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Famous Bonnie Badenoch Quotes

“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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?”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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?”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Traumas embed when our system is overwhelmed by pain and fear without having sufficient internal resources or companionship to help integrate the experience ... Our people may see others being present, but as either unavailable for support or actively injurious, or the experience may have been so terrifying that even had someone tried to help, our people might not have been able to receive it ... what remains now is a sense of isolation with the remaining anguish and terror. Over the years, I have found that as soon as a sense of accompaniment enters the memory, there is a new foundation for doing the work. Just as our people have internalized those who injured them, that same capacity can bring us inside to support processing the emotions and to resolve this primary wound of being alone.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We can perhaps hold both the desire to separate from these bodily memories and the willingness to be with them in the broad embrace of welcome and compassion. I do believe this kind of acceptance is a lifetime's work that inevitably leads to 'failure' at times. Our biology wants to protect us from what may harm us, and the arising of implicit memory can feel quite threatening. If we can soften towards our own tendency to want to move away and offer to begin again with gestures of inclusion, this is likely what is possible and optimal for us humans. Humility and grace are perhaps the gifts of this tension, gifts that we can then extend to our people in the form of honoring their struggle.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“The bodily experience we have taken in from [other people that our body has internalized as 'imported parts'] will affect our muscles, belly and heart brains, autonomic nervous system, eyes, ears and vocal cords when they are active in us. While carrying this much of others can feel like an overwhelming burden, it is also the open door to healing, since their aliveness inside us means they can be touched with the ... care that others might offer us.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“The depth at which we take in the preceding generations astonishes me. There is likely an epigenetic component to this as well as transmission through the internalizations that get passed down through the generations. Whole cultures are carried forward that way, so it makes sense that family legacies might be transmitted that way as well.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“... when an experience is too strong for our current internal and external regulatory resource to manage ... [chemical changes activate to] tuck these pathways into our ... body. In this way, our ongoing lives are protected from the constant incursion of the raw pain and fear and the injured parts of ourselves are partly shielded from new injury. We might say they have been enwombed, awaiting the arrival of support. At the same time, the memories also remain malleable enough that they can be touched and awakened, which is essential for healing. However, we also remain vulnerable to them being brought into activity when support isn't available... a frowning face (man or woman), certain breathing patterns, and even sensory fragments (the color of a person's shirt or hair, the smell of alcohol on someone's breath) all have some probability of awakening the terror. The widely dispersed individual streams that make up these memories are all gathered into the neural net that formed at the time of the initial experience, and when our outer or inner world tugs on any strand, there is some probability that more of the neural net will open, bringing the rush of embodied feelings. Most often, the explicit memory does not arrive at the same time, so there is no context for the flood of sensations and emotions, which feels as if they are related to what is happening right now .... What can look like an out-of-proportion response to what is happening in the moment is exactly in proportion to what is unfolding internally. If we sense this so deeply that this knowing is viscerally available when our patients are having strong emotional experiences, we will be able to offer them acknowledgement of the validity of their experience rather than having to control or change it.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“We might ask what role relational neuroscience plays in these kinds of experiences. For me, it begins with the body. Cultivating an understanding -- and most importantly a felt sense -- of these neural pathways helps us attune body to body with our people as they enter these deeper, more challenging realms. Through resonance, our capacity to attend to our bodies while remaining in a ventral state gradually becomes theirs. An indispensable support comes from our left hemisphere's deepening understanding of the particulars of the healing process. The stability this provides helps our right stay as engaged as possible in the relationship with all its emerging uncertainty. When Joshua became so suddenly depressed, Jaak Panksepp came to mind, so I could remain curious rather than scared. When Caroline entered increasingly intense states with her mother, Stephen Porges helped me remain mindful of our joined windows of tolerance and the necessity of staying in connection for co-regulation and disconfirmation to occur. The whole process of leading, following and responding rests on his statement, "Safety IS the treatment". In the broadest way, Dan Siegel's voice fosters deep acquaintance with the principles of interpersonal neurobiology, which supports hope for healing, confidence in our inherent health, and appreciation for our co-organizing brains. Each of these strands of knowledge increases our trust in the process. You may sense yourself adding to the list those that have been most helpful for you.”

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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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“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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“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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