Quotes by : Bessel A. van der Kolk

Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us.....

We don’t really want to know what soldiers go through in combat. We do not really want to know how....

As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.

The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of....

Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a....

Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing....

BEFRIENDING THE BODY Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations....

Dissociation is adaptive: it allows relatively normal functioning for the duration of the traumatic event....

Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.

The traumatic stress field has adopted the term “Complex Trauma” to describe the experience of multiple....