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The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

Book by Bonnie Badenoch · 20 quotes · Healing, Person Centered, Mental Health

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The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships Quotes

“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.”

ResistanceTherapy TipsSelf Compassion For TherapistsPerson Centered TherapySelf Care For TherapistsBlaming The PatientBlaming The TherapistLeft Dominant CultureSelf Forgiveness For Therapists
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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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“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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“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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“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.”

Person CenteredWitnessingNonverbal CommunicationPerson CentredSomatic HealingAttachment HealingNonverbal TherapyEmbodied Wisdom
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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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“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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“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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“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.”

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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.”

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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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“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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“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.”

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