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Famous Bonnie Badenoch Quotes

“This shift from intellectual to embodied compassion is at the heart of deep forgiveness, or what we call compassionate release that gives us the gift of not needing to fend off the ones who hurt us anymore. It is a letting go at a different depth.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Sand tray can be an embodied conversation between our inner world and outer awareness, held and witnessed by another. Because of the tactile experiences of the sand and minatures and the symbolic nature of the figures, we have the opportunity to make contact with implicit memories that have no words. We follow our body's guidance in arranging the sand and allowing the minatures to choose us. It is a right-centric process that allows us to let go of meaning-making in favor of following our felt sense and behavioral impulse. Meaning may arrive later, but we at least begin, as best we can, without expectation to give our inner world the most freedom we can.”

Mental HealthTrauma HealingSomatic HealingRight HemisphereEmbodied HealingExpressive ArtsIntuitive HealingNonverbal TherapySand Tray TherapySandtray Therapy
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“This may be the signature of the right-hemisphere's leadership -- that over time the left is infused with knowledge and wise principles based on repeatedly perceiving experience through the lens of the right, a kind of true nourishment for optimal relatedness between the two. Then, when the left speaks, it can support and add stability to the interpersonally rooted vision of the right.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“How we speak about the awakening of these memories may influence the ferocity with which they arrive ... One therapist says this: 'even the gentlest sensory breeze can touch and awaken these old memories in our bodies. We are so tender and so available for healing.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We have a tendency to become detached observers rather than participants. There might also be a sense of disassembling a complex, flowing process to focus on a small part of it. If we expand our focus to include emerging, one of the first changes we may notice is the bodily sense of being in the midst of something, of constant motion, lack of clarity (in the left-hemisphere sense), and unpredictability.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We may find ourselves in a role similar to that of a gardener as we cultivate a space in which healing can naturally unfold. In terms of neurobiology, this stance encourages us to lean into the reassuring awareness that our systems already contain seeds awaiting our attention. For some examples, we humans are always seeking the warmest possible attachments we can imagine (Cozolino, Siegel), our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other (Badenoch, Cozolino, Schore), emotional regulation flows naturally from being in the presence of someone we trust (Beckes & Coan) and even our nervous systems have a preference for the social engagement circuitry that sustains connection (Porges). With this kind of support from the biology inherent in both practitioner and patient, our bodies may begin to open into a welcoming state as others come towards us, with a sense of partnership being established rather than someone doing something to us. However this also means letting go of the potential certainty that comes from feeling we are in charge.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“For all of us, there are also likely times when therapy simply doesn't seem to move forward as we imagined it would. At this crossroads, we often question ourselves or blame our patients. Between what our culture requires and what we have experienced in childhood, we might go either direction. We have a particular challenge to feeling competent right now. Our left-centric society has done its best to codify the healing process, leaving us with a set of procedures and expected outcomes that don't welcome the individuality of our people of the fluidity of each person's unpredictable and unique process of recovery. This is doubly difficult, because when we follow the course culture provides, safety is already undermined to a greater or lesser extent. I believe it wounds us when we feel we aren't helping a person because we set out with such good hearts to relieve suffering. A well-practiced practitioner might try to guard our hearts by blaming our people's resistance. When a wounded part of us is afraid we are inadequate, this often generates a critical protective voice to try to urge us toward a better performance. In both instances, our ability to be present for our people gets lost in the need to protect. How can we hold these experiences kindly, recognizing that they are part of the human experience? Right now, we might be able to open the arms of inclusion to these parts of us.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Warm curiosity about what is happening is a different kind of experience than judgement. It can help us open to the bigger picture beyond this moment of what feels like failure. We may consider our person's history and our own. We might bring in our left-hemisphere emissary to see how we could understand where we are in the process. In this quieter internal place, sometimes an intuitive sense of trust will come even when we can't figure it out.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Through mirror neurons and resonance circuitry, we are taking in each other's bodily state, feelings and intention in each emerging moment (Iacoboni, 2009). This gives us an approximate empathic sense of what is happening in the other person, but it is important to be aware that the information is also being filtered through our implicit lens. This filtering colors our perceptions and pretty much guarantees there will be ruptures that invite repairs, as our offers of empathy will sometimes not reflect what the other person is experiencing.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Prior to implicit healing, our protectors are responding to the magnitude of pain they need to sequester. It is as though they are facing mainly inward to keep track of the suffering there while devoting just enough resources to the outside world to modulate the degree of protection needed according to the emerging moment. That is why our responses can sometimes look wildly out of proportion to those only seeing our outer circumstances. As we heal, there is less need for protection from implicit wounds, so more of our protective resources can be devoted to the needs of the current moment.”

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Author:Bonnie Badenoch
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“Our culture tells us to set goals and make treatment plans. Because we are so dedicated to relieving suffering, we can feel capitulated into efforts to change what is hurting our people. We develop agendas and then often generate expectations of what should come next, leaving us vulnerable to disappointment in ourselves or our patients when the uniqueness of the situation brings a different outcome.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“On reflection now, it seems to me she was already telling me what she needed most--a place to settle in proximity, safety, warmth and quiet because she had none of that as a child.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“If ... we hear ourselves speaking words that convey attunement to the process unfolding in this moment--a felt sense of receiving, cultivating, believing, supporting and trusting--we are more apt to be attending from the right with support from the left. This way of experiencing may also be coupled with attention to felt sense, comfort with being rather than pressure to do, and a respect for the undulating rise and fall of healing that unfolds naturally in the space between. When we are in this mode, we have a tendency to speak more tentatively and to check in with our relational partner about how he or she is receiving what we are offering. This past part is particularly important because it reflects our growing felt-sense awareness that the system of the person we are helping knows more about what needs to happen next than we do. In addition to the humility and respect this engenders, we may also notice that instead of wanting to get rid of some state, we are more apt to acknowledge its meaningfulness and be present to it just as it is. Listening in this way, the so-called negative state may reveal itself as telling an important truth and become an opening toward healing. We may also be aware of the limitation and incompleteness of words, leading us to honor silence as well.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We can dedicate ourselves to staying connected to supportive people who will receive us without expectations or judgments. In that process, we will internalize them as they nurture our wounded ones. They will then join and foster those parts of ourselves who can be present with the ones who come to us in their suffering and recovery.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“It can help us keep our balance to distinguish between the living people who were hurtful and the internalized ones who are now part of our neurobiology. Those who harmed us may never change, but once they become part of us, they seem to partake in our impulse towards healing.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“When we experience a break in connection followed by repeated attempts at repair until the bond is restored, we build implicit pathways of resilience. We come to know in a visceral way that when things break down interpersonally, someone will return to help us come back into relationship. That wired-in optimism and expectation makes it much more likely that we will form relationships that have this quality. Most of the people who come to us haven't had this experience consistently in their lives, so when they encounter it with us, it is often surprising to the point of tears. As we accept and then rejoice in our humanness, we offer this vital gift of rupture and repair to those around us.”

Mental HealthTrauma HealingHealthy RelationshipsImplicit MemoryRupture And RepairAttachment HealingEmbodied Expectation
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“How do we be with the paradoxes our people bring? We can align with one side of the conundrum and dismiss the other in an effort to relieve the unsettling experience that the logically unresolvable contradiction brings to us and our people. However, if we do this, we are stepping away from our person's experience because he or she is living inside the paradox and can't move away. Staying present asks us to hold the full paradox within our own minds and bodies, to enter the suffering that entails. If we are able to do this and remain in a ventral state, it seems that something happens and we may be able to enter a state in which the paradox begins to reveal its value a little differently than ever before ... As we settled into this broader acceptance together, I believe we made room for the possibility of the arrival of a resolving third thing in its own time.”

TherapyParadoxRadical AcceptancePolyvagal TherapyVentralWindow Of ToleranceInnate Mental Health
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We were holding this together, and our joined windows of tolerance seemed able to contain the physical and emotional intensity. Witnessing and empathizing at the same time, it seemed we were able to bring some ventral presence to this world.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“The challenge - which is also at the centre - is that what illuminates the process of letting go of certainty, control, planning, clear-cut goals, and so much more may feel settling even as it separates us from those we want to help. This letting go requires cultivation in the trust of the innate processes that support the movement towards healing, something that grows with time and experience, especially when compassion for this depth of challenge to our need for security is present.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Only if we are able to widen the lens to take in the bigger picture that includes both the outer challenges and the inner distress do we begin to sense that the protectors are in proportion to what is in need of shelter. It is our system's sense that moving the safeguard aside and allowing the implicit to emerge would be more harmful than whatever the protector is doing in this moment.”

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Author:Bonnie Badenoch
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“Ruptures are a daily occurrence in all our relationships and ... our systems only need to receive resonance and reflection on the first try at connecting about 33 percent of the time to cultivate security. All the rest is optimally rupture and repair.”

HurtConnectionSecure AttachmentRupture And RepairAttachment WoundImperfect ParentingImperfect Relationships
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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