The Body Keeps the Score

As long as they can imagine only disastrous outcomes to relatively benign situations, anybody walking into a room, any stranger, any image, on a screen or on a billboard might be perceived as a harbinger of catastrophe.

The bizarre behavior of the kids at the children’ s clinic made perfect sense.

If you feel chronically numbed out, potentially dangerous situations may make you feel alive.

When disorganized children carry self-perceptions like these, they are set up to be traumatized by subsequent experiences.

The more isolated and unprotected a person feels, the more death will feel like the only escape.

The amygdala reacts with alarm—even, as in Marsha’s case, thirteen years after the event.

Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered.

If the fight/flight/freeze response is successful and we escape the danger, we recover our internal equilibrium and gradually 'regain our senses.'

Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.

The more intensely people experience and remember, the more likely they are to have their sense of time and identity compromised.