“The key to healing pain lies in understanding and working with body reactions. By cultivating body awareness and maintaining sensation-based focus, we learn to befriend these trauma-based sensations and then to move through them. Since people struggling with pain and trauma often perceive their bodies as the enemy, this ‘befriending’ is a key capacity – a capacity which also provides the opportunity for ongoing vibrancy.

Embodiment creates connection and reduces the need for dissociation and escaping from the body. Overcoming the need to dissociate from the body allows us to learn to feel what the body is feeling. With this connection, we move toward enhanced mind-body-heart-spirit awareness, and the possibility of wholeness.”

“What we see as indelible traits may be no more than habitual defensive techniques, unconsciously adopted. People often identify with these habituated patterns, believing them to be an indispensable part of the self. They may even harbour self-loathing for certain traits – for example, when a person describes herself as ‘a control freak’. In reality, there is no innate humane inclination to be controlling. What there is in a ‘controlling’ personality is deep anxiety. The infant and child who perceives that his needs are unmet may develop an obsessive coping style, anxious about each detail.

When such a person fears that he is unable to control events, he experiences great stress. Unconsciously he believes that only by controlling every aspect of his life and environment will he be able to ensure the satisfaction of his needs. As he grows older, others will resent him and he will come to dislike himself for what was originally a desperate response to emotional deprivation. The drive to control is not an innate trait but a coping style.”

“I believe that the very essence of trauma is powerlessness. It is that unavoidable, inescapable overwhelm of suffering that we can do nothing about. Some of us learn that it’s best never to struggle, to just accept the freeze response and lie still until the danger passes. Perhaps by freezing, perhaps by submitting, it will be over with more quickly and we will be hurt less in the process. Lie still under the danger passes…But then, in our minds, the danger never passes, and so we live our lives inhibited by an eternal learned helplessness. We feel inept and incapable and stupid and weak, because when it really mattered, when our lives were at risk, we couldn’t even move a muscle.”