Quotes

More Quotes

• "Just as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others."

  — Beverly Engel

  Healing the Emotional Self

• "One must have a chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star."

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Thus Spake Zarathustra

• "Trauma is perhaps the most avoided, ignored, belittled, denied, misunderstood, and untreated cause of human suffering."

  — Peter A. Levine PhD

  https://www.somaticexperiencing.com

• "… what doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger."

  — Friedrich Nietzsche

  Twilight of the Idols

• "The person … in the grip of an old distress says things that are not pertinent, does things that don’t work, fails to cope with the situation, and endures terrible feelings that have nothing to do with the present."

  — Harvey Jackins

  As cited in Homecoming

• "The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

  — Ernest Hemingway

  A Farewell to Arms

• "Just as too much physical force can break a child’s bones, too much control can break a child’s spirit and fracture his psyche. It can cause a splintering of self, causing a child to disown some parts of himself and to inflate others."

  — Beverly Engel

  Healing The Emotional Self

• "… trauma, undigested and locked in our body, randomly breaks through into consciousness. For years after the actual danger is past, a person who has been traumatized may relive an event as if it were continually occurring in the present."

  — Tara Brach

  Radical Acceptance

• "Traumas can be defined as experiences that cause people to develop erroneous beliefs about themselves or the world which keep them from living to their full potential and causing them suffering."

  — Laurel Parnell

  Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Spiritual Unfolding

• "Those of us who have suffered from extreme physical, sexual, and emotional abuse have a big challenge trying to create a loving Inner Adult."

  — Margaret Paul

  Inner Bonding

• "When our Inner Child feels consistently unloved by our Inner Adult, the Child’s false beliefs, adopted in childhood when parents were unloving, are reinforced—beliefs that we are bad, wrong, unlovable, unimportant, inadequate, defective in some way."

  — Margaret Paul

  Inner Bonding

• "In overcoming the destructive force of trauma, our innate potential… lifts us to new heights of mastery and knowledge."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "The challenge of trauma treatment is not only dealing with the past but, even more, enhancing the quality of day-to-day experience… 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."

  — Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.

  The Body Keeps the Score

• "If you are experiencing strange symptoms that no one seems to be able to explain, they could be arising from a traumatic reaction to a past event that you may not even remember. You are not alone. You are not crazy. There is a rational explanation for what is happening to you. You have not been irreversibly damaged, and it is possible to diminish or even eliminate your symptoms."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "Trauma is a fact of life. It does not, however, have to be a life sentence. Not only can trauma be healed, but with appropriate guidance and support, it can be transformative. Trauma has the potential to be one of the most significant forces for psychological, social, and spiritual awakening and evolution."

  — Peter Levine

  Waking the Tiger

• "Ultimately, the main goal of trauma therapy is to relegate the trauma to its rightful place in the client’s past."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "One of the difficulties of PTSD is the phenomenon of flashbacks, which involve highly disturbing replays of implicit sensory memories of traumatic events sometimes with explicit recall, sometimes without. The sensations that accompany them are so intense that the suffering individual is unable to distinguish the current reality from the past. It feels like it is happening now."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "While dissociation appears to be an instinctive response to save the self from suffering—and it does this very well—it exacts a high price in return."

  — Babette Rothschild

  The Body Remembers

• "People first awaken to a spiritual dimension in their lives in an incredible variety of ways. Some people seem to open up to it through traumatic experiences… Other people awaken through meditation or through religious experiences. Others arrive at it through sex or through drugs."

  — Ram Dass

  Polishing the Mirror