Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Quotes

“The body is a baby's first vehicle of emotional registration, before they have any language with which to call a need a need, a feeling a feeling, an emotion an emotion. In an infant, these authors observe, emotion is first experienced as excitations (pain, tension, nausea, etc.) at the level of the internal organs (stomach, heart, etc.), the head, the musculature, and the skin. The body itself, albeit passively, becomes the organ of registration of our earliest emotions.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“Words give a feeling or an experience somewhere to live, so that it need no longer live everywhere within us.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“The body is a baby's first vehicle of emotional registration, before they have any language with which to call a need a need, a feeling a feeling, an emotion an emotion. In an infant, these authors observe, emotion is first experienced as excitations (pain, tension, nausea, etc.) at the level of the internal organs (stomach, heart, etc.), the head, the musculature, and the skin. The body itself, albeit passively, becomes the organ of registration of our earliest emotions. As we develop beyond babyhood and into adulthood, the body continues to be emotion's “first language.” The body is the first receiver of emotional signals that arise—remember—from deep within our brainstem and our subcortex. The body is really a transceiver of emotion. It receives signals from the subcortical parts of our emotional brains, and moves them forward in the chain of our experience.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“The process of harvesting our emotion from the deep, inaccessible reaches of our primitive brain is a crucial one indeed. Lecours and Bouchard (1997) refer to this as the process of mentalization—“mentalizing”—moving the messages of our emotional brain to our conscious, thinkable, speakable awareness.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“All these systems I've described—the brainstem, the limbic system, the hypothalamically-mediated autonomic nervous system, our “neurological” stomachs and hearts, our bodies, our five senses—all of these are neurologically connected to, and feed their information to our right brain, our right hemisphere's cortex. That is their destination point. The right brain, then, makes sense of and integrates all of these inputs. Its outputs within our minds are largely non-verbal, but register in our experience as internal mental pictures, feelings, bodily sensations, intuitions, reveries, songs, etc. Simultaneously, the right brain deposits outputs into the intersubjective space between two humans (through our facial expressions, eyes, tone and prosody of voice, body posture, etc.) without our consciously directing these expressions. Finally, the right brain hands a distillation of all this information to its left-brain counterpart, so that, finally, we are allowed to “know” (in words) what we're thinking and experiencing.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“Those whose (experience-dependent) orbitofrontal cortex is under-developed (due to neglect) or damaged (due to physical compromise) are unable to experience accurate empathy for the emotions of another (Gerhardt, 2004).”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“Freud made the observation that cognition and affect are often found to be shorn from one another—in either direction—sometimes with emotion overtaking reason; sometimes with cognition becoming emotionless (Breuer & Freud, 1999). When affect takes over, emotional dysregulation ensues, often wreaking devastating interpersonal damage. Sometimes, intrapersonally, such dysregulation requires extraordinary measures to quell its demands: sometimes spawning addictions or violence; sometimes dangerous risk-taking activities; sometimes self-injury, etc. (Cloitre et al., 2009).”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“Attuned listening listens for the emotions at the bottom of the verbal (or non-verbal) pile, so to speak. Why? Because emotion and cognition are meant to be complementary. It's a design feature of humanness. When they are disconnected, as they so often are in modern culture, we become, neurologically and psychologically speaking, a house divided against itself.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“By elegant design, then, our emotional-cognitive architecture is meant to be nested and integrated.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“As infants, we gradually build our advanced cognitive capacities—language, forethought, imagination, etc.,—on top of and (when all goes well) integrated with a solid foundation of emotional experience, mediated through our interactions with our primary attachment figures. Schore points out that the first eighteen months of our brain's life are spent predominantly on the task of wiring up our right brain's emotional circuitry, only then to be followed by the dendritic explosion of our more cognitive and verbal selves (Schore, 2009, 2012). Developmentally, our affective foundation precedes and provides the essential grounding for our cognitive superstructure. And this is also big. All of our most basic emotional systems—even at the level of our brainstems—are experience-dependent (Gerhardt, 2004; Siegel, 2012). From bottom to top, our genetic emotional systems are trained and trimmed by emotional experience. As infants and toddlers, sectors of our emotional brains become more dendritically proliferated, or less; made more prominent or less; up-regulated or down-regulated; made more or less sensitive to neurotransmissions. Our early experience inclines us to be more trustful of others, or less. It makes our emotional warning systems more apt to trigger action, amplified emotion, heightened or distorted perception, or less. So sculpted, our basic emotional systems remain within us, all the time, doing their silent, vigilant, life-preserving and life-promoting work. In other words, our experience-trained emotional brains constantly provide to us—without our “thinking” about it—the foundational affective data for our encounters with the world beyond us (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“These deeply-imbedded emotional centers—down in the periaqueductal gray and midbrain regions of our brainstem—respond to a myriad of internal and external stimuli on a moment by moment basis (Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Current neuro-imaging studies have identified seven separate but intertwined emotional brainstem-based systems that play the affective “background music” of our experiencing selves all the time. They are making moment by moment emotional evaluations for us, giving us instantaneous promptings about all of the following: our safety; our desires to engage in the activities of life; our attractions; our angers; our drives to attach and nurture; our feelings of sadness and grief; even our urges to play. Panksepp puts it this way: “When we do an accurate archaeology of the mind, we find affective experience at the mind's foundation” (Panksepp & Biven, 2012: p. 423). This is big. Neurologically, affect precedes cognition. Down at the bottom of things, at our brains’ deepest and most life-critical centers, we have emotional brain structures that are quickly, quietly and constantly monitoring things for us outside our conscious awareness. We feel first; we think later.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“As therapists, we are in the business of listening to people's stories, and listening for their feelings. We somehow know intuitively, or are taught along the way, that the medium of "the talking cure" involves having people move awareness along a gradient within them from unthought/unknown, to barely detectable, to feelable, to speakable, to elaborate-able, linkable, and ultimately transformable; from unconscious to conscious, if you will. We are taught and probably know from our own experience that there is something powerfully freeing about birthing a formerly unworded feeling into words. When we're truly scared, or aggrieved, or angered or even surprised, it helps to name the thing. It helps because an emotional experience seems to hold part of our being hostage in some kind of way until we've been able to move it into worded symbols for ourselves, usually by talking to another human being about the experience.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art

“But we simply can’t attune to another in ways that no one has attuned to us. We can’t open in another what is closed in ourselves.”
― Teri Quatman, Essential Psychodynamic Psychotherapy: An Acquired Art