Sublime

please check out Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma; Pat Ogden, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy; and Dan Siegel and his many books.

The contrast with the scans of the eighteen chronic PTSD patients with severe early-life trauma was startling. There was almost no activation of any of the self-sensing areas of the brain:

Fear is the core emotion and the primary dysrhythmia in developmental trauma. Without addressing the brain’s fear circuitry directly, developmental

Unlike conventional exposure treatment, EMDR spends very little time revisiting the original trauma. The trauma itself is certainly the starting point, but the focus is on stimulating and opening up the associative process.

Before you can learn them, that trauma may have to be cleared out of your body.

Often there is excessive activity in the right temporal lobe, the fear center of the brain, combined with too much frontal slow-wave activity. This means that their hyperaroused emotional brains dominate their mental life. Our research showed that calming the fear center decreases trauma-based problems and improves executive functioning.

Crucial for understanding trauma, the frontal lobes are also the seat of empathy—our ability to “feel into” someone else.