What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

by Bruce D. Perry

What I know for sure is that all pain is the same.

There is a difference between thinking you deserve to be happy and knowing you are worthy of happiness.

no matter what happened, your simply being here, alive, makes you worthy.

Physical well-being and your emotional health are deeply connected.

for many people, there is a “terror of being alive.” I’ll never forget that phrase.

Books, for me, have always been a way to escape.

And you can go to places in your head and imagine things in the future in ways that a lot of people have a hard time doing. That’s dissociation. It’s healthy, healing, and productive. This is why people need to be careful about labeling dissociation as a pathology, as a strictly negative behavior. It can be an incredible strength.

With every decision, big or small, learning to say no has healed me, and intention has saved my life.

we feel better with the certainty of misery than the misery of uncertainty.

Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar.

“You teach people how to treat you.”

A healthy community is a healing community,