Trauma In Relationships Quotes

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Over time as most people fail the survivor's exacting test of trustworthiness, she tends to withdraw from relationships. The isolation of the survivor thus persists even after she is free.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
Many abused children cling to the hope that growing up will bring escape and freedom. But the personality formed in the environment of coercive control is not well adapted to adult life. The survivor is left with fundamental problems in basic trust, autonomy, and initiative. She approaches the task of early adulthood――establishing independence and intimacy――burdened by major impairments in self-care, in cognition and in memory, in identity, and in the capacity to form stable relationships. She is still a prisoner of her childhood; attempting to create a new life, she reencounters the trauma.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
I am done looking for love where it doesn’t exist. I am done coughing up dust in attempts to drink from dry wells.
Maggie Georgiana Young
It was awful and so surreal to see it unfold before my eyes. I will never forget that sight. The only thing I could think of is that one day you are king of your domain, and the next day you are being escorted to your car by security.
Dean Mafako (Burned Out)
The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
If the sound of happy children is grating on your ears, I don't think it's the children who need to be adjusted.
Stefan Molyneux
we are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our body, which is doomed to decay..., from the external world which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless force of destruction, and finally from our relations with other men... This last source is perhaps more painful to use than any other. (p77)
Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents)
Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.
Stefan Molyneux
Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity. The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment.
Chris Hedges
The guarantee of safety in a battering relationship can never be based upon a promise from the perpetrator, no matter how heartfelt. Rather, it must be based upon the self-protective capability of the victim. Until the victim has developed a detailed and realistic contingency plan and has demonstrated her ability to carry it out, she remains in danger of repeated abuse.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
They remained imprisoned in the CICU, kept alive in physicality by mechanical devices and medicinal support, inexorably suffering. I revered their resiliency, though I struggled to understand whether they were truly resilient or if this was a descriptive term I used to assure myself that what we were doing was just. Could they merely represent physical beings at this point, molecular derivatives of carbon and water, void of souls that had moved on months prior once the universe had delivered their inevitable fate, simply kept alive by us physicians, who ourselves clutched desperately to the most favored of our prehistoric binary measures of success: life?
Dean Mafako (Burned Out)
The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
They say that love is blind, but it’s trauma that’s blind. Love sees what is.
Neil Strauss (The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book about Relationships)
Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.
Sierra D. Waters (Debbie.)
There is tremendous trauma in the betrayal caused by a perpetual liar as they repeatedly commit psychological abuse.
Cathy Burnham Martin (The Bimbo Has Brains: And Other Freaky Facts)
It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological.... [A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which was not entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.
Anthony Storr (Solitude: A Return to the Self)
Our major finding is that your history of relational health—your connectedness to family, community, and culture—is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity (see Figure 8). This is similar to the findings of other researchers looking at the power of positive relationships on health. Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.
Bruce D. Perry (What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing)
The child is right," she announced firmly. Arrietty's eyes grew big. "Oh, no-" she began. It shocked her to be right. Parents were right, not children. Children could say anything, Arrietty knew, and enjoy saying it-knowing always they were safe and wrong.
Mary Norton (The Borrowers (The Borrowers, #1))
If you’re still in it, it’s hard to talk about it. I wasn’t able to attach in the way that you need to attach and open up in the way that you need to open up in order to have any type of relationship with a therapist.” This was a stunning revelation: So many patients are in and out of treatment, unable to meaningfully connect because they are still “in it.” Of course, when people don’t know who they are, they can’t possibly see the reality of the people around them.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
First, the physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder have been brought within manageable limits. Second, the person is able to bear the feelings associated with traumatic memories. Third, the person has authority over her memories; she can elect both to remember the trauma and to put memory aside. Fourth, the memory of the traumatic event is a coherent narrative, linked with feeling. Fifth, the person's damaged self-esteem has been restored. Sixth, the person's important relationships have been reestablished. Seventh and finally, the person has reconstructed a coherent system of meaning and belief that encompasses the story of trauma.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
Survivors often develop an exaggerated need for control in their adult relationships. It’s the only way they feel safe. They also struggle with commitment—saying yes in a relationship means being trapped in yet another family situation where abuse might take place. So the survivor panics as her relationship gets closer, certain that something terrible is going to happen. She pulls away, rejects, or tests her partner all the time.
Laura Davis (Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child)
Keep your heart wide open and you’ll be received with open hearts — not by everyone, but to be received by one open heart is more than worth the journey.
Marnie Grundman (Missing A True Story Of A Childhood Lost)
It was no coincidence, that fear could move a person to extremes, just as seamlessly as love. They were the conjoined twins of emotion: If you didn't know what was at stake to lose, you had nothing to fight for.
Jodi Picoult (The Tenth Circle)
Paradoxically, the more we try to change ourselves, the more we prevent change from occurring. On the other hand, the more we allow ourselves to fully experience who we are, the greater the possibility of change.
Laurence Heller (Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship)
We do not "get over" a death. We learn to carry the grief and integrate the loss in our lives. In our hearts, we carry those who have died. We grieve and we love. We remember.
Nathalie Himmelrich (Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple)
Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insult. And, by facilitating reconnection to ordinary life, the public testimony helps survivors restore basic trust in a just world and overcome feelings of isolation. But the talking cure is predicated on the existence of a community willing to bear witness. 'Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships,' write Judith Herman. 'It cannot occur in isolation.
Lawrence N. Powell (Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana)
No whim of fate, no Freudian trauma, no loss of a loved one will be as devastating to the human spirit as some prolonged ambivalent relationship that leaves us forever unable to say goodbye.
George E. Vaillant (Adaptation to Life)
I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.
Zachary Quinto
because of its repetitive nature, complex trauma is fundamentally relational trauma. In other words, this is trauma caused by bad relationships with other people—people who were supposed to be caring and trustworthy and instead were hurtful. That meant future relationships with anybody would be harder for people with complex trauma because they were wired to believe that other people could not be trusted. The only way you could heal from relational trauma, he figured, was through practicing that relational dance with other people. Not just reading self-help books or meditating alone. We had to go out and practice maintaining relationships in order to reinforce our shattered belief that the world could be a safe place. “Relationships
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
An emotionally abusive relationship, in very simplistic terms, is much like standing up in a too hot bath and sinking back in so as not to feel so dizzy.
Jackie Haze, Borderless
Because traumatized people often have trouble sensing what is going on in their bodies, they lack a nuanced response to frustration. They either react to stress by becoming “spaced out” or with excessive anger. Whatever their response, they often can’t tell what is upsetting them. This failure to be in touch with their bodies contributes to their well-documented lack of self-protection and high rates of revictimization23 and also to their remarkable difficulties feeling pleasure, sensuality, and having a sense of meaning. People with alexithymia can get better only by learning to recognize the relationship between their physical sensations and their emotions, much as colorblind people can only enter the world of color by learning to distinguish and appreciate shades of gray.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
To hold traumatic reality in consciousness requires a social context that affirms and protects the victim and that joins the victim and witness in a common alliance. For the individual victim, this social context is created by relationships with friends, lovers, and family. For the larger society, the social context is created by political movements that give voice to the disempowered.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
Changes in Relationship with others: It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be able to distinguish between good and bad intentions in other people. Some parts do not seem to trust anyone, while other parts may be so vulnerable and needy that they do not pay attention to clues that perhaps a person is not trustworthy. Some parts like to be close to others or feel a desperate need to be close and taken care of, while other parts fear being close or actively dislike people. Some parts are afraid of being in relationships while others are afraid of being rejected or criticized. This naturally sets up major internal as well as relational conflicts.
Suzette Boon (Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists)
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.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Children of trauma are experts at triangulation.” “Triangulation?” I asked. “The child will act a certain way with one parent and a different way with the other parent. They try all kinds of things to drive a wedge in the parents’ relationship.
Lucinda Berry (The Perfect Child)
Patience and timing . . . everything comes when it must come. A life cannot be rushed, cannot be worked on a schedule as so many people want it to be. We must accept what comes to us at a given time, and not ask for more. But life is endless, so we never die; we were never really born. We just pass through different phases. There is no end. Humans have many dimensions. But time is not as we see time, but rather in lessons that are learned.
Brian L. Weiss (Through Time Into Healing: Discovering the Power of Regression Therapy to Erase Trauma and Transform Mind, Body, and Relationships)
Grieving is intense and it is non-stop intense. Even if things are quiet, and you're sitting there in your chair, kind of staring off into space, inside, the intensity is raging. - Lori Ennis
Nathalie Himmelrich (Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple)
In his book The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University, explores how trauma literally reshapes the brain and the body, and how interventions that enable adults to reclaim their lives must address the relationship between our emotional well-being and our bodies.
Brené Brown (Rising Strong: The Reckoning. The Rumble. The Revolution.)
Recovery can take place only within then context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connection with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological facilities that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic operations of trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy. Just as these capabilities are formed in relationships with other people, they must be reformed in such relationships. The first principle of recovery is empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure. Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor founder because this basic principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression.
Kaliane Bradley (The Ministry of Time)
It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.
Bonnie Badenoch (The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
We do not have control over many things in life and death but we do have control over the meaning we give it.
Nathalie Himmelrich (Grieving Parents: Surviving Loss as a Couple)
When you release money blocks and become self-aware about your own personal relationship with money, you can begin to re-write your own personal money story.
Keisha Blair (Holistic Wealth (Expanded and Updated): 36 Life Lessons to Help You Recover from Disruption, Find Your Life Purpose, and Achieve Financial Freedom)
Self-regulation depends on having a friendly relationship with your body. Without it you have to rely on external regulation—from medication, drugs like alcohol, constant reassurance, or compulsive compliance with the wishes of others.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
You've been wondering about your own relationship to open water. You've been wondering about the trauma and how it always finds its way to the surface, floating in the ocean. You've been wondering about how to protect that trauma from consumption. You've been wondering about departing, about being elsewhere. You have always thought if you opened your mouth in open water you would drown, but if you didn't open your mouth you would suffocate. So here you are, drowning.
Caleb Azumah Nelson (Open Water)
As far as monks are concerned, I believe that they are bad experiencers. They know nothing about the struggles of a normal human being. The struggle to stay alive. The struggle to survive in this capitalist world. The trauma of being in a bad relationship. Juggling between the myriads of emotions and sentiments. These monks are oblivious to such battles which a normal human being fights every day.
Abhaidev (The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit)
We forget in order to survive our childhoods, when we are totally dependent on our parents' goodwill; but to recover from such childhoods, we must begin by remembering-the bad and the good.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
If it is your fault that your mother is miserable, it becomes a potentially fixable affront. Taking blame means that at least the hope of love is still there-all you have to do is deserve it.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
Narcissistic abuse is a form of psycho-emotional abuse that takes place when a pathological narcissist targets another individual and exposes them to trauma. It can also manifest as physical, financial, spiritual and sexual abuse.
M. Wakefield (Narcissistic Family Dynamics: Collected Essays)
If unloving mothers were able to see their behavious as abusive, they either would stop behaving that way or they would get help for their dysfunction. But many cannot: instead, they deny it, to themselves, their families, and the world at large, in order to avoid a sense of guilt, to avoid having to make changes in their lives, or to avoid the bruising awareness that they, too, were unloved children.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
Complex PTSD consists of of six symptom clusters, which also have been described in terms of dissociation of personality. Of course, people who receive this diagnosis often also suffer from other problems as well, and as noted earlier, diagnostic categories may overlap significantly. The symptom clusters are as follows: Alterations in Regulation of Affect ( Emotion ) and Impulses Changes in Relationship with others Somatic Symptoms Changes in Meaning Changes in the perception of Self Changes in Attention and Consciousness
Suzette Boon (Coping with Trauma-Related Dissociation: Skills Training for Patients and Therapists)
Childhood trauma may sneak up from behind and fuck you in the ass when you grow up, but at least it leaves a tip on the nightstand.
Neil Strauss (The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book about Relationships)
Is the whole world doomed to emotional trauma?
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
Love that is conditional upon looks and performance is not love at all
Laurence Heller (Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship)
I had trusted him. I had even trusted him after he betrayed me. I was too open for my own good. I still gave that man my heart even after he destroyed it.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn (Let Love Rule (Where You'll Land #3))
The most traumatic aspects of all disasters involve the shattering of human connections. And this is especially true for children. Being harmed by the people who are supposed to love you, being abandoned by them, being robbed of the one-on-one relationships that allow you to feel safe and valued and to become humane—these are profoundly destructive experiences. Because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that can befall us inevitably involve relational loss. As a result, recovery from trauma and neglect is also all about relationships—rebuilding trust, regaining confidence, returning to a sense of security and reconnecting to love. Of course, medications can help relieve symptoms and talking to a therapist can be incredibly useful. But healing and recovery are impossible—even with the best medications and therapy in the world—without lasting, caring connections to others.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
In this climate of profoundly disrupted relationships the child faces a formidable developmental task. She must find a way to form primary attachments to caretakers who are either dangerous or, from her perspective, negligent. She must find a way to develop a sense of basic trust and safely with caretakers who are untrustworthy and unsafe. She must develop a sense of self in relation to others who are helpless, uncaring or cruel. She must develop a capacity for bodily self-regulation in an environinent in which her body is at the disposal of others' needs as well as a capacity for self-soothing in an environment without solace. She must develop the capacity for initiative in an environment which demands that she bring her will into complete conformity with that of her abuser. And ultimately, she must develop a capacity for intimacy out of an environment where all intimate relationships are corrupt, and an identity out of an environment which defines her as a whore and a slave.
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
It makes perfect sense that if human beings are raised in warm, loving households; if they are brought up to believe that the world is a secure and decent place, then they will grow up with a healthy relationship toward themselves and other people. - able to give love freely and receive it in return. Conversely, if a person is severely mistreated from his earliest years, subjected to constant psychological and physical abuse, he or she will grow up with a malignant view of life. To such a person, the world is a hateful place where all human relationships are based, not on love and respect, but on power, suffering, and humiliation.
Harold Schechter (The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers)
Stop trying to get validation from people who can't or won't acknowledge your feelings. This reflects their inability to empathize. It's a failure on their part and has nothing to do with you.
Jacqueline Simon Gunn
When you go through the moments where you are questioning yourself whether or not it was abuse, remember the way it made you feel. Push away the nostalgia that is trying to minimize it, trying to trick you like a bad magician at a children’s party that the rabbit did come from the hat, that love and abuse come from the same hat.
Nikita Gill (Your Heart is the Sea)
Our relationship maps are implicit, etched into the emotional brain and not reversible simply by understanding how they were created. You may realize that your fear of intimacy has something to do with your mother’s postpartum depression or with the fact that she herself was molested as a child, but that alone is unlikely to open you to happy, trusting engagement with others.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
By developing a relationship with the painful parts of ourselves—parts we have often inherited from our family—we have an opportunity to shift them. Qualities like cruelty can become the source of our kindness; our judgments can forge the foundation of our compassion.
Mark Wolynn (It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle)
Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of the most unequal relationships imaginable. It is no accident that incest occurs most often precisely in the relationship where the female is most powerless. The actual sexual encounter may be brutal or tender, painful or pleasurable; but it is always, inevitably, destructive to the child. The father, in effect, forces the daughter to pay with her body for affection and care which should be freely given. p4
Judith Lewis Herman (Father-Daughter Incest (with a new Afterword))
It’s perplexing how family members claim their undying love for us. They can say whatever they choose, but their actions and behaviors don’t match their words. There is an imbalance in the relationships with distinct discrepancies, especially in who overpowers the scapegoat.
Dana Arcuri (Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma)
Our increasing use of drugs to treat these conditions doesn’t address the real issues: What are these patients trying to cope with? What are their internal or external resources? How do they calm themselves down? Do they have caring relationships with their bodies, and what do they do to cultivate a physical sense of power, vitality, and relaxation? Do they have dynamic interactions with other people? Who really knows them, loves them, and cares about them? Whom can they count on when they’re scared, when their babies are ill, or when they are sick themselves? Are they members of a community, and do they play vital roles in the lives of the people around them? What specific skills do they need to focus, pay attention, and make choices? Do they have a sense of purpose? What are they good at? How can we help them feel in charge of their lives?
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
The narcissistic mother cannot give her child unconditional love. She’s not capable of being self-less, devoted, warm, mature, or attentive to you. Instead, everything is about her. Life revolves around meeting her unrealistic, immature needs. She expects your undivided attention. Your admiration. Your praises. Your loyalty to her. She demands you to meet her needs no matter how ridiculous they can be.
Dana Arcuri (Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma)
What is it that makes you cry? It is only your attachments. What is it that you miss when it is lost? It is the object of your attachment. Ponder over this. Find out what it is that grips your very life, without which you feel miserable and destitute; that is the center of your attachment. Here is what you should do: make an effort to find out what things it would hurt you to lose. Then, before they are lost, open your hands little by little, relax your grip on them. This is the method for conquering attachment. There is bound to be pain, but you must bear it; this is your penance. It is not necessary to renounce anything. It is not that you should leave your wife and run away to the Himalayas. Remain there, where you are, but gradually stop depending on her. There is no need to cause any pain; your wife need not even know it. There is no need to tell her. Seek out the attachments. Try gradually to live without the things that you now think you cannot live without. Create such a state within yourself that if and when these things are lost, there is not the slightest tremor within you. Then you will have attained victory over these attachments. This can be possible. It has been possible. And if it has happened to even one, it can happen to all.
Osho (Bliss: Living beyond happiness and misery)
the essence of a therapeutic relationship: 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: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Abandonment is at the core of addictions. Abandonment causes deep shame. Abandonment by betrayal is worse than mindless neglect. Betrayal is purposeful and self-serving. If severe enough, it is traumatic. What moves betrayal into the realm of trauma is fear and terror. If the wound is deep enough, and the terror big enough, your bodily systems shift to an alarm state. You never feel safe. You’re always on full-alert, just waiting for the hurt to begin again. In that state of readiness, you’re unaware that part of you has died. You are grieving. Like everyone who has loss, you have shock and disbelief, fear, loneliness and sadness. Yet you are unaware of these feelings because your guard is up. In your readiness, you abandon yourself. Yes, another abandonment.
Patrick J. Carnes (The Betrayal Bond: Breaking Free of Exploitive Relationships)
We have a tendency to become detached observers rather than participants. There might also be a sense of disassembling a complex, flowing process to focus on a small part of it. If we expand our focus to include emerging, one of the first changes we may notice is the bodily sense of being in the midst of something, of constant motion, lack of clarity (in the left-hemisphere sense), and unpredictability.
Bonnie Badenoch (The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
I go from Wikipedia to a government page about C-PTSD as it relates to veterans. I read the list of symptoms. It is very long. And it is not so much a medical document as it is a biography of my life: The difficulty regulating my emotions. The tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people. The dismal self-loathing. The trouble I have maintaining relationships. The unhealthy relationship with my abuser. The tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
God ordered Abraham to make a burnt offering of his longed-for son. Abraham built an altar, put firewood upon it, and trussed Isaac up on top of the wood. His murdering knife was already in his hand when an angel dramatically intervened with the news of a last-minute change of plan: God was only joking after all, 'tempting' Abraham, and testing his faith. A modern moralist cannot help but wonder how a child could ever recover from such a psychological trauma. By the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example simultaneously of child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defence: 'I was only obeying orders.' Yet the legend is one of the great foundational myths of all three monotheistic religions.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
Confusing being mortal with being threatened can occur in any realm. The fact that something could go wrong does not mean that we are in danger. It means we are alive. Mortality is the sign of life. In the most intimate and personal of arenas, many of us have love and trusted someone who violated that trust. So when someone else comes along who intrigues us, whose interests we share, who we enjoy being with, with whom there could be some mutual enrichment and understanding, that does not mean that we are being violated again. Experiencing anxiety does not mean that anyone is doing anything to us that is unjust.
Sarah Schulman (Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair)
Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion. The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day. Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247 Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997
Judith Lewis Herman (Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror)
Another step is that daughters can learn to monitor their own feelings and instincts by saying, "I feel uncomfortable (angry, dominated, usurped, inadequate, guilty, furious) with my mother more often than I do not. I have to pay attention to that, because it shows in how I treat my friends (lover, spouse, kids, colleagues). There is validity here. I don't have to blame or excuse my mother-I just have to see her so I can see myself.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated? Tom
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
Something really important to understand about the protective self is that you didn’t ask for it. Repeat that in your mind a few times: You didn’t ask for the protective self to take over. This was a physiological response from your own body, tensing or blocking or numbing to protect you. You didn’t go through a trauma and say, “Okay, body, numb me out now!” Decisions were made without your approval or awareness.
Jackson MacKenzie (Whole Again: Healing Your Heart and Rediscovering Your True Self After Toxic Relationships and Emotional Abuse)
People can learn to control and change their behavior, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. The body keeps the score: If trauma is encoded in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger, and manage relationships. Where traumatized children are concerned, the last things we should be cutting from school schedules are the activities that can do precisely that: chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, and other forms of joyful engagement.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
If you are told from the time you are one month that you're no good and you're not smart and you can't do it and you don't have an opinion of your own and you pick the wrong friends and you don't study the right way and you don't wear the right clothes and you don't look nice, at some point you're going to start believing it. And if you believe it, you're going to need a mommy to tell you what to do. And that's abuse. Not to let your child grow up to be an independent, respected human being.
Victoria Secunda (When You and Your Mother Can't Be Friends: Resolving the Most Complicated Relationship of Your Life)
Some survivors can be wary of most people, yet blinded by compassion toward fellow survivors or others who suffer — or who pretend to suffer, or exaggerate their sufferings, in order to take advantage of the survivor. Some survivors overidentify with other survivors, not realizing that even if someone was traumatized or suffers in a similar way, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is honest. Being either overly suspicious or overly trusting can create problems with a partner who is able to judge the sincerity of others more realistically.
Aphrodite Matsakis (Loving Someone with PTSD: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Connecting with Your Partner after Trauma (The New Harbinger Loving Someone Series))
Through mirror neurons and resonance circuitry, we are taking in each other's bodily state, feelings and intention in each emerging moment (Iacoboni, 2009). This gives us an approximate empathic sense of what is happening in the other person, but it is important to be aware that the information is also being filtered through our implicit lens. This filtering colors our perceptions and pretty much guarantees there will be ruptures that invite repairs, as our offers of empathy will sometimes not reflect what the other person is experiencing.
Bonnie Badenoch (The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personal relationships, and soem are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in some instances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, has steered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of his personality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this does not mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological.... [A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant from behavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we can see that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whose principal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life was not entirely, or even cheifly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships.
Anthony Storr (Solitude: A Return to the Self)
Their experiences led them to create assumptions about others and related beliefs about themselves such as "this is my lot in life" and "this is what I deserve". Some also learned that personal safety and happiness are of lower priority than survival and that it may be safer to give in than to actively fight off additional abuse and victimization. When abuse is perpetrated by intimates, it is additionally confounding in terms of attachment, betrayal, and trust. Victims may be unable to leave or to fight back due to strong, albeit insecure and disorganized, attachment and misplaced loyalty to abusers. They may have also experienced trauma bonding over the course of their victimization, that is, a bond of specialness with or dependence on the abuser.
Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
As I discussed in the previous chapter, attachment researchers have shown that our earliest caregivers don't only feed us, dress us, and comfort us when we are upset; they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met. This information is embodied in the warp and woof of our brain circuitry and forms the template of how we think of ourselves and the world around us. These inner maps are remarkably stable across time. This doesn‘t mean, however, that our maps can‘t be modified by experience. A deep love relationship, particularly during adolescence, when the brain once again goes through a period of exponential change, truly can transform us. So can the birth of a child, as our babies often teach us how to love. Adults who were abused or neglected as children can still learn the beauty of intimacy and mutual trust or have a deep spiritual experience that opens them to a larger universe. In contrast, previously uncontaminated childhood maps can become so distorted by an adult rape or assault that all roads are rerouted into terror or despair. These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs.
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained therapists tend to make with DID and DDNOS. Although his client was properly diagnosed, he assumed that the ANP should be encouraged to take charge of the other parts at all times. He also expected her to speak for them—in other words, to do their therapy. This denied the other parts the opportunity to reveal their secrets, heal their pain, or correct their childhood-based beliefs about the world. If you were doing family therapy, would it be a good idea to only meet with the father, especially if he had not talked with his children or his spouse in years? Would the other family members feel as if their experiences and feelings mattered? Would they be able to improve their relationships? You must work with the parts who are inside of the system. Directly.
Alison Miller (Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control)
Like most people who decide to get sober, I was brought to Alcoholics Anonymous. While AA certainly works for others, its core propositions felt irreconcilable with my own experiences. I couldn't, for example, rectify the assertion that "alcoholism is a disease" with the facts of my own life. The idea that by simply attending an AA meeting, without any consultation, one is expected to take on a blanket diagnosis of "diseased addict" was to me, at best, patronizing. At worst, irresponsible. Irresponsible because it doesn't encourage people to turn toward and heal the actual underlying causes of their abuse of substances. I drank for thirteen years for REALLY good reasons. Among them were unprocessed grief, parental abandonment, isolation, violent trauma, anxiety and panic, social oppression, a general lack of safety, deep existential discord, and a tremendous diet and lifestyle imbalance. None of which constitute a disease, and all of which manifest as profound internal, mental, emotional and physical discomfort, which I sought to escape by taking external substances. It is only through one's own efforts to turn toward life on its own terms and to develop a wiser relationship to what's there through mindfulness and compassion that make freedom from addictive patterns possible. My sobriety has been sustained by facing life, processing grief, healing family relationships, accepting radically the fact of social oppression, working with my abandonment conditioning, coming into community, renegotiating trauma, making drastic diet and lifestyle changes, forgiving, and practicing mindfulness, to name just a few. Through these things, I began to relieve the very real pressure that compulsive behaviors are an attempt to resolve.
Noah Levine (Refuge Recovery: A Buddhist Path to Recovering from Addiction)
It is always appropriate to ask for love, but to ask any other adult (including our parents in the present) to meet our primal needs is unfair and unrealistic. Most of us emerge from childhood with conscious and unconscious primal wounds and emotional unfinished business. What we leave incomplete we are doomed to repeat. The untreated traumas of childhood become the frustrating dramas of adulthood. Our fantasy of the “perfect partner,” or our disappointments in a relationship we do not change or leave, or the dramas that keep arising in our relationships reveal our unique unmet primal wounds and needs. We try so hard to get from others what once we missed. What was missed can never be made up for, only mourned and let go of. Only then are we able to relate to adults as adults.
David Richo (How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly)
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).
Pat Ogden (Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
My intentions for readers of this book are that you recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing. Bonus: realize you are a pleasure activist!
Adrienne Maree Brown (Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Emergent Strategy))
I was taught that punishment and shame were the logical and necessary reactions to screwing up. The benefit of punishment was that it would keep my wild and terrible natural tendencies in line. It would shame me into being better. “Justice is the firmest pillar of good government,” after all, and justice meant people had to pay for their mistakes. When something went wrong, there had to be fault. There had to be blame. There had to be pain. Now I knew I was wrong. Punishment didn’t make things better. It mucked things up even more. The father’s self-punishment did not grant him his daughter’s forgiveness. It did not whip his sins out of him. Instead, it removed him from his family by isolating him in a prison of self-loathing. Locked in this prison, he couldn’t hear what his daughter needed. He couldn’t give her what she was asking for. There was blame and pain in spades. But all of this actively prevented him from making amends, from healing his relationship with his daughter. Punishment did not ease Willow or Jeremy or the other children at Mott Haven back into their circles of friends. Punishment excludes and excises. It demolishes relationships and community. I could not believe it had taken me this long to realize that punishment is not love. In fact, it is the opposite of love. Forgiveness is love. Spaciousness is love.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
Open Letter to Neil Armstrong" Dear Neil Armstrong, I write this to you as she sleeps down the hall. I need answers I think only you might have. When you were a boy, and space was simple science fiction, when flying was merely a daydream between periods of History and Physics, when gifts of moon dust to the one you loved could only be wrapped in your imagination.. Before the world knew your name; before it was a destination in the sky.. What was the moon like from your back yard? Your arm, strong warm and wrapped under her hair both of you gazing up from your back porch summers before your distant journey. But upon landing on the moon, as the earth rose over the sea of tranquility, did you look for her? What was it like to see our planet, and know that everything, all you could be, all you could ever love and long for.. was just floating before you. Did you write her name in the dirt when the cameras weren't looking? Surrounding both your initials with a heart for alien life to study millions of years from now? What was it like to love something so distant? What words did you use to bring the moon back to her? And what did you promise in the moons ear, about that girl back home? Can you, teach me, how to fall from the sky? I ask you this, not because I doubt your feat, I just want to know what it's like to go somewhere no man had ever been, just to find that she wasn't there. To realize your moon walk could never compare to the steps that led to her. I now know that the flight home means more. Every July I think of you. I imagine the summer of 1969, how lonely she must have felt while you were gone.. You never went back to the moon. And I believe that's because it dosen't take rockets to get you where you belong. I see that in this woman down the hall, sometimes she seems so much further. But I'm ready for whatever steps I must take to get to her.I have seem SO MANY skies.. but the moon, well, it always looks the same. So I gotta say, Neil, that rock you landed on, has got NOTHING on the rock she's landed on. You walked around, took samples and left.. She's built a fire cleaned up the place and I hope she decides to stay.. because on this rock.. we can breath. Mr. Armstrong, I don't have much, many times have I been upside down with trauma, but with these empty hands, comes a heart that is often more full than the moon. She's becoming my world, pulling me into orbit, and I now know that I may never find life outside of hers. I want to give her EVERYTHING I don't have yet.. So YES, for her, I would go to the moon and back.... But not without her. We'd claim the moon for each other, with flags made from sheets down the hall. And I'd risk it ALL to kiss her under the light of the earth, the brightness of home... but I can do all of that and more right here, where she is..And when we gaze up, her arms around ME, I will NOT promise her gifts of moon dust, or flights of fancy. Instead I will gladly give her all the earth she wants, in return for all the earth she is. The sound of her heart beat and laughter, and all the time it takes to return to fall from the sky,down the hall, and right into love. God, I'd do it every day, if I could just land next to her. One small step for man, but she's one giant leap for my kind.
Mike McGee
Approximately 15 to 20 percent of the population has a nervous system wired to be more sensitive. These people are more attuned to the subtleties of their environment and process that information much more deeply compared to others without this trait. While being more observant might be a survival advantage, it can also be overwhelming. Someone who is constantly aware of the subtleties of the environment and of the people around them can quickly experience sensory overload. My clients who consider themselves to be HSPs [highly sensitive persons] often report experiencing a certain type of disorganized attachment because the world itself is too much. Due to their increased sensitivity, even normal everyday events can feel too intense, too chaotic or too stimulating, leaving little respite to feel settled, safe and secure. In relationships, HSPs are often unclear as to whether what they are feeling has its origin in themselves or if their partner's feelings are creating that 'one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake' experience in their nervous system. They want to be close to people, but being close can be a sensory assault that is confusing or that dysregulates them for days.
Jessica Fern (Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy)
Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.
Christine A. Courtois (Treatment of Complex Trauma: A Sequenced, Relationship-Based Approach)
Months later, I learned that what happened that first day at restorative yoga hadn’t been entirely spiritual—I hadn’t just found the exact spot on the astral plane to tap into my sacred core. Instead, my instructor’s techniques happened to be the perfect mechanism to turn down my DMN. The default mode network is so-called because if you put people in an MRI machine for an hour and let their minds wander, the DMN is the system of connections in our brain that will light up. It’s arguably the default state of human consciousness, of boredom and daydreaming. In essence, our ego. So if you’re stuck in a machine for an hour, where does your mind go? If you’re like most people, you’ll ruminate on the past or plan your future. You might think about your relationships, upcoming errands, your zits. And scientists have found that some people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or C-PTSD have overactive DMNs. Which makes sense. The DMN is the seat of responsibility and insecurity. It can be a punishing force when it over-ruminates and gets caught in a toxic loop of obsession and self-doubt. The DMN can be silenced significantly by antidepressants or hallucinogenic substances. But the most efficient cure for an overactive DMN is mindfulness. Here’s how it works: In order for the DMN to start whirring, it needs resources to fuel its internal focus. If you’re intently focused on something external—like, say, filling out a difficult math worksheet—the brain simply doesn’t have the resources to focus internally and externally at the same time. So if you’re triggered, you can short-circuit an overactive DMN by cutting off its power source—shifting all of your brain’s energy to external stimuli instead.
Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
Is it possible nevertheless that our consumer culture does make good on its promises, or could do so? Might these, if fulfilled, lead to a more satisfying life? When I put the question to renowned psychologist Tim Krasser, professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College, his response was unequivocal. "Research consistently shows," he told me, "that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day. Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse also tend to be higher among people who value the aims encouraged by consumer society." He points to four central principles of what he calls ACC — American corporate capitalism: it "fosters and encourages a set of values based on self-interest, a strong desire for financial success, high levels of consumption, and interpersonal styles based on competition." There is a seesaw oscillation, Tim found, between materialistic concerns on the one hand and prosocial values like empathy, generosity, and cooperation on the other: the more the former are elevated, the lower the latter descend. For example, when people strongly endorse money, image, and status as prime concerns, they are less likely to engage in ecologically beneficial activities and the emptier and more insecure they will experience themselves to be. They will have also lower-quality interpersonal relationships. In turn, the more insecure people feel, the more they focus on material things. As materialism promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving. This massive and self-perpetuating addictive spiral is one of the mechanisms by which consumer society preserves itself by exploiting the very insecurities it generates. Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No wonder we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body and soul.
Gabor Maté (The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture)
CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)