Ginny Mata

“Semrad taught us that most human suffering is related to love and loss and that the job of therapists is to help people “acknowledge, experience, and bear” the reality of life—with all its pleasures and heartbreak. “The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves,” he’d say, urging us to be honest with ourselves about every facet of our experience. He often said that people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“What we found is that when people [are] excluded, you see activity in…the neural regions [of the brain] that are also involved in the distressing component of pain, or what sometimes people call the ‘suffering component’ of pain.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After

“Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated?”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

“Social rejection—or the feeling of not belonging, of being less than others, unwanted, and an outcast—activates the same brain regions as physical pain.”
― Katherine Woodward Thomas, Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After