The Body Keeps The Score Quotes

“Our culture teaches us to focus on personal uniqueness, but at a deeper level we barely exist as individual organisms. Our brains are built to help us function as members of a tribe. We are a part of that tribe even when we are by ourselves, whether listening to music (that other people created), watching a basketball game on television (our muscles tensing as the players run and jump), or preparing a spreadsheet for a sales meeting (anticipating the boss’s reactions). Most of our energy is devoted to connecting with others.”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“If you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating a trauma from the patient’s past.”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“If, as a therapist, teacher, or mentor, you try to fill the holes of early deprivation, you come up against the fact that you are the wrong person, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“Research had already shown that sleep, and dream sleep in particular, plays a major role in mood regulation. As the article in "Dreaming" pointed out, the eyes move rapidly back and forth in REM sleep, just as they do in EMDR. Increasing our time in REM sleep reduces depression, while the less REM sleep we get, the more likely we are to become depressed......Today we know that both deep sleep and REM sleep play important roles in how memories change over time. The sleeping brain reshapes memory by increasing the imprint of emotionally relevant information while helping irrelevant material fade away. In a series of elegant studies Stickgold and his colleagues showed that the sleeping brain can even make sense out of information whose relevance is unclear while we are awake and integrate it into the larger memory system.”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“In contrast to phobias (such as a spider phobia, which is based on a specific irrational fear", posttraumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation, (or seeing someone else being annihilated). which reorganizes self-experience (as helpless) and the interpretation of reality (the entire world is a dangerous place).”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“There is no question traumatized people have irrational thoughts: "I was to blame for being so sexy." "The other guys weren't afraid - they're real men." "I should have known better than to walk down that street." It's best to treat those thoughts as cognitive flashbacks - you don't argue with them any more than you would argue with someone who keeps having visual flashbacks of a terrible accident. They are residues of traumatic incidents: thoughts they were thinking when, or shortly after, the traumas occurred that are reactivated under stressful conditions. A better way to treat them is with EMDR....”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“Such changes are called "switching" in clinical practice, and we see them often in individuals with trauma histories. Patients activate distinctly different emotional and physiological states as they move from one topic to another. Switching manifests not only as remarkably different vocal patterns but also in different facial expressions and body movements. Some patients even appear to change their personal identity, from timid to forceful and aggressive or from anxiously compliant to starkly seductive. When they write about their deepest fears, their handwriting often becomes more childlike and primitive”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma

“Since then neuroscience research has shown that we possess two distinct forms of self-awareness: one that keeps track of the self across time and one that registers the self in the present moment. The first, our autobiographical self, creates connections among experiences and assembles them into a coherent story. This system is rooted in language. Our narratives change with the telling, as our perspective changes and as we incorporate new input.”
― Bessel van der Kolk M.D., The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in The Healing of Trauma