{"author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk","total_quotes":14,"quotes":[{"text":"Mary was my first encounter with dissociative identity disorder (DID), which at that time was called multiple personality disorder. As dramatic as its symptoms are, the internal splitting and emergence of distinct identities experienced in DID represent only the extreme end of the spectrum of mental life.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["dissociation","dissociative-identity-disorder","mental-health","mental-life","multiple-personality-disorder"],"id":44044,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how many children are being molested and abused in our own society or how many couples—almost a third, as it turns out—engage in violence at some point during their relationship. We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["ptsd","trauma"],"id":56566,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"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).","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["avoidance","body","feelings","numb","numbness","sense-of-safety","trauma","traumatic","traumatized"],"id":95340,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has been sheltered from destruction by the various protectors that have emerged in their efforts to ensure survival. Once those protectors trust that it is safe to separate, the Self will spontaneously emerge, and the parts can be enlisted in the healing process.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["complex-ptsd","complex-trauma","dissociative-disorders","neuroscience","psychology","trauma"],"id":101064,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality of their patients' experiences… This search for predisposing factors probably had its origins in the need to deny that all people can be stressed beyond endurance, rather than in solid scientific data; until recently such data were simply not available… When the issue of causation becomes a legitimate area of investigation, one is inevitably confronted with issues of man's inhumanity to man, with carelessness and callousness, with abrogation of responsibility, with manipulation and with failures to protect.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["avoidance","blame","humanity","inhumane","inhumanity","minimization","posttraumatic-stress-disorder","psychology","psychology","ptsd","responsibility","science","society-denial","suffering","trauma","truth"],"id":127401,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"Because drugs have become so profitable, major medical journals rarely publish studies on nondrug treatments of mental health problems.31 Practitioners who explore treatments are typically marginalized as “alternative.” Studies of nondrug treatments are rarely funded unless they involve so-called manualized protocols, where patients and therapists go through narrowly prescribed sequences that allow little fine-tuning to individual patients’ needs. Mainstream medicine is firmly committed to a better life through chemistry, and the fact that we can actually change our own physiology and inner equilibrium by means other than drugs is rarely considered.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["alternative-therapy","alternative-treatments","clinical-literature","clinical-trial","effectiveness","lack-of-research","medical-journals","mental-health","mental-health-bias","mental-illness","psychiatric-drugs","psychotherapy"],"id":128098,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"I cut myself up really badly with the lid of a tin can. They took me to the emergency room, but I couldn’t tell the doctor what I had done to cut myself—I didn’t have any memory of it. The ER doctor was convinced that dissociative identity disorder didn’t exist. . . . A lot of people involved in mental health tell you it doesn’t exist. Not that you don’t have it, but that it doesn’t exist.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["denial","dissociative-amnesia","dissociative-disorders","dissociative-identity-disorder","invalidation","mental-health","mental-health-bias","mental-health-stigma","mental-illness-discrimination","mental-illness-stigma"],"id":147494,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["healing","trauma"],"id":169772,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"EMDR is a bizarre and wondrous treatment and anybody who first hears about it, myself included, thinks this is pretty hokey and strange. It's something invented by Francine Shapiro who found that, if you move your eyes from side to side as you think about distressing memories, that the memories lose their power.And because of some experiences, both with myself, but even more with the patients of mine who told me about their experiences, I took a training in it. It turned out to be incredibly helpful. Then I did what's probably the largest NIH-funded study on EMDR. And we found that, of people with adult-onset traumas, a one-time trauma as an adult, that it had the best outcome of any treatment that has been published.What's intriguing about EMDR is both how well it works and the question is how it works and that got me into this dream stuff that I talked about earlier, and how it does not work through figuring things out and understanding things. But it activates some natural processes in the brain that's helped you to integrate these past memories.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["emdr","posttraumatic-stress-disorder","ptsd","trauma"],"id":175831,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"},{"text":"Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.","author":"Bessel A. van der Kolk","tags":["minimization","posttraumatic","ptsd","reality","society","society-denial","trauma","traumatic"],"id":181276,"author_id":"Bessel+A.+van+der+Kolk"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":14,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}