Quotes by Bessel A. van der Kolk

“BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guar...”

“Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a world that longs to forget.”

“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...”

“Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has been sheltered from destruction by th...”

“The traumatic stress field has adopted the term Complex Trauma to describe the experience of multiple and/or chronic and prolonged, developmentally adverse traumatic events, most often of an interp...”

“The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability fac...”

“Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.”

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, i...”

“Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears dont hijack us. (For example, your fear at being flagged down by the police can turn instantly to gratitude when ...”

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.”

“While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.”

“When you have a persistent sense of heartbreak and gutwrench, the physical sensations become intolerable and we will do anything to make those feelings disappear. And that is really the origin of w...”

“Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginal...”

“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...”

“I cut myself up really badly with the lid of a tin can. They took me to the emergency room, but I couldnt tell the doctor what I had done to cut myselfI didnt have any memory of it. The ER doctor w...”

“In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you ...”

“Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder. As dramatic as its symptoms are, the internal splitting and emerg...”

“We dont 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 couplesalmost a third, a...”

“Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma.”

“EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, ...”