experiencing, right now, separating out your reactions from the raw sensory events.” This is what is meant by bare attention: just the bare facts, an exact registering, allowing things to speak for themselves as if seen for the first time, distinguishing any reactions from the core event.

In sensorimotor treatment, traumatized clients are taught to become aware of trauma-related tendencies of orientation and to redirect their attention away from the past and toward the present moment. Repeatedly "shifting the client's attention to the various things going on outside of the flow of conversation [evokes] experiences which are informative and emotionally meaningful" (Kurtz, 2004, p. 40). Redirecting orientation and attention from conversation to present-moment experience-that is, from external awareness to internal awareness, and from the past to the present⎯engages exploration and curiosity, and clients can discover things about themselves that they did not know previously (Kurtz, 2004).

Body dysmorphic disorder wedges itself between the sufferer’s desperation to connect and the fear that they might be rejected while attempting to do so. This serves the purpose of preventing rejection; if one is constantly dismissing oneself it becomes much more difficult to be rejected by another human being. For many highly sensitive body dysmorphic disorder patients, rejection is experienced as the ultimate proof that something must be inherently defective about them. For this to be the case is often interpreted as absolute confirmation that they can never be loved. Taking the risk of possible rejection might mean experiencing these dire consequences, and to most, the benefits do not out-weigh the consequences. Thus body dysmorphic disorder exists in the space of the relational ambivalence, completely changing the focus from fears of intimacy and fundamental feelings of inadequacy to excessive attention towards perceptible physical features.

For this reason the ancients often compared the symbol to water, a case in point being tao, where yang and yin are united. Tao is the “valley spirit,” the winding course of a river. The symbolum of the Church is the aqua doctrinae, corresponding to the wonder-working “divine” water of alchemy, whose double aspect is represented by Mercurius. The healing and renewing properties of this symbolical water—whether it be tao, the baptismal water, or the elixir—point to the therapeutic character of the mythological background from which this idea comes. Physicians who were versed in alchemy had long recognized that their arcanum healed, or was supposed to heal, not only the diseases of the body but also those of the mind. Similarly, modern psychotherapy knows that, though there are many interim solutions, there is, at the bottom of every neurosis, a moral problem of opposites that cannot be solved rationally, and can be answered only by a supraordinate third, by a symbol which expresses both sides. This was the “veritas” (Dorn) or “theoria” (Paracelsus) for which the old physicians and alchemists strove, and they could do so only by incorporating the Christian revelation into their world of ideas. They continued the work of the Gnostics (who were, most of them, not so much heretics as theologians) and the Church Fathers in a new era, instinctively recognizing that new wine should not be put into old bottles, and that, like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.

The Buddha was concerned with how to escape from just this kind of self-created suffering, with how to avoid the pitfalls of self-inflation or -debasement. It is here that the latter parts of the Second Noble Truth, the thirsts for existence and nonexistence, become relevant. Buddha, we must remember, did not teach a speculative psychology; he taught a practical one designed to liberate practitioners from dissatisfaction. “I do not teach theory,” he said, “I analyse.”2 He refused to answer questions that would feed either the tendency to cling to some kind of absolute romanticized ideal or that would enable nihilistic distancing, the two trends that are subsumed under the headings of existence and nonexistence and that become the basis for many powerful religious, psychological, and philosophical dogmas. There were, in fact, fourteen subjects that the Buddha repeatedly refused to discuss, all of them searching for absolute certainty:        1)  Whether the world is eternal, or not, or both, or neither.        2)  Whether the world is finite (in space), or infinite, or both, or neither.        3)  Whether an enlightened being exists after death, or does not, or both, or neither.        4)  Whether the soul is identical with the body or different from it. The Buddha taught that to attempt a definitive answer to these questions would give the wrong idea, that to do so would only feed the tendency to cling to an absolute or to nihilistically reject, neither of which he found useful. He never taught the existence of a true self, nor did he ever support the idea of a chaotic universe in which “nothing matters” and individual actions are of no importance. Rather, he encouraged a consistent doubting of all fixed assumptions about the nature of things. In a teaching that he gave to a skeptical follower named Malunkyaputta, he likened the asking of questions about the ultimate nature of things to a man wounded by an arrow refusing to have the arrow taken out until all of his questions about who the assassin was, where he came from, what he looked like, what kind of bow he was using, and what make of arrow had been shot had been addressed. “That man would die, Malunkyaputta,” emphasized the Buddha, “without ever having learnt this.”3

When you feed a girl, you make her feel that both her body and her self are wanted. When you screw her she can feel that her body is separate and dead. People can screw dead bodies, but they never feed them.

From Freud’s biological image of man via the psychological images of Adler and Jung there arose the more spiritual images of man proposed by Frankl and Assagioli. In the thinking of Rudolf Steiner we find an image of man which embodies all three of these aspects at once, so that it does not envisage a separate form of psychotherapy but, instead, a total therapy of body, psyche and spirit.

Asian philosophy and culture never endured an intellectual upheaval like the Cartesian split of mind and body that brought the so-called Enlightenment to the West. The consequent achievements of scientific method and the less fortunate by-products of secular self-interest together laid the groundwork, in Europe and America, for the personal psychology of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

The research that Judy Herman, Chris Perry, and I had done (see chapter 9) showed that people who felt unwanted as children, and those who did not remember feeling safe with anyone while growing up, did not fully benefit from conventional psychotherapy, presumably because they could not activate old traces of feeling cared for.

While a neurosis isn’t necessarily fatal, it slowly but surely saps the vitality out of life. A neurosis destroys our potential, places us in the constricting confines of an ever-shrinking comfort zone, fills us with guilt for a life not lived, wreaks havoc on relationships, inhibits the cultivation of skills, and damages our physical health due to the effects of chronic anxiety and depression on the body. Jung went as far as to call a neurosis “the agony of a human soul in all its vast complexity” (Carl Jung, The State of Psychotherapy Today).

The goal of the research on my ward was to determine whether psychotherapy or medication was the best way to treat young people who had suffered a first mental breakdown diagnosed as schizophrenia. The talking cure, an offshoot of Freudian psychoanalysis, was still the primary treatment for mental illness at MMHC. However, in the early 1950s a group of French scientists had discovered a new compound, chlorpromazine (sold under the brand name Thorazine), that could “tranquilize” patients and make them less agitated and delusional. That inspired hope that drugs could be developed to treat serious mental problems such as depression, panic, anxiety, and mania, as well as to manage some of the most disturbing symptoms of schizophrenia.

In families in which parents are overbearing, rigid, and strict, children grow up with fear and anxiety. The threat of guilt, punishment, the withdrawal of love and approval, and, in some cases, abandonment, force children to suppress their own needs to try things out and to make their own mistakes. Instead, they are left with constant doubts about themselves, insecurities, and unwillingness to trust their own feelings. They feel they have no choice and as we have shown, for many, they incorporate the standards and values of their parents and become little parental copies. They follow the prescribed behavior suppressing their individuality and their own creative potentials. After all, criticism is the enemy of creativity. It is a long, hard road away from such repressive and repetitive behavior. The problem is that many of us obtain more gains out of main- taining the status quo than out of changing. We know, we feel, we want to change. We don’t like the way things are, but the prospect of upsetting the stable and the familiar is too frightening. We ob- tain “secondary gains” to our pain and we cannot risk giving them up. I am reminded of a conference I attended on hypnosis. An el- derly couple was presented. The woman walked with a walker and her husband of many years held her arm as she walked. There was nothing physically wrong with her legs or her body to explain her in- ability to walk. The teacher, an experienced expert in psychiatry and hypnosis, attempted to hypnotize her. She entered a trance state and he offered his suggestions that she would be able to walk. But to no avail. When she emerged from the trance, she still could not, would not, walk. The explanation was that there were too many gains to be had by having her husband cater to her, take care of her, do her bidding. Many people use infirmities to perpetuate relationships even at the expense of freedom and autonomy. Satisfactions are derived by being limited and crippled physically or psychologically. This is often one of the greatest deterrents to progress in psychotherapy. It is unconscious, but more gratification is derived by perpetuating this state of affairs than by giving them up. Beatrice, for all of her unhappiness, was fearful of relinquishing her place in the family. She felt needed, and she felt threatened by the thought of achieving anything 30 The Self-Sabotage Cycle that would have contributed to a greater sense of independence and self. The risks were too great, the loss of the known and familiar was too frightening. Residing in all of us is a child who wants to experiment with the new and the different, a child who has a healthy curiosity about the world around him, who wants to learn and to create. In all of us are needs for security, certainty, and stability. Ideally, there develops a balance between the two types of needs. The base of security is present and serves as a foundation which allows the exploration of new ideas and new learning and experimenting. But all too often, the security and dependency needs outweigh the freedom to explore and we stifle, even snuff out, the creative urges, the fantasy, the child in us. We seek the sources that fill our dependency and security needs at the expense of the curious, imaginative child. There are those who take too many risks, who take too many chances and lose, to the detriment of all concerned. But there are others who are risk-averse and do little with their talents and abilities for fear of having to change their view of themselves as being the child, the dependent one, the protected one. Autonomy, independence, success are scary because they mean we can no longer justify our needs to be protected. Success to these people does not breed success. Suc- cess breeds more work, more dependence, more reason to give up the rationales for moving on, away from, and exploring the new and the different.

One of the best descriptions of the actual psychological experiences that come with deep meditation is the Visuddhimagga (Path of purification), a fourth-century meditation manual composed on the island of Sri Lanka by an Indian Buddhist named Buddhaghosa. In the Visuddhimagga he laid out the early Buddhist vision of what can be achieved psychologically through the cultivation of certain critical factors of mind that are developed through meditation practice. As a cross section of the meditative mind, this manual is unparalleled. Through the relentless development of both concentration (the ability to rest the mind in a single object of awareness) and mindfulness (the ability to shift attention to a succession of objects of awareness), the meditator eventually enters into states that are variously described as ones of either terror or delight. These are states that do not often unfold in psychotherapy: they may be glimpsed or remembered, but they do not come forward inexorably, as they do in meditation practice. Their emergence is predicated on the development of certain ego functions beyond the normal operating range of everyday life. Listen, for example, to the classic descriptions of some of these states. The experiences of delight, for instance, are characterized by varying degrees of rapture or happiness, of which there are said to be five grades: Minor happiness is only able to raise the hairs on the body. Momentary happiness is like flashes of lightning at different moments. Showering happiness breaks over the body again and again like waves on the seashore. Uplifting happiness can be powerful enough to levitate the body and make it spring up in the air. . . . But when pervading (rapturous) happiness arises, the whole body is completely pervaded, like a filled bladder, like a rock cavern invaded by a huge inundation.1

AT MY FIRST meditation retreat, a two-week period of silent attention to mind and body, I was amazed to find myself sitting in the dining hall with an instant judgment about each of the hundred other meditators, based on nothing besides how they looked while eating. Instinctively, I was searching out whom I liked and whom I did not: I had a comment for each one. The seemingly simple task of noting the physical sensations of the in and out breath had the unfortunate effect of revealing just how out of control my everyday mind really was. Meditation is ruthless in the way it reveals the stark reality of our day-to-day mind. We are constantly murmuring, muttering, scheming, or wondering to ourselves under our breath: comforting ourselves, in a perverse fashion, with our own silent voices. Much of our interior life is characterized by this kind of primary process, almost infantile, way of thinking: “I like this. I don’t like that. She hurt me. How can I get that? More of this, no more of that.” These emotionally tinged thoughts are our attempts to keep the pleasure principle operative. Much of our inner dialogue, rather than the “rational” secondary process that is usually associated with the thinking mind, is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. None of us has moved very far from the seven-year-old who vigilantly watches to see who got more.

One famous Japanese haiku illustrates the state that Sid managed to discover in himself. It is one that Joseph Goldstein has long used to describe the unique attentional posture of bare attention:                                          The old pond.                                          A frog jumps in.                                          Plop!2 Like so much else in Japanese art, the poem expresses the Buddhist emphasis on naked attention to the often overlooked details of everyday life. Yet, there is another level at which the poem may be read. Just as in the parable of the raft, the waters of the pond can represent the mind and the emotions. The frog jumping in becomes a thought or feeling arising in the mind or body, while “Plop!” represents the reverberations of that thought or feeling, unelaborated by the forces of reactivity. The entire poem comes to evoke the state of bare attention in its utter simplicity.

It was early in my career, and I had been seeing Mary, a shy, lonely, and physically collapsed young woman, for about three months in weekly psychotherapy, dealing with the ravages of her terrible history of early abuse. One day I opened the door to my waiting room and saw her standing there provocatively, dressed in a miniskirt, her hair dyed flaming red, with a cup of coffee in one hand and a snarl on her face. “You must be Dr. van der Kolk,” she said. “My name is Jane, and I came to warn you not to believe any the lies that Mary has been telling you. Can I come in and tell you about her?” I was stunned but fortunately kept myself from confronting “Jane” and instead heard her out. Over the course of our session I met not only Jane but also a hurt little girl and an angry male adolescent. That was the beginning of a long and productive treatment.

Acceptance is not something we can give to a person or thing. It only exists as a function of our relationship to our own experience.

transformative change requires learning to use our own body as a crucible. A good crucible has a certain set of properties. It can withstand a lot of heat without melting; it is strong enough not to break; and it must not chemically interact with what’s in it.

Two months later 83 percent of the patients who received MDMA plus psychotherapy were considered completely cured, compared with 25 percent of the placebo group.

Detoxification and fasting will improve your life on every level!" Marjan "If people would only detoxify and fast, a fair percentage of the sickness, mental illness and addictions in our society would simply disappear." Marjan "Many of today's psychiatrists and their psychotherapies flail with futility at the stored poisons lurking in our spirits, minds and bodies." Marjan "At the stage of cellular purity, a person should be as healthy as possible." Marjan

Kathy was a twenty-one-year-old student at a local university. When I first met her, she looked terrified. She had been in psychotherapy for three years with a therapist whom she trusted and felt understood by but with whom she was not making any progress. After her third suicide attempt her university health service referred her to me, hoping that the new technique I’d told them about could help her. Like several of my other traumatized patients, Kathy was able to become completely absorbed in her studies: When she read a book or wrote a research paper, she could block out everything else about her life. This enabled her to be a competent student, even when she had no idea how to establish a loving relationship with herself, let alone with an intimate partner.

Translating the body's language, from nonverbal and conscious, leads to greater integration of the body and mind.

Only when tensions or pain in the body arise do we pay attention to what is happening.

Mind/body interventions are key in autoimmune disease, because the ups and downs of these diseases often correlate with emotional ups and downs, and because we know that mental factors influence immune responses. Psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, and guided imagery therapy are all useful and worth exploring

After twenty years in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, I’m used to noticing them, their smoke signals from the past drawing my attention to burned-out wreckage in a distant forest of the mind, packed and buried under years of debris, still smouldering.

An important report was published in the prestigious British journal Lancet in July 1990 (Vol. 336, pp. 129–33). A large team headed by Dr. Dean Ornish of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine did a randomized, controlled study in which they demonstrated that lifestyle changes (practiced for a year) could actually reverse the process of atherosclerosis (arteriosclerosis, hardening) in coronary arteries. The patients in the experimental group were put on a low-fat, low-cholesterol vegetarian diet; participated in stress-management activities like meditation, relaxation, imagery, breathing techniques, and stretching exercises; and did moderate aerobic exercise regularly. In addition, there were twice-weekly group discussions to provide social support and reinforce adherence to the lifestyle change program. The control (nonexperimental) group of patients showed an increase in coronary atherosclerosis. With the decrease in blockage of the coronary arteries, experimental patients also experienced a reduction in the frequency, duration, and severity of angina (chest pain) while the control group had an increase in angina over the one-year period. This obviously important report shows what has long been suspected: that it is not just diet, exercise, and other purely physical factors that determine whether or not there will be hardening of the arteries but psychosocial factors as well. I predict that further experimentation will identify the person’s emotional state as being the most important variable and that intensive psychotherapy alone will demonstrate a similar reversal of atherosclerosis.

This is where all the work we have done with ourselves to sense the connection between our bodily sensations and implicit memories comes to help our person. Our conviction that this is the doorway to the deeper places provides a foundation, through resonance, for him to slow down and attend to his body.

Liberation is not the release of the soul from the body; it is recovery from the tactical split between the soul and the body which seems to be necessary for the social discipline of the young. It therefore sets reason and culture not against Eros but at the disposal of Eros, of the “polymorphous perverse” body which always retains the potentiality of a fully erotic relationship with the world — not just through the genital system but through the whole sensory capacity.

Liberation is not the release of the soul from the body; it is recovery from the tactical split between the soul and the body[.]

For a hundred years or more, every textbook of psychology and psychotherapy has advised that some method of talking about distressing feelings can resolve them. However, as we’ve seen, the experience of trauma itself gets in the way of being able to do that. No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.

This point was driven home for me for the first time when I was traveling in Asia in 1978 on a trip to a forest monastery in northeastern Thailand, Wat Ba Pong, on the Thai-Lao border. I was taken there by my meditation teacher, Jack Kornfield, who was escorting a group of us to meet the monk under whom he had studied at that forest hermitage. This man, Achaan Chaa, described himself as a “simple forest monk,” and he ran a hundred-acre forest monastery that was simple and old-fashioned, with one notable exception. Unlike most contemporary Buddhist monasteries in Thailand, where the practice of meditation as the Buddha had taught had all but died out, Achaan Chaa’s demanded intensive meditation practice and a slow, deliberate, mindful attention to the mundane details of everyday life. He had developed a reputation as a meditation master of the first order. My own first impressions of this serene environment were redolent of the newly extinguished Vietnam War, scenes of which were imprinted in my memory from years of media attention. The whole place looked extraordinarily fragile to me. On my first day, I was awakened before dawn to accompany the monks on their early morning alms rounds through the countryside. Clad in saffron robes, clutching black begging bowls, they wove single file through the green and brown rice paddies, mist rising, birds singing, as women and children knelt with heads bowed along the paths and held out offerings of sticky rice or fruits. The houses along the way were wooden structures, often perched on stilts, with thatched roofs. Despite the children running back and forth laughing at the odd collection of Westerners trailing the monks, the whole early morning seemed caught in a hush. After breakfasting on the collected food, we were ushered into an audience with Achaan Chaa. A severe-looking man with a kindly twinkle in his eyes, he sat patiently waiting for us to articulate the question that had brought us to him from such a distance. Finally, we made an attempt: “What are you really talking about? What do you mean by ‘eradicating craving’?” Achaan Chaa looked down and smiled faintly. He picked up the glass of drinking water to his left. Holding it up to us, he spoke in the chirpy Lao dialect that was his native tongue: “You see this goblet? For me, this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on a shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ But when I understand that this glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”5 Achaan Chaa was not just talking about the glass, of course, nor was he speaking merely of the phenomenal world, the forest monastery, the body, or the inevitability of death. He was also speaking to each of us about the self. This self that you take to be so real, he was saying, is already broken.

The research that Judy Herman, Chris Perry, and I had done (see chapter 9) showed that people who felt unwanted as children, and those who did not remember feeling safe with anyone while growing up, did not fully benefit from conventional psychotherapy, presumably because they could not activate old traces of feeling cared for. I could see this even in some of my most committed and articulate patients. Despite their hard work in therapy and their share of personal and professional accomplishments, they could not erase the devastating imprints of a mother who was too depressed to notice them or a father who treated them like he wished they’d never been born. It was clear that their lives would change fundamentally only if they could reconstruct those implicit maps.

All these systems I've described—the brainstem, the limbic system, the hypothalamically-mediated autonomic nervous system, our “neurological” stomachs and hearts, our bodies, our five senses—all of these are neurologically connected to, and feed their information to our right brain, our right hemisphere's cortex. That is their destination point. The right brain, then, makes sense of and integrates all of these inputs. Its outputs within our minds are largely non-verbal, but register in our experience as internal mental pictures, feelings, bodily sensations, intuitions, reveries, songs, etc. Simultaneously, the right brain deposits outputs into the intersubjective space between two humans (through our facial expressions, eyes, tone and prosody of voice, body posture, etc.) without our consciously directing these expressions. Finally, the right brain hands a distillation of all this information to its left-brain counterpart, so that, finally, we are allowed to “know” (in words) what we're thinking and experiencing.