“Even though we have been so influenced by the left hemisphere's ascendency, we also have an inherent capacity to be rooted in the relational right because we are, after all, first, last, and always beings whose embodied brains hunger for connection with others, literally shaping one another's ongoing experience in every moment.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Embodiment of any of these principles is likely a lifetime's work, and it is also true that the small steps we take in that direction often yield substantial increases in connection.”
Source: The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Play: Brain-Building Interventions for Emotional Well-Being
“In these pages, we keep returning to one foundational principle: providing the possibility of emotional/relational safety for our people, be they patients, children, partners, friends or strangers.
We are able to make this offer when they are experiencing their own neuroception of safety, not continuously, but as the baseline to which we return after our system has adaptively moved into sympathetic arousal or dorsal withdrawal in response to inner and outer conditions.
When we neuroceive safety, we humans automatically begin to open into vulnerability, and the movement of our "inherent treatment plan" (Sills, 2010) has a greater probability of coming forward.
When we have a neuroception of threat, we adaptively tighten down at many levels, from physical tension to activation of the protective skills we have learned over a lifetime (Levine, 2010). In that state, our innate healing path will often wisely stay hidden until more favorable conditions arrive.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Depression always brings to mind the possibility that the person's SEEKING system may have been turned off ...
Our mutual trust in his system's wisdom kept us from being swept away by the despair he felt. We began to ask, "what is this depression, this one who is so still, wanting to tell us?" Then we waited.
We stayed with the one who felt dead inside, acknowledging his protective value even when though we had no cognitive awareness of who and what he was sheltering.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“If we trust that our inner world knows what is needed next, one outcome isn't preferable to another.
It is so easy for us to want healing to pursue a more linear path: Something arises and it would be best if we could stay with that.
There can be a sense of disappointment in therapist, patient, or both if the sensation doesn't return. This might be perceived as a lack in our patient's ability to maintain contact, a reflection of our inadequacy of a therapist, or simply discomfort that the therapy feels stuck.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“I have other stories just as mysterious, just as beautiful, just as sacred, but it seems good to stop here and wonder if it is possible for us to begin to let go of our expectations about the shape in which healing may arrive, to trust the treatment plan lying dormant and waiting within our people, to cultivate a gradually gathering stillness so that, in the safety of the space between, healing pathways have the possibility of revealing themselves.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“I am not sure how we came to believe that we know more about what our people need than they do. A core, culturally supported assumption about their brokenness may have something to do with it, and so might our left-dominant culture and training that makes it more challenging to be present to anyone's implicit experience. Many it is equally about our inability to trust our own inner wisdom to guide us because no-one helped us listen when we were young. Without this trust, we may get frightened for our people and the process, and such feelings bring on the need to assert control ...
experiment with the pause, remembering that our rupture and repair are optimal, trust will grow as we and our 'patients' stumble together into the tentative, fluid process of attunement with one another that supports the awakening of the inherent wisdom and health.”
“I smiled broadly. " ...This is your body's wisdom speaking to us, sensing when it is safe to go forward, pulling back a bit when it might be too much. You and I are just getting to know one another, so I really respect the caution and protection in your inner world." ...
With visible relaxation in her body and strong eye contact, she said, "All my life people have criticized me for being cautious. It means a lot that you like that I'm that way."
W”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“There are so many valuable techniques for regulation, for exploring and integrating traumatic experience, and so on. Once we get to know these protocols, they may pull on us in ways that invite us to seize control of the therapy.
The other pathway suggests that her system holds the answers and that if I can offer enough safe support, it will likely begin to speak with us.
At least cognitively, I can recognize that this person's inner world contains much more information about the root causes of her upset than I do.
From this perspective, I am less interested in dealing with symptoms than moving towards making room for the implicit origin to emerge so that the protective systems can take care of themselves.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“This was the unexpected ... unforeseeable resolution of the paradox ... her personal goodness was no longer the issue because it had been replaced by the sweetness of relationship.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“This is where all the work we have done with ourselves to sense the connection between our bodily sensations and implicit memories comes to help our person. Our conviction that this is the doorway to the deeper places provides a foundation, through resonance, for him to slow down and attend to his body.”
Source: The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Group Psychotherapy and Group Process
“Moving slowly, listening, noticing when my own intentions are trying to take over, and pausing in that moment have so often proved to be the most respectful and effective path of healing.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“we may never know exactly when or how this began, but if we acknowledge this little one, she will somehow know that we are listening to her.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“So many of us who choose this work come from backgrounds of pain and fear that have been instrumental in calling us to now co-suffer with others as they find the courage to approach their wounds.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“We stayed with the one who felt dead inside, acknowledging his protective value, even though we had no cognitive awareness of who and what he was sheltering ...
'What is this depression, this one who is so still, wanting to tell us?”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“At moments of deep uncertainty, I find that I sometimes jump the tracks into taking control, and in those moments, if I can move back toward following, the process often finds its own feet again. All of this has gradually led me to believe that letting go of expectations about the outcome of therapy as much as possible gives the process the most room to show itself.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“neuroscience can be seen as offering metaphors that point in a general direction, but don't exactly match anyone's individual experience.”
Source: Being a Brain-Wise Therapist: A Practical Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology
“The combination of outward privilege and emotional invisibility is one of the most hurtful and confusing ways to live.
Nothing appears to be wrong and yet every day is a torturous maze of unreflected chaotic emotional upheaval, ameliorated only be regular descents into dorsal numbness.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“I notice that when the other person has been in despair for a prolonged period, I begin to feel myself crumbling into discouragement internally. One of the ways my system seeks to protect both me and the other person is to activate into helpful doing. Even though it is a psuedo-engagement, the intent is to shelter both of us from being engulfed in despair.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“When our SEEKING system is pulled into the service of only pursuing tasks, goals, solutions, and success, its primary purpose of maintaining connection is subverted to the point it eventually gives up and we fall into despair.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“recognizing the injury in all of us and cultivating our capacity for nonjudgmental presence, an ever-evolving process.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“we are adaptive rather than disordered”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Joshua is one of the people who taught me about respecting pace, particularly when it is very slow.
I do believe we all heal as quickly as we can given the co-integrating nature of our embodied brains, so when the process unfolds very slowly, it often speaks to us of the magnitude of what is coming [emerging to be healed].”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Sometimes people begin, discover how much pain and fear they are holding, and adaptively decide to take whatever gains they have made and stop. Occasionally we reach the limits of our competence or capacity and must help one of people find someone or a nest of people who can hold their wounds when we can't. We could likely add other situations in which we have parted with someone early in the relationship or at a time that seemed premature. All of this is part of human limitation in both of us.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Bit by bit, our people begin to embody the changed anticipation of being cared for and treated with kindness and respect.
Part of what strengthens this new way of being comes from us having co-internalized one another.
We continue to be their reflective companion on the outside, and they will also feel how we continue to carry them with us in our inner world.
It is quite beautiful to watch this healing unfold, often revealing itself as changes in body, feeling, behavior, relational choices first, then later affirmed in more frequent words of tenderness toward themselves.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“If we focus on the means to change a person's state in the direction of what we believe is greater health, we are also stepping out of empathic connection. This is a violation of our innate expectation, at every biological level, that we are meant to be embedded in a nest of warm relationships.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“This reassurance that we only want to witness and acknowledge what is happening may be the essential stance that deepens safety.
When we have no intention of being an active agent of change, the feeling of possible coercion seems to leave the relationship.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“I have found that much that happens in supervision/consultation focuses on what needs to happen next. There can be a sense of the person under consideration becoming a static object to be analyzed, and then advice may be offered about how that person could/should be shaped in a certain (presumably healthier) way.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“When he would hear me speak in ways that were judgmental or indicated my wish to get rid of some part of me, he would gently say, 'A more respectful word may want to emerge soon' ...
He encouraged me to just listen for it, not to try to find it by digging around.
Something always came and gradually opened me to a more kind and inclusive way of being with myself and others.
I began to notice that my words and perceptions were inextricably linked, so as the words changed and my perceptions were also shifting (and vice versa, I imagine), and this led to more changes in language to better reflect this continually emerging felt-sense experience while encouraging it to deepen further as well--a beautiful circle of transformation.
Slowly, slowly I found myself moving away from a more judgmental, analytical, disembodied, left-shifted viewpoint toward a more open, curious, accepting way of being that emerges when right-hemisphere processes take the lead.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“How might language separate us or draw us together? If our words center around grasping, creating, using, knowing, efficiency, step-by-step procedures, problem-solving, interventions, tools, and a sense of good-better-best (an ever-upward trend), we are likely attending mostly from a left hemisphere that is operating more or less autonomously, without support from the right's perspective. There is often a sense of judgement and certainty, along with an intent to guide, shape or control another that arises from and is reflected in this way of speaking. Because the left hemisphere has a tendency toward either/or, good/bad distinctions, there is often the sense of preference or wanting to get rid of something in favor of something else (ie: getting rid of sadness in favor of happiness or peace).”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“as always, relationship is everything, and the capacities of the left are essential for the expression of the right's vision. If we can find ways to support leading with the perspective of the right hemisphere, the left's capacities can then offer essential assistance from its storehouse of prior learning.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“These two viewpoints offer us different ways of orienting to the world that lead to strikingly different values, ways of relating, and behaviors ...
The essence of the right-hemisphere perspective involves attending to relationship, embodiment, and what is unfolding in the unique moment in the space between. We could say that from this viewpoint, the central metaphor here is living beings in relationship with each other in this moment.
In contrast, the left-hemisphere viewpoint steps out of the relational moment to focus on division, fixity, disembodiment, and the creation of algorithms (standardized step-by-step solutions to problems that do not take individuality and context into account). The central metaphor here is the machine, with our bodies, our brains and our very selves viewed as mechanisms to be analyzed and shaped.
We might immediately sense that the perspective of each hemisphere has substantial consequences for how we are able to be present with one another.”
“emotional regulation flows naturally from being in the presence of someone we trust”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“In any attachment encounter, there is both what we perceive being offered and our embodied response to it.
If we call to mind, heart and body three or four people with whom we've had particularly close relationships, how do our bodies respond to their offers of connection?
We can begin by being with muscles, belly, heart and breath. How does our body want to move?”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“As we make the journey inward with our people, we will come to the next challenge to our compassion: those inner community members who have actively bought harm to the young ones inside. This is such tender territory, a place where we need to acknowledge the suffering our people have sustained without demonizing and alienating the ones who bought it, for they are now part of the ones in our care as well. This can be radical inclusiveness at its most healing, widening our joined windows of tolerance to truly accept every part.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“We internalize not only living people, but characters who come alive in our reading and viewing.”
“For me, hearing a relational history at the beginning of our work helps me form pictures of some encounters that bought pain and others that offered empathic support. Early in life, who comforted this person? Who kept her safe? Who was distant? Who needed her to regulate them? Who felt dangerous? Who bought confusion or chaos? Who criticized and who was accepting? We might quickly discover that one person brought contradictory experiences - the confusing one also comforted, or the dangerous one at home was a primary support of safety in the outside world. All this helps us begin to feel into the qualities of relatedness our person has taken in.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“We live within and beyond our own skin at the same time.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“My multifaceted canary in the coal mine signaling the impulse to control is my belly tightening, my posture changing slightly to lean forward, tension increasing in my upper arms. It feels as though I am preparing to thrust myself into the middle of the problem with everything I know. It comes from a good-hearted place of wanting to relieve suffering and also diminishes interpersonal safety as my system enters mild to medium sympathetic arousal.
If we take a step back, we might become curious about how the neuroception of danger arose in the first place, because that is what initiates this chain of events. If we were to explore this, many answers might come: We have been trained to intervene; we don't have any experience that tells us our patient's systems are trustworthy guides to healing; the upset in our patient is severe enough that we fear for her safety; if we can't heal this person, there's something wrong with us; strong emotions are uncomfortable for us and we need to regulate them before they overwhelm us.
The list is endless, individual and likely changes with each new circumstance. It is always a most valuable inquiry, especially if we can begin it with compassionate curiousity, which makes it less likely that we will feel shamed by the answer that presents itself.
When we remember that neuroception is an automatic adaptive process, it may take character condemnation out of the equation when we invite awareness of what frightens us.
If our fear feels heard and acknowledged, there is some likelihood that our bodies will be able to find their way back toward receptivity. As we feel our own openness returning, we can be certain that this embodied change is also influencing our patient and the quality of the connection.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“Pause for reflection
Let's take a moment to see if we remember a time when a process that had begun simply stopped, faded away, or became unavailable in some other way. It could be in our own therapy work or with our patients.
What as our experience of this?
We might check in with muscles, belly, heart, and breath as a beginning place.
Then we can move to the feelings and thoughts that arose from these sensations.
Do we feel at ease with these kinds of experiences, or does it feel as if something is wrong?
We may find that other examples come to our awareness as well, bringing similar or different cascades of sensation, feeling and thought.
As best we can, we may offer all of them welcome with warmth and kindness.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“The majority of research-related articles I read move automatically towards suggestions for doing something to the brain - finding new medications, applying techniques to train the brain, and other ways of treating the brain like an object that is separate from ourselves. In addition to this objectification, there is perhaps the greater danger that when we are viewing ourselves or another that way, we have already stepped away from being truly present, so the person being so scrutinized will not feel safe or have a felt sense of being heard, seen, or held. This includes our relationship with ourselves.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“In various paradigms of practice, we have called these protectors "defenses" or "resistances", as though they were objects that needed to be moved out of the way. This is understandable, because we see that these parts of ourselves sometimes cause injury if we view them only from the outer perspective, without opening to the ways they are sheltering our inner world.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“If we can approach these implicit arisings as a gift rather than an attack, as an opening towards healing, we may be able to help our people get into relationship with their implicit world in a more compassionate and collaborative way.
Perhaps we can begin with considering these memories, no matter how challenging, to be messengers of life-giving truth.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“We are often so eager to support others, while our culture and even the conditions of our practices make it difficult to imagine or seek support for ourselves. We aren't meant to carry suffering alone.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“When we consider our rich inner communities, we will find it is quite possible that more than one pattern of attachment can arise at the same time, sometimes in support of the others and sometimes in conflict.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“listening to one another activates our mirror neurons and resonance circuitry (Iacoboni, 2009) so that we can be said to literally begin to inhabit one another's embodied emotional universe.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“As long as I was aligned with listening rather than with an intention to receive a particular response or to shift something, we would stay on safe ground.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“It might be possible that 'triggered' may not be the most helpful word ... For me, there is a felt sense of violence in this word, while 'touched and awakened' more accurately describes what happens to these sequestered neural nets.
This gentler wording helps us cultivate a sense of meeting the experience every time we are so 'touched' with an appreciation for what it might be offering.”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
“our nervous systems have a preference for the social engagement system that maintains connection”
Source: The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships