189 Quotes by Bessel A. van der Kolk

What would you call this patient – schizophrenic or schizoaffective?" He paused and stroked his chin, apparently in deep thought. "I think I'd call him Michael McIntyre," he replied.

If you criticize others, they don't dare to hurt you. If you are perfect, nobody can criticize you.

... stress hormones are meant to give us the strength and endurance to respond to extraordinary conditions. People who actively do something to deal with a disaster - rescuing loved ones or strangers, transporting people to a hospital, being a part of a medical team, pitching tents or cooking meals - utilize their stress hormones for their proper purpose and therefore are at much lower risk of becoming traumatized.

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.

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.

But it is exactly on that edge between impulse and acceptable behavior where most of our troubles begin. The more intense the visceral, sensory input from the emotional brain, the less capacity the rational brain has to put a damper on it.

Being able to hover calmly and objectively over our thoughts, feelings, and emotions (an ability I’ll call mindfulness throughout this book) and then take our time to respond allows the executive brain to inhibit, organize, and modulate the hardwired automatic reactions preprogrammed into the emotional brain.

Dissociation is the essence of trauma. 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. The sensory fragments of memory intrude into the present, where they are literally relived.

Memories of traumatic experiences may not be primarily retrieved as narratives. Our own and others’ research has suggested that PTSD traumatized people’s difficulties with putting memories into words are reflected in actual changes in brain activity.(van der Kolk, Hopper & Osterman, 2001)Trauma and Cognitive Science, Chapter 1