Home > Work > The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
121 " More important than the words or silence is my inner stance of making room for what is stirring within him, becoming alertly still enough inside that his inner world senses safety, the precursor to him opening into vulnerability. "
― , The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
122 " When patients tell me of the mild anxiety that comes with them to each session, I no longer think of it as a problem, but instead as an indication of their aliveness at the brink of the unknown. "
123 " implicit memory can change "
124 " Our conviction that staying with 'what is' will support those changes is not easy ground to hold. Being with both those parts of ourselves, the one who stands witness to anguish and the one who wishes for change, broadens the foundation that anchors us and ultimately may also help our people hold the ambiguity of their feelings towards implicit arisings. "
125 " Protocols we have learned have the opportunity to become supplies when they encounter the solvent of this moment's need, softening to become flexible and adaptive. "
126 " This reassurance that we only want to witness and acknowledge what is happening may be the essential stance that deepens safety. When we have no intention of being an active agent of change, the feeling of possible coercion seems to leave the relationship. "
127 " Each time I experience the unseen wisdom of a person's system, it deepens my trust in the inner process unfolding and my awe at the way we are organized to be protected until the possibility of healing arrives. "
128 " 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. "
129 " I wonder if our right hemisphere believes there is such a thing as pathology or if our symptoms might all be seen as truth-telling and adaptive. "
130 " 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. "
131 " This shift from intellectual to embodied compassion is at the heart of deep forgiveness, or what we call compassionate release that gives us the gift of not needing to fend off the ones who hurt us anymore. It is a letting go at a different depth. "
132 " 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. "