Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal

“It sounds like you have a problem. I know you can handle it. What are your options?”

in any relationship, it typically takes five good interactions to make up for a single bad one. And that’s because our painful experiences are a great deal more memorable than pleasurable ones. As Hanson has put it, “The brain is like Velcro for negative experiences, but Teflon for positive ones.”

“Shutting down one’s feelings becomes the only way to survive childhood,”

“You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you’ve come to be,” folding “the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.”

Because he had a parent whom he couldn’t trust or get close to, he has trouble understanding the language of love and intimacy.