Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Kolk, Bessel van der

Quote by Kolk, Bessel van der

“One reason that traumatic memories become dominant in PTSD is that it's so difficult to feel truly alive right now. When you can't be fully here, you go to the places where you did feel alive --- even if those places are filled with horror and misery.”

Quote by Kolk, Bessel van der

Author

Kolk, Bessel van der

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Kolk, Bessel van der. more

You May Also Like

“The pursuit of personal happiness has become a modern maxim, crowding out other definitions of the “good life.” Even acts of kindness toward others are framed as a strategy for personal happiness. Altruism, no longer merely a good in itself, has become a vehicle for our own “well-being".”

“Public torture, in seventeenth-century Europe, created searing, unforgettable spectacles of pain and suffering in order to convey the message that a system in which husbands could brutalize wives, and parents beat children, was ultimately a form of love. … It seems to us that this connection – or better perhaps confusion – between care and domination is utterly critical to the larger questions of how we lost the ability freely to recreate ourselves by recreating our relationships with one another. It is critical, that is , to understanding how we got stuck, and why these days we can hardly envisage our own past or future as anything other than a transition from smaller to larger cages.”

“It was a situation sincere hearts find themselves in of raw, dirty discomfort they cannot share. A day-to- day, on-the-ground, actual trouble of skin and reality—like flat tires, psychotic parents, immobilized brothers—a pain that the restless world would have no patience for and so was kept secret in the shadows of tragedy along with lost people, lost things, and real life.”

“And every time I've set out to meet life, I've met and embraced death. I've collected all my skeletons and bones from each of those moments and have stored them inside the closet that I own. The bones that the death wouldn't touch. And I guess now I have enough of them with me to build a bridge to the paradise in which life lives.”