Marion F. Solomon > Quotes

“Hyperarousal causes traumatized people to become easily distressed by unexpected stimuli. Their tendency to be triggered into reliving traumatic memories illustrates how their perceptions have become excessively focused on the involuntary search for the similarities between the present and their traumatic past. As a consequence, many neutral experiences become reinterpreted as being associated with the traumatic past.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain

“When the traumatic event is the result of an attack by a family member on whom victims depend for economic and other forms of security (as occurs in victims of intrafamilial abuse) victims are prone to respond to assaults with increased dependence and with paralysis in their decision-making processes. Thus, some aspects of how people respond to trauma are quite predictable - but individual, situational and social factors play a major role in the shaping the symptomatology.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain

“New evidence (2002) indicates that reparative adult experiences enable those with attachment traumas to increase their ability to cope with stress and restore a sense of security. Healing through new relationships occurs frequently, and makes a person who has experienced trauma increase the ability to cope with stress and negative affect. Religious or 12-step experiences, therapeutic experiences, and intimate relationships all offer possibilities for repair.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain

“Romantic love releases surges of the neurotransmitters dopamine and norepinephrine and activates brain regions that drive the reward system in a way that is similar to addiction”
― Marion F. Solomon, Love and War in Intimate Relationships: Connection, Disconnection, and Mutual Regulation in Couple Therapy

“Trauma is a flooding of dysregulated affective experience that, if it cannot be relationally processed, destabilizes a person’s perceptual experience of his or her own existence and creates an escalating dread of depersonalization that must be stopped at any cost. The brain then takes over.”
― Marion Solomon, How People Change: Relationships and Neuroplasticity in Psychotherapy

“This wiring is manifest in well-worn neural network pathways, which are stimulated by triggers that remind us, implicitly, of childhood experience—our wounds, triumphs and longed-for experiences.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Love and War in Intimate Relationships: Connection, Disconnection, and Mutual Regulation in Couple Therapy

“Our REM sleep in 90-minute bursts, in a 24 hour cycle "digests" trauma that is experienced on a daily basis. In dreaming, the brain compares the trauma with early memory traces of similar experience, and files the memories of the day's events according to an affect-based associative system for further use and potential survival value. Comforting figures may appear in the dream to give care, advice, counsel, and relief, if necessary. The nightly dream process helps the dreamer receive positive resolution of his or her experience, and the dreamer moves on to the next day's activities restored, refreshed, and prepared for survival-based action.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain

“Still other times are more difficult, even "toxic", when we may become overwhelmed with anger that directly interferes with our ability to be in tune with our children. At these times, children may become filled with a sense of shame and humiliation, being left with an urge to turn away and with a sense that the self is defective. Repair is essential when there is a rupture, especially of this latter toxic sort. Repair is an interactive process that involves an acknowledgment of the disconnection and an attempt to move forward and reconnect.”
― Marion F. Solomon, Healing Trauma: Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain