Hudson > Hudson's Quotes

“He says
That he doesn’t
Believe in magic.

Yet when she
Walks into the room
His heart beats against
His xylophone ribs
And plays a love tune.

If that’s not magic
Then tell me
What is it?”
― Zienab Hamdan, For The Other Halves Of Me

“Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.” (p.97)”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“BEFRIENDING THE BODY

Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change, people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

All too often, however, drugs such as Abilify, Zyprexa, and Seroquel, are prescribed instead of teaching people the skills to deal with such distressing physical reactions. Of course, medications only blunt sensations and do nothing to resolve them or transform them from toxic agents into allies.

The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished. If you come from an incomprehensible world filled with secrecy and fear, it’s almost impossible to find the words to express what you have endured. If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“In our studies we keep seeing how difficult it is for traumatized people to feel completely relaxed and physically safe in their bodies. We measure our subjects’ HRV by placing tiny monitors on their arms during shavasana, the pose at the end of most classes during which practitioners lie face up, palms up, arms and legs relaxed. Instead of relaxation we picked up too much muscle activity to get a clear signal. Rather than going into a state of quiet repose, our students’ muscles often continue to prepare them to fight unseen enemies. A major challenge in recovering from trauma remains being able to achieve a state of total relaxation and safe surrender.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Controllers think differing ideas and views are personal opposition to be rejected and destroyed. And, since Controllers identify themselves with their prescriptions, it becomes important to them that others be dissuaded of theirs. Their success is measured in conversions.”
― Patricia Evans, Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal With People Who Try to Control You

“Our ability to choose is our most basic freedom. When we define ourselves we choose. When we give meaning to our experience we also choose. The more aware we are of ourselves and our day-to-day experience, the more we are able to exercise freedom's power — the power of choice. Freedom depends upon clarity. We cannot exercise our freedom if we are confused. And, of course, being defined backwards leaves people confused. Backwards connections arise out of the Controller's confusion, and oppressive and controlling behaviors create confusion. When others define us, our freedom is assaulted because our awareness is assaulted. Awareness and freedom are intrinsically linked. Without freedom awareness fades. Without awareness freedom fades. If our freedom of choice is lost, life itself loses meaning. Despair fills the void of lost meaning.”
― Patricia Evans, Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal With People Who Try to Control You

“Some people have not learned to know what their feelings mean. Some have been trained not to feel much. And some have been trained not to know that they have feelings.”
― Patricia Evans, Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal With People Who Try to Control You

“On the other hand, once they are anchored in someone, some Controllers appear to be respectful of most people. Not surprisingly, they may be described as kind, thoughtful, even charming by those with whom they have not established a Control Connection. Indeed they see themselves in this positive light. Some even think of themselves as wonderful because they have built their identity from the outside in, according to their chosen “wonderful” model. Most of us only rarely fall under the influence of the spell, because we are beside ourselves only under rare circumstances — for instance, when jolted from ourselves by traumatic events. Controllers, however, have adopted a “beside-themselves” lifestyle.”
― Patricia Evans, Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal With People Who Try to Control You

“What blinds people the most to controlling behavior is the belief that the person who consistently defines them truly loves them.”
― Patricia Evans, Controlling People: How to Recognize, Understand, and Deal With People Who Try to Control You

“The Unavailable Available Pattern.” It’s where you convince yourself (and others) that you are available for relationship, but you always find a way to stop short. That stopping short can manifest in many ways: choosing unavailable people, looking for excuses to run, focusing on a lover’s imperfections rather than their appealing qualities, getting lost in the excitement of ecstatic possibility until the first glimpse of real vulnerability sends you packing. It’s the addiction to possibility and the fear of intimacy all rolled into one.”
― Jeff Brown, An Uncommon Bond

“As far as I could tell, stories may enable us to live, but they also trap us, bring us spectacular pain. In their scramble to make sense of nonsensical things, they distort, codify, blame, aggrandize, restrict, omit,”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“How often, in everyday conversation, had I said things I didn’t mean or feel, just to be polite, to make things easier? How often had I said to Brandon what I thought I should say in order to maintain order, to repair a rift? We had never been good at disagreement. One of us always gave in when it got too uncomfortable. One of us would recognize that we were at a dead end, would begin to back out. We rarely paved a road through to the other side. We rarely stuck with it long enough to forge any kind of new, if painful, understanding.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“Do not marry someone who will not go to therapy, both on their own and with you. Refusing to go to therapy with your partner is like looking the other way when they're drowning.”
― Molly Wizenberg, The Fixed Stars

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.”
― Noam Chomsky

“We shouldn't be looking for heroes, we should be looking for good ideas.”
― Noam Chomsky

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
― Noam Chomsky

“All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.”
― Noam Chomsky

“It's not radical Islam that worries the US -- it's independence”
― Noam Chomsky

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country.” Some people might now call that the deep state. I wouldn’t, but some people might. “We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of” (1928). He is referring to himself and other people who are behind the scenes manipulating public opinion, which is another phrase for common sense. “In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind”
― Noam Chomsky, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance

“Here is a radical idea that I would like you to understand: white silence is violence. It actively protects the system. It says I am okay with the way things are because they do not negatively affect me and because I enjoy the benefits I receive with white privilege.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“Your desire to be seen as good can actually prevent you from doing good, because if you do not see yourself as part of the problem, you cannot be part of the solution.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“White supremacy is a system you have been born into. Whether or not you have known it, it is a system that has granted you unearned privileges, protection, and power.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“People often think that white supremacy is a term that is only used to describe far-right extremists and neo-Nazis. However, this idea that white supremacy only applies to the so-called “bad ones” is both incorrect and dangerous, because it reinforces the idea that white supremacy is an ideology that is only upheld by a fringe group of white people.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“Here’s to doing what is right and not what is easy.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“In essence, white fragility looks like a white person taking the position of victim when it is in fact that white person who has committed or participated in acts of racial harm.”
― Layla F. Saad, Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

“Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing. But we are so used to seeing them die at men’s hands, so used to justifying and excusing it as normal or “understandable,” that it wouldn’t occur to us to consider this enough of an aberration to raise alarm.”
― Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists: The Truth about Extreme Misogyny and How it Affects Us All

“Women have always been the canaries in the coal mines, quietly singing.”
― Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women: The Extremism Nobody is Talking About