The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships
Bonnie Badenoch
Top 10 Best Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“Through mirror neurons and resonance circuitry, we are taking in each other's bodily state, feelings and intention in each emerging moment (Iacoboni, 2009). This gives us an approximate empathic sense of what is happening in the other person, but it is important to be aware that the information is also being filtered through our implicit lens. This filtering colors our perceptions and pretty much guarantees there will be ruptures that invite repairs, as our offers of empathy will sometimes not reflect what the other person is experiencing.”
“the practice of nonjudgmental, agendaless presence [is] the foundation for safety and co-regulation.”
“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.”
“the greater the wounding, the more numerous and powerful our protectors need to be.”
“listening to one another activates our mirror neurons and resonance circuitry (Iacoboni, 2009) so that we can be said to literally begin to inhabit one another's embodied emotional universe.”
“We humans are always seeking the warmest attachments we can imagine”
“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.”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
trust, therapy, attachment, healing-in-relationship, self-acceptance, resistance, self-compassion, flexibility, understanding, psychological-safety, imperfection-in-therapy, inner-listening, somatic, coregulation, compassion, transition, empathy, resonance, mental-health, co-regulation, innate-healing-plan, self-compassion-for-therapists, healing, hope, person-centered, therapy-tips, change, rupture-and-repair, polyvagal, body-wisdom, control, self-love, psychology, somatic-experiencing, self-harm, connection, protection, attunement, emergence, mindfulness, warmth, self-hatred, radical-acceptance, mirror-neurons, presence, empathy-tips, trauma-healing, neuroception, listening, imperfection, trauma, embodied-safety
