“One should never go by what people say.”
Source: Murder at the Vicarage
“A broken trust is like a broken mirror.
You can't put the pieces together again.”
Source: The Screen Saver
“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
“Don’t blame yourself. You believed what he told you, because you trusted him. You’re a warm, open, trusting person. And you’re trustworthy. Trustworthy people like us always get screwed, because we expect other people to be like us. Don’t let his bad behavior make you question yourself.”
Source: The Cat Who Ate His Tail
“A stab from a friend cuts deeper than a stab from a foe.”
Source: Wealth of Words
“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
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
Source: The Holy Bible: King James Version
“I don’t think you ever really fall out of love with someone. I think when you fall in love, like true love, it’s love for life. All the rest is just experience and delusions.”
Source: The Edge of Never
“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