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Bonnie Badenoch Quotes

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Famous Bonnie Badenoch Quotes

“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.”

CompassionTrustSelf AcceptanceTherapistPerson CenteredAttunementLeft Hemisphere
Author:Bonnie Badenoch
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“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.”

WisdomAcceptanceRespectSelf AcceptancePsychological SafetyTips For TherapistsAccepting LimitationsSupervision For TherapistsTherapy FailWhen Therapy Fails
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

CompassionSelf AcceptanceWarmthTrauma HealingTherapy TipsSomaticTherapy Skills
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.”

HealingCompassionMental HealthSelf AcceptanceNonviolenceTherapy TipsSafe PresencePerson Centered TherapyPerson Centred Care
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“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.”

CompassionAwakeningTherapySelf AcceptanceTriggersImplicit MemoryBody Wisdom
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.”

HealingSelf LoveResistanceSelf AcceptancePresenceSelf HatredSelf HarmRadical AcceptancePsychological Safety
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“It is rather paradoxical for our task-focused self when it isn't the quality of the practice, but our honest and humble acceptance of the emerging moment, that prepares us for nonjudgemental, agendaless presence with another. Being kind to ourselves can be helpful as we seek to practice this way of being, because it places us at cross-purposes with our culture, where performance and improvement are so valued and the limits and variability of our humanness are cause for criticism and correction. Many aspects of our training as well as our everyday experience in this society urge us to take control to achieve a particular result, and this can become so implicitly ingrained that it feels wrong to sink toward our innate humanity. Again, just listening with kindness to the competing voices inside is good preparation for extending this attentiveness and kindness to all aspects of the person about to come in our door.”

WelcomeControlSelf AcceptanceImperfectionPresenceTrauma HealingOpen HeartednessSelf Compassion For Therapists
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Between each meeting, I usually feel drawn to do a brief practice to let go of what was experienced and settle into the felt sense of opening into receptivity. It begins with rooting my feet into the stability of the earth; then listening to the sensations of my muscles, belly and heart with no intent to change anything; glancing upwards at the spaciousness of the sky as the complement to the solidity beneath my feet; following the flow of my in-breath and out-breath a couple of times, again with no intention to shift anything but just listen and experience; and opening into a bowl of receptivity, which may feel like an expansion and quieting of my heart. The experience is different every time. Sometimes there is pervasive distraction, sometimes a wish to change the tension in my muscles or the depth of my breath, sometimes judgement about how I'm doing this practice, and sometimes it flows like a sweet river. Most important is being present to what is with as little judgement as possible, even when this means being present to judgement itself. That level of acceptance, much more than the quality of the practice itself, is what can prepare us to receive our person with the same quality of attending.”

Self AcceptanceTherapist Self CareEmpathy MedititationGrounding MeditationSelf Compassion MeditationTherapy TransitionTransition Meditation
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“Remembering that the impulse to control is an indication that we are having a neuroception of danger, perhaps we can be compassionate rather than critical of ourselves when we do step in to overtly manage the process. Perhaps we can begin to ask inside about the nature of the threat that brings on the need to assert control and fix. As always, dropping the questions into our right hemisphere and not expecting a particular answer in this moment opens the way for a deeper understanding to emerge bit by bit.”

ControlSelf AcceptanceImperfectionPerson CenteredPsychological SafetyBody WisdomSelf Compassion For TherapistsInner ListeningImperfection In TherapyNeuroception
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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“It makes sense for us to want a symptom, an 'it' to go away. If we begin to sense that we are made up of many selves ... then we might instead say, 'the anxious part of me is really suffering. I wonder how we might help her'. There is often a palpable softening as we gaze on a person inside who has value apart from the distressing symptom. We also may sense more clearly that this experience isn't all of us, but belongs to a part who has had encounters that give this anxiety context and meaning. The change of pronoun, granting personhood, may move us into a more right-centric way of perceiving, which also opens us to a more both/and perspective of broad acceptance, arouses our warm curiosity, expands receptivity to the present moment. It can really be a very profound change.”

HealingSelf AcceptanceSelf CompassionPerson CenteredPartsSafe Presence
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.”

HopeHealingHumilitySelf AcceptanceImplicit MemoryCoregulationSymptom
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.”

HopeHealingTraumaSelf AcceptancePartsImplicit Memory
Book:The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
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