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The Body Keeps the Score

Psychology

Bessel van der Kolk

Popular Quotes

30 in total
  • Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors.
  • Traumatic experiences do leave traces, whether on a large scale (on our histories and cultures) or close to home, on our families, with dark secrets being imperceptibly passed down through generations.
  • The part of our brain that is devoted to ensuring our survival is not very good at denial.
  • As our minds desperately try to leave trauma behind, our bodies keep us trapped in the past with wordless emotions and feelings.
  • These inner disconnections cascade into ruptures in social relationships with disastrous effects on marriages, families, and friendships.
  • If the interpretation of threat by the amygdala is too intense, and/or the filtering system from the higher areas of the brain are too weak, as often happens in PTSD, people lose control over automatic emergency responses.
  • Faulty alarm systems lead to blowups or shutdowns in response to innocuous comments or facial expressions.
  • The overwhelming experience is split off and fragmented, so that the emotions, sounds, images, thoughts, and physical sensations related to the trauma take on a life of their own.
  • As long as the trauma is not resolved, the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating, and the defensive movements and emotional responses keep getting replayed.
  • Many untreated trauma survivors start out like Stan, with explosive flashbacks, then numb out later in life.
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