Developmental trauma occurs when emotional pain cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.1 In retrospect, I can see that this was the case for
Having released the wartime images he was carrying in his unconscious, he became worried that he would now be at their mercy, plagued by them in day as well as by night. But what he found was just the...
He was aware of his trauma, but he was using it to distance himself from life. He had a story about himself but no access to who he might have been before his trauma derailed him. I was trying to use...
His efforts were always in the service of releasing people from their fixed ideas about who or what they were, about freeing them from attachment to whatever concept they were clinging to, about loose...
I felt silly to be falling into such an obvious trap of letting my expectations interfere with what was actually happening, but I also felt an all-too-familiar sadness creeping up from my chest to my...
If things do not exist as fixed, independent entities, then how can they die? Our notion of death as the sudden expiration of that which was once so real starts to unwind. If things do not exist in th...
In building a path through the self to the far shore of awareness, we have to carefully pick our way through our own wilderness. If we can put our minds into a place of surrender, we will have an easi...
In demonstrating this, the Buddha was making an important example for the ages. For almost no one is exempt from trauma. While some people have it in a much more pronounced way than others, the unpred...
Separate and together cease to be mutually exclusive and instead become, in psychoanalyst Christopher Bolla's phrase, reciprocally enhancing and mutually informative.
In order to change conditions outside ourselves, whether they concern the environment or relations with others, we must first change within ourselves.
In the practice of mindfulness, the ego’s usual insistence on control and security is deliberately and progressively undermined. This is accomplished by steadily shifting one’s center of gravity from...
Intimacy puts us in touch with fragility, he realized, and the acceptance of fragility opens us to intimacy.
It is always true to say when reviewing one of this patient’s sessions that if she could scream she would be well, wrote Winnicott. The great non-event of every session is screaming.6 The Burmese mast...
It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unle...
It's one of my theories that when people give you advice,
Joseph made clear, it is not just the mother that has to be released from perfection. It is everything.
According to Buddhism, it is our fear at experiencing ourselves directly that creates suffering.
Love is the revelation of the other person’s freedom,
After five minutes, or ten, or fifteen—it doesn’t matter—open your eyes and resume your day. For a moment or two things might seem more alive.
Painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance, containment, and integration is profoundly absent,8 writes Robert Stolorow, a philo...
Showing 41 to 60 of 69 results