Waking the Tiger Quotes

“Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness. The tree is made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. These roots take nourishment from the ground and grow strong. Grounding also allows the tree to be resilient so that it can yield to the winds of change and not be uprooted. Springiness is the facility to ground and ‘unground’ in a rhythmical way. This buoyancy is a dynamic form of grounding. Aggressiveness is the biological ability to be vigorous and energetic, especially when using instinct and force. In the immobility (traumatized) state, these assertive energies are inaccessible. The restoration of healthy aggression is an essential part in the recovery from trauma. Empowerment is the acceptance of personal authority. It derives from the capacity to choose the direction and execution of one’s own energies. Mastery is the possession of skillful techniques in dealing successfully with threat. Orientation is the process of ascertaining one’s position relative to both circumstance and environment. In these ways the residue of trauma is renegotiated.”
― Peter A. Levine Ph.D., Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“The body has been designed to renew itself through continuous self-correction. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Because the symptoms and emotions associated with trauma can be extreme, most of us (and those close to us) will recoil and attempt to repress these intense reactions. Unfortunately, this mutual denial can prevent us from healing. In our culture there is a lack of tolerance for the emotional vulnerability that traumatized people experience. Little time is allotted for the working through of emotional events. We are routinely pressured into adjusting too quickly in the aftermath of an overwhelming situation. Denial is so common in our culture that it has become a cliché.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“When a young tree is injured it grows around that injury. As the tree continues to develop, the wound becomes relatively small in proportion to the size of the tree. Gnarly burls and misshapen limbs speak of injuries and obstacles encountered through time and overcome. The way a tree grows around its past contributes to its exquisite individuality, character, and beauty. I certainly don't advocate for traumatization to build character, but since trauma is almost a given at some point in our lives, the image of the tree can be a valuable mirror.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Every trauma provides an opportunity for authentic transformation. Trauma amplifies and evokes the expansion and contraction of psyche, body, and soul. It is how we respond to a traumatic event that determines whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Medusa turning us into stone, or whether it will be a spiritual teacher taking us along vast and uncharted pathways. In the Greek myth, blood from Medusa’s slain body was taken in two vials; one vial had the power to kill, while the other had the power to resurrect. If we let it, trauma has the power to rob our lives of vitality and destroy it. However, we can also use it for powerful self-renewal and transformation. Trauma, resolved, is a blessing from a greater power.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Although we rarely die, humans suffer when we are unable to discharge the energy that is locked in by the freezing response. The traumatized veteran, the rape survivor, the abused child, the impala, and the bird all have been confronted by overwhelming situations. If they are unable to orient and choose between fight or flight, they will freeze or collapse. Those who are able to discharge that energy will be restored. Rather than moving through the freezing response, as animals do routinely, humans often begin a downward spiral characterized by an increasingly debilitating constellation of symptoms.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Physicians and mental health workers today don't speak of retrieving souls, but they are faced with a similar task—restoring wholeness to an organism that has been fragmented by trauma. Shamanistic concepts and procedures treat trauma by uniting lost soul and body in the presence of community. This approach is alien to the technological mind. However, these procedures do seem to succeed where conventional Western approaches fail.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Today, our survival depends increasingly on developing our ability to think rather than being able to physically respond. Consequently, most of us have become separated from our natural, instinctual selves—in particular, the part of us that can proudly, not disparagingly, be called animal. Regardless of how we view ourselves, in the most basic sense we literally are human animals. The fundamental challenges we face today have come about relatively quickly, but our nervous systems have been much slower to change. It is no coincidence that people who are more in touch with their natural selves tend to fare better when it comes to trauma. Without easy access to the resources of this primitive, instinctual self, humans alienate their bodies from their souls. Most of us don't think of or experience ourselves as animals. Yet, by not living through our instincts and natural reactions, we aren't fully human either. Existing in a limbo in which we are neither animal nor fully human can cause a number of problems, one of which is being susceptible to trauma.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Trauma has become so commonplace that most people don't even recognize its presence. It affects everyone. Each of us has had a traumatic experience at some point in our lives, regardless of whether it left us with an obvious case of post-traumatic stress. Because trauma symptoms can remain hidden for years after a triggering event, some of us who have been traumatized are not yet symptomatic.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Trauma can be prevented more easily than it can be healed.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“In many ways, the felt sense is like a stream moving through an ever-changing landscape. It alters its character in resonance with its surroundings. When the land is rugged and steep, the stream moves with vigor and energy, swirling and bubbling as it crashes over rocks and debris. Out on the plains, the stream meanders so slowly that one might wonder whether it is moving at all. Rains and spring thaw can rapidly increase its volume, possibly even flood nearby land. In the same way, once the setting has been interpreted and defined by the felt sense, we will blend into whatever conditions we find ourselves. This amazing sense encompasses both the content and climate of our internal and external environments. Like the stream, it shapes itself to fit those environments.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“In order to stay healthy, our nervous systems and psyches need to face challenges and to succeed in meeting those challenges. When this need is not met, or when we are challenged and cannot triumph, we end up lacking vitality and are unable to fully engage in life. Those of us who have been defeated by war, abuse, accidents, and other traumatic events suffer far more severe consequences.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“In moving through apprehensive chills to mounting excitement and waves of moist tingling warmth, the body, with its innate capacity to heal, melts the iceberg created by deeply frozen trauma. Anxiety and despair can become creative wellspring when we allow ourselves to experience bodily sensations, such as trembling, that stem from traumatic symptoms. Held within the symptoms of trauma are the very energies, potentials, and resources necessary for their constructive transformation. The creative healing process can be blocked in a number of ways—by using drugs to suppress symptoms, by overemphasizing adjustment or control, or by denial or invalidation of feelings and sensations.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Learning to know yourself through the felt sense is a first step toward healing trauma.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“If we feel inclined to focus on memories (even if they are basically accurate), it is important to understand that this choice will impair our ability to move out of our traumatic reactions. Transformation requires change. One of the things that must change is the relationship that we have with our “memories.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“This leading-edge research echoes what ancient wisdom has always known: that each organ of the body, including the brain, speaks its own “thoughts,” “feelings,” and “promptings,” and listens to those of all the others.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Until we understand that traumatic symptoms are physiological as well as psychological, we will be woefully inadequate in our attempts to heal them. The heart of the matter lies in being able to recognize that trauma represents animal instincts gone awry. When harnessed, these instincts can be used by the conscious mind to transform traumatic symptoms into a state of well-being.       Acts”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Animals do not view freezing as a sign of inadequacy or weakness, nor should we.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Trauma is so arresting that traumatized people will focus on it compulsively. Unfortunately, the situation that defeated them once will defeat them again and again. Body sensations can serve as a guide to reflect where we are experiencing trauma, and to lead us to our instinctual resources. These resources give us the power to protect ourselves from predators and other hostile forces. Each of us possesses these instinctual resources. Once we learn how to access them we can create our own shields to reflect and heal our traumas.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Some things must be dealt with at the roots. Trauma is one of these things.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Sometimes, traumatized individuals have an investment in being ill and may form a kind of attachment to their symptoms. There are innumerable reasons (both physiological and psychological) to explain why this attachment occurs. I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail on this subject. The important thing to keep in mind is that we can only heal to the degree that we can become unattached from these symptoms. It is almost as if they become entities unto themselves through the power we give them. We need to release them from our minds and hearts along with the energy that is locked in our nervous systems.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“when we cling strongly to the concrete version of memory we are re-stricted to doing what we have always done in relation to it. The dilemma is that unresolved trauma forces us to repeat what we have done before. New and creative assemblages of possibilities will not easily occur to us.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Fortunately, because we are instinctual beings with the ability to feel, respond, and reflect, we possess the innate potential to heal even the most debilitating traumatic injuries. I am convinced, as well, that we as a global human community can begin to heal from the effects of large-scale social traumas such as war and natural disaster.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“The changes can be extremely subtle: something that feels internally like a rock, for example, may suddenly seem to melt into a warm liquid. These changes have their most beneficial effect when they are simply watched, and not interpreted. Attaching meaning to them or telling a story about them at this time may shift the child’s perceptions into a more evolved portion of the brain, which can easily disrupt the direct connection established with the reptilian core. Bodily responses that emerge along with sensations typically include involuntary trembling, shaking, and crying. The body may want, slowly, to move in a particular way. If suppressed or interrupted by beliefs about being strong (grown up, courageous), acting normal, or abiding by familiar feelings, these responses will not be able to effectively discharge the accumulated energy.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“If healing is what you want, your first step is to be open to the possibility that literal truth is not the most important consideration. The conviction that it really happened, the fear that it may have happened, the subtle searching for evidence that it did happen, can all get in your way as you try to hear what the felt sense wants to tell you about what it needs to heal.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is (only) because an action has not been completed that it is vile. —Jean Genet, from Thiefs Journal”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Traumatic re-enactment is one of the strongest and most enduring reactions that occurs in the wake of trauma. Once we are traumatized, it is almost certain that we will continue to repeat or re-enact parts of the experience in some way. We will be drawn over and over again into situations that are reminiscent of the original trauma.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. from the Gnostic Gospels[1]”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“healing of trauma in its many forms. The most common of these forms are automobile and other accidents, serious illness, surgery and other invasive medical and dental procedures, assault, and experiencing or witnessing violence, war, or a myriad of natural disasters.               I”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“The "helping" professions tend to describe trauma in terms of the event that caused it, instead of defining it in its own terms. Since we don't have a way to accurately define trauma, it can be difficult to recognize.

The official definition that psychologists and psychiatrists use to diagnose trauma is that it is caused by a stressful occurrence "that is outside the range of usual human experience, and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone." This definition encompasses the following unusual experiences: "serious threat to one's life or physical integrity; serious threat or harm to one's children, spouse, or other close relatives or friends; sudden destruction of one's home or community; seeing another person who is or has recently been seriously injured or killed as the result of an accident or physical violence."

This description is somewhat useful as a starting point, but it is also vague and misleading. Who can say what is "outside the range of usual human experience", or "markedly distressing to almost anyone"? The events mentioned in the definition are helpful qualifiers, but there are many other potentially traumatizing events that fall into gray areas. Accidents, falls, illnesses, and surgeries that the body unconsciously perceives as threatening are often not consciously regarded as outside the range of usual human experience. However, they are often traumatizing. In addition, rapes, drive-by shootings, and other tragedies occur frequently in many communities. Though they may be considered inside the range of usual experience, rapes and shootings will always be traumatic.

The healing of trauma depends upon the recognition of its symptoms. Because traumatic symptoms are largely the result of primitive responses, they are often difficult to recognize. People don't need a definition of trauma; we need an experiential sense of how it feels. [ ... ] People who have experienced trauma of [great] magnitude really know what it is, and their responses to it are basic and primitive. [ ... A mother who witnesses her child struck by a car presents with symptoms that are] brutally clear and compelling. For many of us, however, the symptoms are more subtle. We can learn to identify a traumatic experience by exploring our own reactions. It has a feel that is unmistakable once it is identified.”
― Peter A. Levine, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma