Over the coming weeks, I will periodically use quotes from this book in my blog and continue to encourage you to purchase the book. Here’s the first:
‘We have also begun to understand how overwhelming experiences affect our innermost sensations and our relationship to our physical reality – the core of who we are.
We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past: it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, body and brain. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.
Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our capacity to think.
We have discovered that helping victims of trauma find the words to describe what has happened to them is profoundly meaningful, but usually is not enough.
The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time.
For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.
Our search to understand trauma has led us to think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also the processes by which it heals.’