Healing Trauma Quotes

“Feelings of helplessness, immobility, and freezing. If hyperarousal is the nervous system’s accelerator, a sense of overwhelming helplessness is its brake. The helplessness that is experienced at such times is not the ordinary sense of helplessness that can affect anyone from time to time. It is the sense of being collapsed, immobilized, and utterly helpless. It is not a perception, belief, or a trick of the imagination. It is real.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“Although humans rarely die from trauma, if we do not resolve it, our lives can be severely diminished by its effects. Some people have even described this situation as a “living death.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“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. —THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“The symptoms of trauma can be stable, that is, ever-present. They can also be unstable, meaning that they can come and go and be triggered by stress. Or they can remain hidden for decades and suddenly surface. Usually, symptoms do not occur individually, but come in groups. They often grow increasingly complex over time, becoming less and less connected with the original trauma experience.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“Re-enactments may be played out in intimate relationships, work situations, repetitive accidents or mishaps, and in other seemingly random events. They may also appear in the form of bodily symptoms or psychosomatic diseases. Children who have had a traumatic experience will often repeatedly recreate it in their play. As adults, we are often compelled to re-enact our early traumas in our daily lives. The mechanism is similar regardless of the individual’s age.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“If we look at this man’s behaviors without knowing anything about his past, we might think he was mad. However, with a little history, we can see that his actions were a brilliant attempt to resolve a deep emotional scar. His re-enactment took him to the very edge, again and again, until he was finally able to free himself from the overwhelming nightmare of war. ACCIDENTS “JUST” HAPPEN”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“What I do know is that we become traumatized when our ability to respond to a perceived threat is in some way overwhelmed. This inability to adequately respond can impact us in obvious ways, as well as ways that are subtle.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“Our sense of safety and stability in the world and our interpersonal relationships become undermined by childhood abuse because we carry these early thwarted—that is, deeply conflicted—survival patterns into adulthood.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“Any attempt to dictate what thoughts, feelings, and sensations are proper or improper creates a breeding ground for guilt and shame.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“Hyperarousal. This may take the form of physical symptoms—increase in heart rate, sweating, difficulty breathing (rapid, shallow, panting, etc.), cold sweats, tingling, and muscular tension. It can also manifest as a mental process in the form of increased repetitious thoughts, racing mind, and worry. If we allow ourselves to acknowledge these thoughts and sensations, in other words let them have their natural flow, they will peak, then begin to diminish and resolve. As this process occurs, we may experience trembling, shaking, vibration, waves of warmth, fullness of breath, slowed heart rate, warmth, relaxation of the muscles, and an overall feeling of relief, comfort, and safety.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“Often, traumatized people either feel nothing or they feel rage, and often the rage is expressed in inappropriate ways. By beginning to get a sense of what healthy aggression feels like, the extremes of numbness and rage can begin to give way to a healthier middle ground.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“key is to uncouple fear from the biological immobility response so that the response can complete itself—work through into a meaningful course of action.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“I have worked to develop a safe, gentle, and effective way for people to heal from trauma. It works by understanding that trauma is primarily physiological. Trauma is something that happens initially to our bodies and our instincts. Only then do its effects spread to our minds, emotions, and spirits.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“What generally gets overlooked is that sexual energy and life-force energy are virtually one and the same.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“When the moral judgment is removed, individuals are able to acknowledge and experience their authentic life energy freely.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“In virtually every spiritual tradition, suffering is seen as a doorway to awakening. In the West, this connection can be seen in the biblical story of Job, as well as the dark night of the soul in medieval mysticism. The transformative power of suffering finds perhaps its clearest expression in the Four Noble Truths espoused by the Buddha. Though suffering and trauma are not identical, the Buddha’s insight into the nature of suffering can provide a powerful mirror for examining the effects of trauma in your life.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“The first truth, Buddha taught his disciples, is that suffering is part of the human condition. If we simply try to avoid confronting painful experiences, there is no way to begin the healing process. In fact, this denial creates the very conditions that promote and prolong unnecessary suffering.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“The second noble truth states that we must discover why we are suffering. We must cultivate the courage to look deeply, with clarity and courage, into our own suffering. We often hold the tacit assumption that all of our suffering stems from events in the past. But, whatever the initial seed of trauma, the deeper truth is that our suffering is more closely a result of how we deal with the effect these past events have on us in the present.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“When this stuck energy is restored to the whole organism, we can begin to live more fully—to create, accomplish, communicate, collaborate, and share. Instead of being engaged merely in survival, we can then come back to our balanced place, where we’re basically social animals. The fear and paralysis and dread drop away, and we come back into the present, because we have access to all of the energy previously bound up in our freezing and immobility, in our incomplete fight and flight responses.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“When people have been traumatized, they are stuck in paralysis—the immobility reaction or abrupt explosions of rage. Because of this, they lack the healthy aggression that they need to carry out their lives effectively.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“The fourth noble truth states that, once you have identified the cause of your suffering, you must find an appropriate path. I believe that the exercises I’ve developed and that you’ll be learning in the Twelve-Phase Healing Trauma Program can serve as the path to lead you out of suffering and help you recapture the simple wonders of life.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“There’s one more symptom we need to look at before looking at how trauma actually gets into the body and mind and causes long-term problems. This one is a little less straightforward than the others. Here’s one of the more unusual and problem-creating symptoms that can develop from unresolved trauma: the compulsion to repeat the actions that caused the problem in the first place. We are inextricably drawn into situations that replicate the original trauma in both obvious and less obvious ways.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“This difficulty in normalizing ourselves is very important. I believe that the ability to return to equilibrium and balance, after using the “immobility response,” is the primary factor in avoiding being traumatized.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“The answer lies in the particular type of spontaneous shaking, trembling, and breathing that I described earlier.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“If they have not trembled and breathed that way before they are released, they will not survive. They will die.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“The key to completing this uncompleted immobility response lies in uncoupling our fear from the response itself. This allows the stuck energy to be freed up for use wherever it is needed within the body.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“We have a lot going for us; we can conquer our fears. With the full use of our highly developed ability to think and perceive, we can, through the felt sense, consciously move out of the trauma response.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“For someone who’s been traumatized, that feeling of balance and wholeness is such a surprise, it can cause an “identity crisis.” We don’t recognize ourselves because we’re no longer filled with shame and fear and collapse.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

“I found that, if given appropriate guidance, human beings can and do shake off the effects of overwhelming events and return to their lives using exactly the same procedures that animals use.”
― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body