What If the Body Politic Kept the Score?
When a person is distressed, standard therapy tries to figure out what makes something so disturbing, and what you can do to change it. Most therapies downplay or ignore the shifts in people’s inner sensory world that carry the essence of the organisms’ responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the state of the body’s chemical profile,
... See moreElizabeth Hopper • Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body
We compartmentalized the stress and ongoing trauma, flattening it into something survivable, but we nonetheless ate it for breakfast, and lunch, and dinner. We swam in that stress. We slept in it. We swallowed it in gulps. We lived through it, and we told ourselves stories of resilience, because what other choice did we have. But the body is bad at... See more
Anne Helen Petersen • That's a Stress Response
Way back already in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book about emotions in which he talks about how emotions are expressed in things like heartbreak and gut-wrenching experience. So you feel things in your body. And then it became obvious that, if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench, they do everything to shut down those feelin
... See moreKrista Tippett • Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and the Art of Living
It’s often hard to find our way back into our bodies after experiencing anguish. This is why so much effective trauma work today is not only about reclaiming our breath, our feelings, and our thinking, but also getting our bones back and returning to our bodies.
Brené Brown • Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience
We are a deeply enmeshed republic of physiological, emotional and symbolic systems whose interactions can be thrown into disorder with frightening ease. Our story about our struggles and our suffering needs to try to capture this complexity, and how it will show up differently in every case.