Hillary Mcbride Quotes

If I could sum up all my years of clinical training and research in one statement, it would be this: We heal when we can be with what we feel.

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking.”1

Our bodies are telling the stories we have avoided or forgotten how to hear - and sometimes our inability to feel our feelings (the messages that precede the alarm bells) means that our bodies have to scream in order to get some attention.

If you’re willing to pay attention to and dialogue with what’s happening inside of you, you’ll find that your body already knows the answers about how to live a full, present, connected, and healthy life.

We heal when we can be with what we feel.

Embodiment is the self in motion, the living, breathing story of who you are and the culture and people you have come from.

Rather, transformation happens from the ground up: when we have a new experience of ourselves and hold our attention on it long enough for it to sink

So embodiment is a coming home, a remembering of our wholeness, and a reunion with the fullness of ourselves.

Celebrating another person's weight loss and believing it to be complimentary supports cultural messages about weight bias that end up hurting us all. This praise reinforces the idea that our appearance is connected to our social belonging. It can hook us into a cycle of trying to change our body to earn value in the eyes of others. This system fuels conditional self-worth, which in turn keeps us endlessly chasing affirmation.

She cupped her hands around the remnant flame of spirit inside me, protecting the flickering light until it grew stronger, and then placed my own hands around the flame and made me the protector of this growing force.

our ability to feel our feelings as they move as energy through our body with our ability to talk about what we feel. We can sit in therapy, tell sad stories, and talk about feeling sad without ever having the bodily experience of sadness. Psychology has historically focused too much on cognition and behavior while neglecting the process that underlies them both: emotion. But current neuroscientific research reveals emotion (also called affect in the scientific literature) as the central driver behind why we are the way we are, and how we develop and heal.2 We now know that most psychopathology, or mental illness, is the result of the inability to effectively regulate emotion.

While I do employ moment-to-moment strategies to ease my suffering, the overarching narrative had to change from avoiding or dismissing my pain to learning to be in dialogue with it, realizing that I could decide to respond to it in a way that took me closer to myself.

Historically, those with the least social status have been people of color, women, and those with physical disabilities. The paradox here is that the individuals who had more social power because of their bodies did not experience themselves as defined by their bodies, but they made choices that affected the day-to-day bodily realities of others. Obvious examples of this include men determining the reproductive rights of women, or people without disabilities designing buildings that restrict building access for those with disabilities.

Transcendence is beautiful, but I'm not convinced it's the full picture. One of my psychology professors used to remind us that if there are only two options and one of them is bad, then we aren't seeing everything. If we think of God as only out there and certainly not here, we are not seeing everything.

To say that you are your body is not to further overidentify each of us with the ways our bodies have been made objects, but rather to remind us that our personhood is inextricable from our physicality. This is meant to rehumanize us all and to distance us from the paradigms that separated us from our bodies in the first place, as if any of us could ever transcend our bodies.

Here is the idea: pain can be a doorway into the present. Even more, pain can be the invitation into loving and caring for oneself, sometimes learning how to do that for the very first time. The intensity of the sensations of pain are cause for us to try to escape into our mind, but they are also an invitation into the present. When we feel nerve activation in our bodies, it is a reminder that we are here, in the right now, alive and feeling.

It takes time to feel comfortable with something we're just learning. And if we're counting on what we're learning to help us heal, that can add pressure, which can make us afraid and tight. But we can always begin again with a breath, a noticing, a shift in posture or attention, a decision to not do the same old thing. Hope becomes available when we become more aware of our inner process and learn to see off-ramps from the old cycle available in any moment.

No matter how or why we get there, no matter how well it may have served us, forgetting the body also costs us something—individually and collectively. We lose the fundamental building blocks of human thriving, connection to ourselves and others, and the fullness of pleasure, wisdom, empathy, and justice. Connection to our bodily selves allows us to internalize a sense of safety and connection that tells us who we are, what we long for, and how to be most fully alive.

When we are frustrated, it is easy to blame another person, but doing so means we miss a chance to see where we need to heal, seek comfort, get out of a situation, or understand ourselves more deeply. Believing that a feeling is about someone else might make us think that the other person, or the situation, has to change. That can trap us in a cycle of codependency, making us think that we can never be okay until the other person changes. When a feeling happens in your body, you are responsible for exploring, understanding, and regulating that emotion.

Embodiment is a way to heal the mind-body divide we experience within ourselves and, more systemically, within Western cultures. To do so we need to understand the self as a body. Our body and our personhood are so intimately connected that they can never be separated. We are not just a mind, or brain, carried around by a meat-puppet of flesh and bones. Embodiment is a kind of re-remembering of who we really are, because what we picked up along the way was disembodiment. But disembodiment is not how we come into the world. It can be unlearned, while embodiment, our birthright, can be remembered. So embodiment is a coming home, a remembering of our wholeness, and a reunion with the fullness of ourselves.

Think about someone who scares you. How likely would you be to walk up to that person and say, “I find you terrifying. Let’s explore that.” Probably not very likely. Similarly, if our only way of interacting with our body is through a fear-based paradigm, we are unlikely to even try to understand our bodily selves. Yet our devaluation of bodies leads to psychosomatic disorders and prevents us from honoring the bodily cues we have learned to ignore, messages telling us that something is not right, that we need medical attention, or that it’s time to rest or receive care. If we cannot listen to these messages, we cannot begin to live lives of peace (because we are at war with ourselves), presence (because we are not in the here and now), and pleasure (because we are disconnected from our own sensations).3

While for some of us it may take an event - a serious illness or a trauma - to remember that we are bodies, many people do not have to wait for a specific event to remember the centrality of their body. That's because their body is placed outside the cultural hierarchy of the "ideal body", and so they learn early on that their body makes them "other". Most forms of oppression are directed against the body as "isms": racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism, ageism, sizeism, and so on. The message underneath isms is this: You are less valuable in this society because of your body. This exemplifies the body-as-object narrative mentioned above: people are reduced to body-as-objects, not empowered as body-subjects. Because of their inability to leave or transcend or conquer their unruly body, the social context suggests to some that they are nothing more than a body, less-than in a world that does not value the inherent goodness of bodies. This creates a trap: their body becomes central to their identity while also being something they are unable to conquer in a social context that privileges the conquered body.

Pretty soon, you find yourself spending more time on your front lawn than you do inside the house. And because your house tells the story of rainy winters and hot summers, including wear on the garage door and some faded paint, you’re working hard to maintain the outside. But over time, you lose sight of the fact that your house was made to inhabit, not just evaluate; you were meant to live inside your home, not on the front lawn. You also forget that your home is yours—which means it doesn’t have to look like the neighbors’. Your home is a place that allows you to express your own style, to entertain, and to store the resources you need to get through the demands of life. When it comes to our bodies, most of us are living on the front lawn. We are looking at our bodies from the outside only, and we have not yet learned how to move back in. In other words, we are so fixated on our appearance that we lose the ability to sense what is happening inside. Even if all our attention is on the outside, the house still exists—for us. We are all born living on the “inside”—it really is the only option. But as we start to realize we have a public body—that other people comment on, celebrate, use, grab, or critique—it gets harder to resist leaving the home that has always been ours.

Because of how much our heads are down, looking at our phones, it can even be an act of resistance to put down our devices and look up and around in the world, keeping our hands, eyes, and minds free from constant stimulation and the ensuing anxiety or numbness.

Thoughts are like blossoms on a flower—there's a stem and then a whole root system beneath them. Thought substitution alone is like plucking off a dandelion bloom, glue-gunning a daffodil blossom on the stem, and expecting daffodils to keep blooming.

Thought substitution alone is like plucking off a dandelion bloom, glue-gunning a daffodil blossom on the stem, and expecting daffodils to keep blooming.

research about body dissatisfaction and body hatred shows us that the majority of us—up to 90 percent of those of us in Western culture and in communities touched by globalization, inclusive of women and men—loathe our bodies.1 Numbers this high and this pervasive among both men and women have led researchers to characterize the Western relationship with the body as “normative discontent,” so normal we can forget there is any other way to relate to our bodies individually and culturally.

Regardless of the why, when we weren’t supported to stay with our emotion, we failed to learn that emotions rise and then eventually fall, and that we will be on the other side of the feeling at some point. As a result, we need to learn, through supportive connection, that it is safe to feel and how to do so.

Never being shown—consistently and frequently enough, if at all—how to ride the wave of an emotion can make it terrifying to start feeling because all we know is that the sensation in our body is rising, rising, rising with no end in sight. So, when we are faced with emotion moving in us, it can be overwhelming and shame inducing. This can keep us stuck in a loop that reinforces a shutdown, fear, or avoidance response.

Without the ability to move all the way through an emotion, we cannot get to what is on the other side: rest, presence, calm, connection, playfulness, and curiosity. This is what we call a “core state”—or our openhearted, authentic, self-at-best state.

defense is used to get away from what it feels like to be us or to avoid the emotion that is trying to get our attention.

Defenses are like winter coats. At one point they helped keep us safe, but now that we are somewhere new, or the seasons have changed, they no longer serve us and can actually hurt us.

This requires identifying that they are present at all and getting curious about what they might be defending us against.

How is it trying to help me right now?”3 Asking this question moves us toward what might be lying beneath the defense without ignoring the defense or creating more shame, and it affirms that the defense is there to help us.

feelings are the experiential arc between the problem and the solution.

Sadness helps us ask for comfort, helps us grieve, or gives us the release of letting go. Anger helps us set a boundary and protect ourselves or someone else. And joy takes us into full expression, sharing our experiences to help them expand.

When we are more emotionally regulated, but haven’t forgotten the message the emotion gave us, we can integrate our thinking into our feelings to figure out our best next move.

Instead, try to step back and notice only the emotion, setting the story aside in order to be fully with the bodily sensation. This can take practice, especially when we aren’t used to focusing on our inner experience this way.

When a feeling happens in your body, you are responsible for exploring, understanding, and regulating that emotion.

emotion itself is never the problem; the problem is the stories that keep us apart from each other, create conditional belonging, or require us to shove things down in order to stay connected.

Living Like You Mean It by Ronald J. Frederick.

How we think about our pain matters for two reasons: it affects the processes within our body (increasing or decreasing actual pain, and the ability to heal) and our quality of life (creating relief and comfort, or increasing our suffering).

Externalizing allows us to center the hard and good work the body is doing to keep us alive and healthy, building compassion for our bodily selves.

It’s so obvious how much your body wants to be alive; it’s doing its very best to fight this right now.

violence, but we often overlook how words and thoughts can also damage our body.

The second arrow we shoot is often modeled after the ways people responded to our pain when we were growing up. Blaming others has its own purpose. It makes us feel in control or puts up a defense against owning our responsibility in this. The arrow that forecasts the scary future also has a role. It sounds like this: “The awful thing will happen again, and I won’t be able to handle it.” And it helps us feel in control, for a moment, thinking we can predict the danger ahead and then plan for

Hope becomes available when we become more aware of our inner process and learn to see off-ramps from the old cycle available in any moment.

The first arrow invites us to develop a fierce inner nurturer who stands opposite the inner critic. The role of the nurturer is to witness and tend to the pain (or whatever the first arrow is) and to comfort

Here are some ideas of what that might sound like: “I’m so sorry you are hurting right now”; “This is hard, and I’m glad I get to be with you in the midst of it”; “I haven’t left you, and we will do it together”; “You did not deserve this, and this didn’t happen because you’re bad.

Here are some questions you can use to ignite wonder: What other sensations can I feel right now besides the pain? If I saw a piece of art that captured what this is like, what would the image be? If my pain had a voice or words, what would it say?

Speaking to the pain: What do you want me to know about what this is like?

And when pain comes up again, we know we have agency in the process: we can choose how we respond to it. That makes pain less scary and hopeless, and

Sometimes the body is saying, “You went through something” or “Stop ignoring me.” Sometimes the body is saying, “This is new” or “This is hard.” My favorite is imagining the sensations as my intricate and beautifully evolved tissues speak with nerve and electrical firings: “I am in desperate need of some care right now.” We can only learn what the message is if we stop to pay attention. Whatever is going on for our body can make us afraid, but it can also reconnect us to ourselves.

My accidents exposed my integrity breach and invited me into all the things that I know work but had not practiced with any degree of commitment myself.

But I have chosen powerfully to refuse to let my inner dialogue contribute to the injuries that happened to me.

The belief that we have to change our body to be happy creates conditional self-worth, which means we can be happy and valuable only if our body never changes back. It leads to an unhealthy preoccupation that increases the likelihood of disordered eating, food and exercise compulsions, anxiety, and depression related to rigid thinking and undernutrition. And it promotes the false belief that it’s better if there is less of us. Instead of changing our body, what we need to change is how we think about, talk about, and care for our body. Becoming more connected to our body, seeing our bodily self as inherently worthy, good, and lovable, means we can pay more attention to our unique bodily needs, which might include intuitive eating, healthy forms of movement, self-care, and a balanced lifestyle that includes rest and routine care.10

Health also includes mental well-being, relationship satisfaction, and community belonging and safety.13

When what we had oriented our life around slips from our grasp, we have the choice to either hold on tighter or open our hands and let go.

There is privilege in knowing how to access, understand, and apply information.

Thoughts are like blossoms on a flower—there’s a stem and then a whole root system beneath them. Thought substitution alone is like plucking off a dandelion bloom, glue-gunning a daffodil blossom on the stem, and expecting daffodils to keep blooming

We wondered together how much more difficult it is to heal when we are also contributing to our own pain by how we respond to ourselves about it.

But ultimately what body hatred costs us—individually and collectively—is the fullness of life. We lose out on the goodness that comes through our body. And if we are our body, we miss out on experiencing our own goodness and the presence and wisdom that comes from deep connection to ourselves. We also lose out on connection with others: the quality of touch offered to soothe a wound, kissing someone who makes our body feel electric, or celebrating how breasts can nourish and nurture a baby. There is so much goodness within and between us because of our bodies, the bodies we spend so much time trying to get away from, control, or blame.

What unifies these two people and their stories is the experience of a pain point—bodies crying out to tell stories that have been disregarded or dishonored.

Most people forget about the body until pain, aging, illness, trauma, incarceration, or impending death brings it to the fore.

we cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it.

Thoughts are like blossoms on a flower—there’s a stem and then a whole root system beneath them. Thought substitution alone is like plucking off a dandelion bloom, glue-gunning a daffodil blossom on the stem, and expecting daffodils to keep blooming. In this case, lasting change requires digging up the roots of one flower and planting a new bulb to grow the other. These new bulbs are embodied experiences; the soil is the context that supports our blooming.

relearning how to experience the body from the inside out. Being in our body gives us access to all the wisdom that our bodies hold. This allows us to know ourselves more fully, experiencing ourselves as good and sacred, and hold safety within ourselves no matter what happens around us.

For some of us, the complexity and richness of being fully alive is difficult and we struggle to consent to all it holds: loss, grief, pain, aloneness, illness, the pangs of hunger or fullness, the grip of fear, and the finality of death.

We can’t avoid the painful things we experience through our bodies without sacrificing the good, the beautiful, the rich.

trauma occurs when something negative and unexpected happens, and it leaves us feeling confused, overwhelmed, and powerless.

When we go through trauma, every ingredient of the experience combines in a way that makes it impossible to separate one from the other.

Dr. Lorimer Moseley, neuroscientist and pain expert, tells a story in his TED talk about a near-death experience.

now know that trauma does not happen to our thoughts but to our bodies—and it remains in our bodies until we know we are safe.14

She was doing what she had been trained to do: to think of herself as being monitored, to think of herself from the outside, and to anticipate judgment.

We heal when we can be with what we feel. In other words, trying to make feelings go away, and in a very authoritarian, cognitive, and seemingly disconnected manner, wouldn’t do it.

Our brain-body system is adaptive, and we can use safety cues and relationships to return to a state of rest.

trauma is defined by how a person experiences an event, not by the event itself.

When a stressor threatens our safety, our bodies are wired first to seek help through social engagement, then to mobilize ourselves to action, and finally, if the first two responses fail, to shut down.

She had always been fun to work with, her jokes cleverly disguising her mistrust of others and the fear knit into her muscle fibers.

It is not when you are gone that I get to do the things I feel excited about doing; it is when we are together.

It is so hard to be seen, because when we are seen, we can be judged and rejected. I know you are just trying to protect me from shame. You are rattling me from the inside out to get my attention, thinking that if you get loud enough, I’ll listen, and we can stop this before we get hurt. This won’t be like other times we got hurt. No matter what happens, we can handle it together. Will you come with me onto that stage? I can’t wait to tell everyone what we’ve learned.

We now know that most psychopathology, or mental illness, is the result of the inability to effectively regulate emotion.

some of us grew up learning that even the so-called positive emotions were bad. We were told that pride—a mix of excitement and joy and self-directed value—was selfish and immoral. We were punished socially—through shame—for feeling this incredible biological impulse. The words “don’t get too big for your britches” or “don’t get too full of yourself” have been used to quiet people’s impulses toward ambition, mastery, and self-satisfaction.

When we feel embodied, we can take up space, move freely in public and private, and challenge external appearance standards. We can connect to the needs and rights of others while simultaneously experiencing and expressing our individuality. We can experience emotion as anchored in the body, care for and protect our body, and use our body as a source of wisdom when interacting with the world. This matters for our health as a whole person and for our individuality as well as our interconnectedness.

your body is the place where the Divine dwells, then you always have direct and immanent access to the Divine. That is sometimes comforting, sometimes healing, and sometimes a reminder that you do not have to keep trying to earn love—you can access it, always.

What we need when we are hurting is patient understanding that proves to our whole brain-body system that we are safe.

Just as water running over rocks changes the shape of the rocks, our thinking/behaving/responding changes our neurobiology, making it easier for our nervous system to instinctively take that pathway in the future.

We complete the stress cycle when we release our trauma response mechanisms by moving the stress-related energy out through the body.

Interoception is the ability to sense what is happening inside your body and to know yourself from the inside out.

But over time, you lose sight of the fact that your house was made to inhabit, not just evaluate; you were meant to live inside your home, not on the front lawn. You also forget that your home is yours—which means it doesn’t have to look like the neighbors’. Your home is a place that allows you to express your own style, to entertain, and to store the resources you need to get through the demands of life.

emotion is e-motion, or energy in motion, and the landscape for that movement is our bodies. But some of us have confused our ability to feel our feelings as they move as energy through our body with our ability to talk about what we feel.

Psychology has historically focused too much on cognition and behavior while neglecting the process that underlies them both: emotion.

we can get back to safety more quickly when we engage the healing process in the context of relationship.

most of our nervous system operates unconsciously, either because it is pre-programmed into our wiring thanks to evolution or because of what our body has experienced regarding what is safe or unsafe for us.

A stressful event becomes a trauma when we feel overwhelmed and powerless.

Our bodies are telling the stories we have avoided or forgotten how to hear—and sometimes our inability to feel our feelings (the messages that precede the alarm bells) means our bodies have to scream in order to get some attention.

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