Sublime

But high arousal not only changes the balance between them but also disconnects other brain areas necessary for the proper storage and integration of incoming information, such as the hippocampus and the thalamus.5 As a result, the imprints of traumatic experiences are organized not as coherent logical narratives but in fragmented sensory and emoti

In his lab, Bessel van der Kolk saw on fMRI scans the significant decrease in the Broca’s area when a person was actively reliving a trauma through flashback. In this case, the individuals being monitored had survived a major car accident, and they were asked to recall as much as they could of that harrowing event. “Our scans showed that the Broca’

When those areas are deactivated, people lose their sense of time and become trapped in the moment, without a sense of past, present, or future.

These reactions are irrational and largely outside people’s control. Intense and barely controllable urges and emotions make people feel crazy—and makes them feel they don’t belong to the human race. Feeling numb during birthday parties for your kids or in response to the death of loved ones makes people feel like monsters. As a result, shame becom

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

One day he told me that he’d spent his adulthood trying to let go of his past, and he remarked how ironic it was that he had to get closer to it in order to let it go.

If we look beyond the list of specific symptoms that entail formal psychiatric diagnoses, we find that almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal (as in the case of habitually becoming enraged, shut down, overexcited, or disorganized). Usually it’s a co

I call this Auden’s rule, and in keeping with it I deliberately did not push Marilyn to tell me what she remembered. In fact, I’ve learned that it’s not important for me to know every detail of a patient’s trauma. What is critical is that the patients themselves learn to tolerate feeling what they feel and knowing what they know.

the development of integrative structures and processes in the brain (Delmonte, 1995; Siegel, 2012).