The Heart of Trauma Quotes

“It wasn't that I gave up on her healing, but, as she continued to struggle to get in the door and actively needed her self-hatred to stay functional, I began to realize more deeply that her patterns had meaning and that it wasn't useful for me to predetermine what recovery might look like for her.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Through mirror neurons and resonance circuitry, we are taking in each other's bodily state, feelings and intention in each emerging moment (Iacoboni, 2009).

This gives us an approximate empathic sense of what is happening in the other person, but it is important to be aware that the information is also being filtered through our implicit lens.

This filtering colors our perceptions and pretty much guarantees there will be ruptures that invite repairs, as our offers of empathy will sometimes not reflect what the other person is experiencing.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We have a tendency to become detached observers rather than participants. There might also be a sense of disassembling a complex, flowing process to focus on a small part of it. If we expand our focus to include emerging, one of the first changes we may notice is the bodily sense of being in the midst of something, of constant motion, lack of clarity (in the left-hemisphere sense), and unpredictability.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“the greater the wounding, the more numerous and powerful our protectors need to be.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“we are adaptive rather than disordered”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“the practice of nonjudgmental, agendaless presence [is] the foundation for safety and co-regulation.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“emotional regulation flows naturally from being in the presence of someone we trust”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Remembering that the impulse to control is an indication that we are having a neuroception of danger, perhaps we can be compassionate rather than critical of ourselves when we do step in to overtly manage the process.

Perhaps we can begin to ask inside about the nature of the threat that brings on the need to assert control and fix.

As always, dropping the questions into our right hemisphere and not expecting a particular answer in this moment opens the way for a deeper understanding to emerge bit by bit.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“As long as I was aligned with listening rather than with an intention to receive a particular response or to shift something, we would stay on safe ground.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“In various paradigms of practice, we have called these protectors "defenses" or "resistances", as though they were objects that needed to be moved out of the way. This is understandable, because we see that these parts of ourselves sometimes cause injury if we view them only from the outer perspective, without opening to the ways they are sheltering our inner world.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“listening to one another activates our mirror neurons and resonance circuitry (Iacoboni, 2009) so that we can be said to literally begin to inhabit one another's embodied emotional universe.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“It might be possible that 'triggered' may not be the most helpful word ... For me, there is a felt sense of violence in this word, while 'touched and awakened' more accurately describes what happens to these sequestered neural nets.

This gentler wording helps us cultivate a sense of meeting the experience every time we are so 'touched' with an appreciation for what it might be offering.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We humans are always seeking the warmest attachments we can imagine”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Since we began with a felt sense of safety this day, several neural streams are initially supporting the renewal of our connection.

In our midbrain, the energies of the SEEKING system are animating the CARE system, which can both foster the good feelings between us and support offers of repair should we have a rupture (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).

Once in connection, our ventral vagal parasympathetic system is affecting the prosody of our voices, our facial mobility, and the attentiveness of our listening, maintaining social engagement (Porges, 2011). Since ventral lateralizes to the right hemisphere, we more easily stay rooted in the right-centric way of attending that keeps us in connection with this moment and with each other (McGilchrist, 2009).

In this intimacy, our brains are coupling in many regions, so there is an experience of social emotional engagement and embodied communication as we become a single system in two bodies (Hasson, 2010).

Because we are trustworthy partners in this healing process, social baseline theory tells us that our amygdalae are calming just because we are together (Beckes & Coan, 2011).

All of this is happening without doing anything, even without saying anything, in microseconds below conscious awareness because of the safe space we have cultivated over time.

We can more clearly understand why Porges says, "Safety IS the treatment".”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“James Coan says, "In truth, because so many neural structures are involved in one way or another in attachment behavior, it is possible to think of the entire human brain as a neural attachment system.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“In these pages, we keep returning to one foundational principle: providing the possibility of emotional/relational safety for our people, be they patients, children, partners, friends or strangers.

We are able to make this offer when they are experiencing their own neuroception of safety, not continuously, but as the baseline to which we return after our system has adaptively moved into sympathetic arousal or dorsal withdrawal in response to inner and outer conditions.

When we neuroceive safety, we humans automatically begin to open into vulnerability, and the movement of our "inherent treatment plan" (Sills, 2010) has a greater probability of coming forward.

When we have a neuroception of threat, we adaptively tighten down at many levels, from physical tension to activation of the protective skills we have learned over a lifetime (Levine, 2010). In that state, our innate healing path will often wisely stay hidden until more favorable conditions arrive.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“It makes sense for us to want a symptom, an 'it' to go away. If we begin to sense that we are made up of many selves ... then we might instead say, 'the anxious part of me is really suffering. I wonder how we might help her'.

There is often a palpable softening as we gaze on a person inside who has value apart from the distressing symptom.

We also may sense more clearly that this experience isn't all of us, but belongs to a part who has had encounters that give this anxiety context and meaning.

The change of pronoun, granting personhood, may move us into a more right-centric way of perceiving, which also opens us to a more both/and perspective of broad acceptance, arouses our warm curiosity, expands receptivity to the present moment. It can really be a very profound change.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“lack of agenda is the primary essence of safety, giving our people implicit permission to bring forward any aspect of themselves that needs attention.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“This shift from intellectual to embodied compassion is at the heart of deep forgiveness, or what we call compassionate release that gives us the gift of not needing to fend off the ones who hurt us anymore.

It is a letting go at a different depth.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Sometimes people begin, discover how much pain and fear they are holding, and adaptively decide to take whatever gains they have made and stop. Occasionally we reach the limits of our competence or capacity and must help one of people find someone or a nest of people who can hold their wounds when we can't. We could likely add other situations in which we have parted with someone early in the relationship or at a time that seemed premature. All of this is part of human limitation in both of us.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“approval... often brings anxiety lest we not be able to repeat the desired behavior.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We might ask what role relational neuroscience plays in these kinds of experiences. For me, it begins with the body. Cultivating an understanding -- and most importantly a felt sense -- of these neural pathways helps us attune body to body with our people as they enter these deeper, more challenging realms. Through resonance, our capacity to attend to our bodies while remaining in a ventral state gradually becomes theirs. An indispensable support comes from our left hemisphere's deepening understanding of the particulars of the healing process. The stability this provides helps our right stay as engaged as possible in the relationship with all its emerging uncertainty. When Joshua became so suddenly depressed, Jaak Panksepp came to mind, so I could remain curious rather than scared. When Caroline entered increasingly intense states with her mother, Stephen Porges helped me remain mindful of our joined windows of tolerance and the necessity of staying in connection for co-regulation and disconfirmation to occur.

The whole process of leading, following and responding rests on his statement, "Safety IS the treatment". In the broadest way, Dan Siegel's voice fosters deep acquaintance with the principles of interpersonal neurobiology, which supports hope for healing, confidence in our inherent health, and appreciation for our co-organizing brains. Each of these strands of knowledge increases our trust in the process. You may sense yourself adding to the list those that have been most helpful for you.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Joshua is one of the people who taught me about respecting pace, particularly when it is very slow.

I do believe we all heal as quickly as we can given the co-integrating nature of our embodied brains, so when the process unfolds very slowly, it often speaks to us of the magnitude of what is coming [emerging to be healed].”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Depression always brings to mind the possibility that the person's SEEKING system may have been turned off ...

Our mutual trust in his system's wisdom kept us from being swept away by the despair he felt. We began to ask, "what is this depression, this one who is so still, wanting to tell us?" Then we waited.

We stayed with the one who felt dead inside, acknowledging his protective value even when though we had no cognitive awareness of who and what he was sheltering.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We are never too old or too wounded to receive healing waves of the personal delight of another.

... at its best, it transcends being delighted with a particular happening and is instead the reflection to us, and often to one another, of an enduring bond that is bigger than any single occurrence between us.

When we are small and see that look on our parents faces, there is such an affirmation that we are good, lovable, welcome.

These experiences go deep into us and become an implicit foundation for drawing in warm companions throughout our lives.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“One gift of nonjudgmental, agendaless presence is that a wide road of acceptance opens, so that the inner world of our people gradually begins to sense, experience and trust that every part is equally valued and equally welcome.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“How do we be with the paradoxes our people bring? We can align with one side of the conundrum and dismiss the other in an effort to relieve the unsettling experience that the logically unresolvable contradiction brings to us and our people. However, if we do this, we are stepping away from our person's experience because he or she is living inside the paradox and can't move away. Staying present asks us to hold the full paradox within our own minds and bodies, to enter the suffering that entails. If we are able to do this and remain in a ventral state, it seems that something happens and we may be able to enter a state in which the paradox begins to reveal its value a little differently than ever before ... As we settled into this broader acceptance together, I believe we made room for the possibility of the arrival of a resolving third thing in its own time.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Each time I experience the unseen wisdom of a person's system, it deepens my trust in the inner process unfolding and my awe at the way we are organized to be protected until the possibility of healing arrives.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“The path of waiting and listening forgoes certainty and exposes us to a sense of tentative unknowing, which is often uncomfortable at best.

This may only be tolerable when we have developed some degree of trust in the inherent healing capacity built into the human system and the power of interpersonal receptivity to animate the process.

For most of us, this trust arrives because we have experienced it ourselves and can now embody it for others.

As this deep learning proceeds in us, we may be able to rest more easily into the waiting because the unknowing is increasingly being held within our expanding window of tolerance.

As we are able to work in this way, I believe our people get a felt sense of our profound and enduring respect for their inherent wisdom, something that is likely a unique and healing experience given their history of traumatic relationships.

I don't believe I have found any offering that is more empowering than respect.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“May we each find a forest-bathing path that can be a daily balm in this taxing world.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships