189 Quotes by Bessel A. van der Kolk

People who are terrified need to get a sense of where their bodies are in space and of their boundaries. Firm and reassuring touch lets them know where those boundaries are: what’s outside them, where their bodies end. They discover that they don’t constantly have to wonder who and where they are. They discover that their body is solid and that they don’t have to be constantly on guard. Touch lets them know that they are safe.

French psychiatrist Pierre Janet: “Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.” As.

The stress hormones of traumatized people, in contrast, take much longer to return to baseline and spike quickly and disproportionately in response to mildly stressful stimuli.

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.

Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.

I was stunned: Tom’s loyalty to the dead was keeping him from living his own life, just as his father’s devotion to his friends had kept him from living.

In contrast, EMDR, as well as the treatments discussed in subsequent chapters – internal family systems, yoga, neurofeedback, psychomotor therapy, and theater – focus not only on regulating the intense memories activated by trauma but also on restoring a sense of agency, engagement, and commitment through ownership of body and mind.

The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them – and from our own experience.

Agency” is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have.