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Famous Bonnie Badenoch Quotes

“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.”

HealingTrustPatienceMental HealthConnectionEmbodied SafetyPolyvagal TherapyTips For TherapistsSelf Care For HelpersTips For Helpers
Book:The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Play: Brain-Building Interventions for Emotional Well-Being
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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 her personal goodness was no longer the issue because it had been replaced by the sweetness of relationship.”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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“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.”

WealthMental HealthPrivilegeNumbnessInvisible SufferingSuffering Of Privilege
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

ChangeAcceptanceListeningRespectMental HealthPerson CenteredCoregulationTherapy SkillsInherent Health
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?”

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

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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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“As we speak from a particular perspective, our words not only reveal something about our hemispheric vantage point, but they also go on to reinforce this way of seeing, wrapping us within a distinct perceptual slant. Then, because of our resonance with each other, we are simultaneously issuing an invitation for others to join us in this mode of attending. As we shift towards left dominance, we move internally out of relationship and into isolation, no matter how many people may be present, and we are inviting others into disconnection from themselves and others as well.”

LanguageMental HealthConnectionJoiningAvoidant AttachmentEmbodied SafetyHealing LanguageImplicit LensLeft Hemisphere Dominance
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“If people have harmed us, that part is usually a protector whose need to cause injury comes from desperate attempts to not feel destroyed by the pain and fear they are carrying. Generally they are not conscious of this process, but it likely mirrors what has been passed down through the generations in the family.”

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Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“The seminal work of Stephen Porges ... suggests that presence becomes possible when there is a felt sense of safety ... When we are in the role of practitioner, if our autonomic nervous system is receiving what it needs to have a neuroception of safety (our system's felt sense, below the level of conscious awareness, that we are safe) then our social engagement system (the ventral vagal parasympathetic) will be alive in the room as our patients arrive. In this state, we become a potentially safe landing strip for them. When we are able to offer this safe haven, the possibility of the other person moving toward a similar felt sense of safety awakens the healing space between us through resonance.”

HealingMental HealthPresenceNervous SystemPolyvagal TherapyTips For TherapistsParasympathetic Nervous SystemTips For Psychologists
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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“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.”

ChangePsychologyMindfulnessMental HealthTransitionFlexibilityEmergenceSelf CompassionTherapy Tips
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.”

ExpectationsMental HealthPerson CenteredSolution Focused TherapyTreatment Plan
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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“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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“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.”

HealingMental HealthSelf Compassion For TherapistsPerson Centered TherapySelf Care For Therapists
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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