Top 37 Van Der Kolk Quotes
#1. During disasters young children usually take their cues from their parents. As long as their caregivers remain calm and responsive to their needs, they often survive terrible incidents without serious psychological scars.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#2. Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a world that longs to forget.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#3. Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#4. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#5. You can't see the glory of life if you haven't seen the dark side of life.
Bessel Van Der Kolk
#7. Mindfulness not only makes it possible to survey our internal landscape with compassion and curiosity but can also actively steer us in the right direction for self-care.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#8. In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#9. The parent-child connection is the most powerful mental health intervention known to mankind.
Bessel Van Der Kolk
#10. People have a range of capacities to deal with overwhelming experience. Some people, some kids particularly, are able to disappear into a fantasy world, to dissociate, to pretend like it isnt happening, and are able to go on with their lives. And sometimes it comes back to haunt them.
Bessel Van Der Kolk
#11. Prior to the advent of brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety. - Roger Sperry1
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#12. Economists have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax revenues due to better-paying jobs.37
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#13. While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#14. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don't need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers - but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#15. Pat Ogden and Peter Levine have each developed powerful body-based therapies, sensorimotor psychotherapy29 and somatic experiencing
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#16. How did his brain come to derive comfort from fishing rather than from compulsive sexual behavior? At this point we simply don't know. Neurofeedback changes brain connectivity patterns; the mind follows by creating new patterns of engagement.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#17. Over the years our research team has repeatedly found that chronic emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#18. The single most important issue for traumatized people is to find a sense of safety in their own bodies,
Bessel Van Der Kolk
#19. One day he told me that he'd spent his adulthood trying to let go of his past, and he remarked how ironic it was that he had to get closer to it in order to let it go.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#20. Neuroscience research shows that the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going inside ourselves.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#21. After trauma the world becomes sharply divided between those who know and those who don't. People who have not shared the traumatic experience cannot be trusted, because they can't understand it. Sadly, this often includes spouses, children, and co-workers. Later
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#22. Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#23. It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension. - Carl Jung I
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#24. Many of our patients are barely aware of their breath, so learning to focus on the in and out breath, to notice whether the breath was fast or slow, and to count breaths in some poses can be a significant accomplishment.13
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#25. French psychiatrist Pierre Janet: "Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available." As
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#26. As the ACE study has shown, child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#27. One tragic example of this orientation is the rampant prescription of painkillers, which now kill more people each year in the United States than guns or car accidents.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#28. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#29. As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are "Notice that" and "What happens next?" Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#30. Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#32. research has shown that depressed patients without prior histories of abuse or neglect tend to respond much better to antidepressants than patients with those backgrounds.17)
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#33. The scientific study of the vital relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who were torn from their families as young boys to be sent off to boarding schools, where they were raised in regimented same-sex settings.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#34. 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.13
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#35. Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event and then leaves a large part of the personality unaffected by the trauma.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#36. The traumatic event itself, however horrendous, had a beginning, a middle, and an end, but I now saw that flashbacks could be even worse. You never know when you will be assaulted by them again and you have no way of telling when they will stop.
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
#37. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability. While
Bessel A. Van Der Kolk
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