Ann Frederick > Quotes

“Every trauma provides an opportunity for authentic transformation. Trauma amplifies and evokes the expansion and contraction of psyche, body, and soul. It is how we respond to a traumatic event that determines whether trauma will be a cruel and punishing Medusa turning us into stone, or whether it will be a spiritual teacher taking us along vast and uncharted pathways. In the Greek myth, blood from Medusa’s slain body was taken in two vials; one vial had the power to kill, while the other had the power to resurrect. If we let it, trauma has the power to rob our lives of vitality and destroy it. However, we can also use it for powerful self-renewal and transformation. Trauma, resolved, is a blessing from a greater power.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“This leading-edge research echoes what ancient wisdom has always known: that each organ of the body, including the brain, speaks its own “thoughts,” “feelings,” and “promptings,” and listens to those of all the others.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“If we feel inclined to focus on memories (even if they are basically accurate), it is important to understand that this choice will impair our ability to move out of our traumatic reactions. Transformation requires change. One of the things that must change is the relationship that we have with our “memories.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Learning to know yourself through the felt sense is a first step toward healing trauma.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Until we understand that traumatic symptoms are physiological as well as psychological, we will be woefully inadequate in our attempts to heal them. The heart of the matter lies in being able to recognize that trauma represents animal instincts gone awry. When harnessed, these instincts can be used by the conscious mind to transform traumatic symptoms into a state of well-being.       Acts”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“when we cling strongly to the concrete version of memory we are re-stricted to doing what we have always done in relation to it. The dilemma is that unresolved trauma forces us to repeat what we have done before. New and creative assemblages of possibilities will not easily occur to us.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Sometimes, traumatized individuals have an investment in being ill and may form a kind of attachment to their symptoms. There are innumerable reasons (both physiological and psychological) to explain why this attachment occurs. I don’t think it’s necessary to go into detail on this subject. The important thing to keep in mind is that we can only heal to the degree that we can become unattached from these symptoms. It is almost as if they become entities unto themselves through the power we give them. We need to release them from our minds and hearts along with the energy that is locked in our nervous systems.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“healing of trauma in its many forms. The most common of these forms are automobile and other accidents, serious illness, surgery and other invasive medical and dental procedures, assault, and experiencing or witnessing violence, war, or a myriad of natural disasters.               I”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Traumatic re-enactment is one of the strongest and most enduring reactions that occurs in the wake of trauma. Once we are traumatized, it is almost certain that we will continue to repeat or re-enact parts of the experience in some way. We will be drawn over and over again into situations that are reminiscent of the original trauma.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Acts must be carried through to their completion. Whatever their point of departure, the end will be beautiful. It is (only) because an action has not been completed that it is vile. —Jean Genet, from Thiefs Journal”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“If you bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will be your salvation. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, Then that which is within you Will destroy you. from the Gnostic Gospels[1]”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“There are two kinds of memory pertinent to trauma. One form is somewhat like a video camera, sequentially recording events. It is called “explicit” (conscious) memory, and stores information such as what you did at the party last night. The other form is the way that the human organism organizes the experience of significant events for example, the procedure of how to ride a bicycle. This type of memory is called “implicit” (procedural) and is unconscious. It has to do with things we don’t think about; our bodies just do them.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“I began to piece together the puzzle of healing trauma. The key I found was being able to work in a gradual, gentle way with the powerful energies bound in the trauma symptoms.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Be aware that the energies of trauma can be bound up in beliefs about being raped or abused. By challenging these beliefs, especially if they aren’t true, some of that energy may be released. If this is the case for you, rest and give yourself plenty of time to process this new information. Stay with the sensations you experience as much as possible, and don’t be alarmed if you feel tremulous or weak. Both are evidence that normal discharge is happening. Don’t force yourself to do more than you can handle. If you feel tired, take a nap or go to bed early. Part of the grace of the nervous system is that it is constantly self-regulating. What you can’t process today will be available to be processed some other time when you are stronger, more resourceful, and better able to do it.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“One young man, sexually abused as a child, had over a dozen serious rear-end collisions within a period of three years. (In none of these “accidents” was he obviously at fault.) Frequent re-enactment is the most intriguing and complex symptom of trauma. This phenomenon can be custom-fit to the individual, with a startling level of “coincidence” between the re-enactment and the original situation. While some of the elements of re-enactment are understandable, others seem to defy rational explanation.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Unlike wild animals, when threatened we humans have never found it easy to resolve the dilemma of whether to fight or flee. This dilemma stems, at least in part, from the fact that our species has played the role of both predator and prey.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“The disconnection between body and soul is one of the most important effects of trauma. Loss of skin sensation is a common physical manifestation of the numbness and disconnection people experience after trauma. To begin to recover sensation, the following awareness exercise will be useful throughout the mending process. The initial cost of $15 to $40 for a pulsing shower head is well worth the investment.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Lasting peace among warring peoples cannot be accomplished without first healing the traumas of previous terrorism, violence, and horror on a mass scale.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Re-enactment is more compelling, mysterious, and destructive to us as individuals, as a society, and as a world community.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Come back to your country; to your people…to the Yurt, by the bright fire!…Come back to your father…to your mother…”[6]”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“initiating and encouraging our innate drive to return to a state of dynamic equilibrium.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Psychiatrist James Gilligan, in his book Violence[8],makes this eloquent statement: …“the attempt to achieve and maintain justice, or to undo or prevent injustice, is the one and only universal cause of violence.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the “triggering” event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and discharged; this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits. The long-term, alarming, debilitating, and often bizarre symptoms of PTSD develop when we cannot complete the process of moving in, through and out of the “immobility” or “freezing” state.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Traumatic symptoms not only affect our emotional and mental states, but our physical health as well. When no other cause for a physical malady can be found, stress and trauma are likely candidates. Trauma can make a person blind, mute, or deaf; it can cause paralysis in legs, arms, or both; it can bring about chronic neck and back pain, chronic fatigue syndrome, bronchitis, asthma, gastrointestinal problems, severe PMS, migraines, and a whole host of so-called psychosomatic conditions. Any physical system capable of binding the undischarged arousal caused by trauma is fair game. The trapped energy will use any aspect of our physiology available to it.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Nature responds, thank goodness, by immediately creating a counter-vortex-a healing vortex to balance the force of the trauma vortex. This balancing force instantly begins to rotate in the opposite direction of the trauma vortex. The new whirlpool exists “within” the banks of mainstream experience (Fig. 3).”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Trauma sufferers tend to identify themselves as survivors, rather than as animals with an instinctual power to heal.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Much of the violence that plagues humanity is a direct or indirect result of unresolved trauma that is acted out in repeated unsuccessful attempts to re-establish a sense of empowerment..”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“As in the Greek myth of Medusa, the human confusion that may ensue when we stare death in the face can turn us to stone. We may literally freeze in fear, which will result in the creation of traumatic symptoms.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“Transformation requires a willingness to challenge your basic beliefs about who you are. We must have the faith to trust responses and sensations that we can’t fully understand, and a willingness to experience ourselves flowing in harmony with the primitive, natural laws that will take over and balance our seemingly incongruous perceptions. Traumatized people must let go of all kinds of beliefs and preconceptions in order to complete the journey back to health. Remember, letting go never happens all at once.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma

“When we are unable to flow through trauma and complete instinctive responses, these incompleted actions often undermine our lives.”
― Ann Frederick, Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma