Kyla’s Reviews > The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma > Status Update

“When patients can physically experience what it would have felt like to fight back or run away, they relax, smile, and express a sense of completion.”

“The most natural way that we humans calm down our distress is by being touched, hugged, and rocked. This helps with excessive arousal and makes us feel intact, safe, protected, and in charge. “

“The imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emotional traces, images, sounds, and physical sensations.”

What cannot be communicated to the mother cannot be communicated to the self. If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation. When you don’t feel real nothing matters, which makes it impossible to protect yourself from danger. Or you may resort to extremes in an effort to feel something— even cutting yourself with a razor blade or getting into fights.

“The most natural way for human being to calm themselves when they are upset is by clinging to another person. This means that patients who have been physically or sexually violated face a dilemma: they desperately crave touch while simultaneously being terrified of body contact. 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.

“Traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them and have trouble deciphering whatever is going on around them.”