Knowing what we feel is the first step to knowing why we feel that way. If we are aware of the constant changes in our inner and outer environment, we can mobilize to manage them. But we can’t do this unless our watchtower, the MPFC, learns to observe what is going on inside us.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Bessel A. van der Kolk Quotes

Erasing awareness and cultivating denial are often essential to survival, but the price is that you lose track of who you are, of what you are feeling, and of what and whom you can trust.5.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

As we will see, finding words to describe what has happened to you can be transformative, but it does not always abolish flashbacks or improve concentration, stimulate vital involvement in your life or reduce hypersensitivity to disappointments and perceived injuries.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

When I go to Europe to teach, I often am contacted by officials at the ministries of health in the Scandinavian countries, the United Kingdom, Germany, or the Netherlands and asked to.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Antipsychotic medications such as Risperdal, Abilify, or Seroquel can significantly dampen the emotional brain and thus make patients less skittish or enraged, but they also may interfere with being able to appreciate subtle signals of pleasure, danger, or satisfaction. They also cause weight gain, increase the chance of developing diabetes, and make patients physically inert, which is likely to further increase their sense of alienation.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Touch makes it possible to live in a body that can move in response to being moved.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

More than anything else, being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

I was surprised and alarmed by the satisfaction I sometimes felt after I’d wrestled a patient to the floor so a nurse could give an injection, and I gradually realized how much of our professional training was geared to helping us stay in control in the face of terrifying and confusing realities.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

However, trauma is much more than a story about something that happened long ago. The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Crucial for understanding trauma, the frontal lobes are also the seat of empathy – our ability to “feel into” someone else.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

If we’re lucky in our relationships, we also feel nourished, supported, and restored as we look into the face and eyes of the other.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Sigmund Freud had said about trauma in 1895: “I think this man is suffering from memories.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Blaming is a universal human trait that helps people feel good while feeling bad, or as my old teacher Elvin Semrad used to say: ‘Hate makes the world go round.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

Whether the trauma had occurred ten years in the past or more than forty, my patients could not bridge the gap between their wartime experiences and their current lives. Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.

— Bessel A. van der Kolk
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