Books

During school age, the bright, shame-based child will attempt to develop inhuman ego defenses or defending scripts, such as perfectionism, blaming, criticizing, righteousness or being judgmental.

My heart was skipping in my throat. I knew that anger. How had I managed to find it in Ohio?

Since emotional regulation is the critical issue in managing the effects of trauma and neglect, it would make an enormous difference if teachers, army sergeants, foster parents, and mental health professionals were thoroughly schooled in emotional-regulation techniques.

To choose joy is to see all existence as a gift, which is why the practice of joy is inseparable from the practice of gratitude. Gratitude gives birth to joy because gratitude teaches us to receive life as a gift in the moment we’re in, regardless of what lies ahead. “It is the truly converted life in which God has become the center of all,”

The problem with silence is that it can’t speak up and say why it’s silent. And so silence collects, becomes amplified, takes on a life outside our intentions, in that silence can get misread as indifference, or avoidance, or even shame, and eventually this silence passes over into forgetting.

IFS recognizes that the cultivation of mindful self-leadership is the foundation for healing from trauma. Mindfulness not only makes it possible to survey our internal landscape with compassion and curiosity but can also actively steer us in the right direction for self-care.

Until I talked to her, I could only imagine Cha’s New York as a shadowy abstraction of a city, a Gotham of unlit steel and windswept empty boulevards.