Bessel van der Kolk
Dutch-American psychiatrist whose forty-year career studying the effects of trauma on the body, brain, and human relationships has reshaped the modern field of integrative healing. Born in The Hague in 1943 to a family marked by the German occupation of the Netherlands, he has been a clinician and researcher at Boston University and Harvard, and is the founder of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts. His 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score — combining clinical case studies, neuroscience, and the somatic, contemplative, and creative therapies that traditional talk therapy cannot reach — has sold over three million copies, spent more than 200 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and become the foundational text of the contemporary trauma-informed movement that now shapes therapy, education, and contemplative practice.
quotes in library
Quotes by Bessel van der Kolk
101 quotes“The flashback is the body's protest. Welcome it. It is trying to integrate.”
“Stories told in safety transform.”
“To witness another's pain, in safety, is itself healing.”
“Group therapy works because we heal together.”
“In intimate relationship, the wounded heart slowly trusts again.”
“The traumatized body is a body that has forgotten how to feel safe.”
“Music reaches places words cannot.”
“Theatre, when held safely, lets the body act out what it could not say.”
“EMDR moves trauma through the body the way the body wants to move.”
“Neurofeedback retrains the dysregulated brain.”
“Multiple modalities, used together, accelerate recovery.”
“There is no single treatment for trauma. There is a constellation.”
“Each wounded person walks a unique path home.”
“Internal Family Systems gives every part a voice.”
“All parts of you are welcome.”
“There is no part of you that is bad. Every part is trying to protect.”
“Listen to your protectors. They have served you.”
“Healing is the long apprenticeship to your own body.”
“There is no shortcut. Each breath is a step.”
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