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“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 much respect I have for each person’s system knowing what will support healing. Not everyone responds to the process of going directly into the body toward the root of implicit memory. For some, being consistently in the presence of a caring other provides disconfirmation for attachment losses. For others, sand tray or art may be the resonant support, or EMDR or Somatic Experiencing. So many modalities have emerged in recent years, primarily in response to our expanded understanding of the neuroscience of wounding and healing. Each way of working has value and may become even more supportive of our people if it rests on the practice of leading, following and responding. In this way we are able to cultivate a safe space for the fluid emergence of any specific protocol.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“the implicit is awakening in search of healing rather than trying to harm us”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Our conviction that staying with 'what is' will support those changes is not easy ground to hold.

Being with both those parts of ourselves, the one who stands witness to anguish and the one who wishes for change, broadens the foundation that anchors us and ultimately may also help our people hold the ambiguity of their feelings towards implicit arisings.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Through resonance and internalization of us as companions, our way of holding them may gradually become the way they are able to hold themselves.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Gentleness, humor and abundant support are wonderful resources on this ever-unfolding, stubbornly non-linear journey from control to receptivity.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“My multifaceted canary in the coal mine signaling the impulse to control is my belly tightening, my posture changing slightly to lean forward, tension increasing in my upper arms. It feels as though I am preparing to thrust myself into the middle of the problem with everything I know. It comes from a good-hearted place of wanting to relieve suffering and also diminishes interpersonal safety as my system enters mild to medium sympathetic arousal.

If we take a step back, we might become curious about how the neuroception of danger arose in the first place, because that is what initiates this chain of events. If we were to explore this, many answers might come: We have been trained to intervene; we don't have any experience that tells us our patient's systems are trustworthy guides to healing; the upset in our patient is severe enough that we fear for her safety; if we can't heal this person, there's something wrong with us; strong emotions are uncomfortable for us and we need to regulate them before they overwhelm us.

The list is endless, individual and likely changes with each new circumstance. It is always a most valuable inquiry, especially if we can begin it with compassionate curiousity, which makes it less likely that we will feel shamed by the answer that presents itself.

When we remember that neuroception is an automatic adaptive process, it may take character condemnation out of the equation when we invite awareness of what frightens us.

If our fear feels heard and acknowledged, there is some likelihood that our bodies will be able to find their way back toward receptivity. As we feel our own openness returning, we can be certain that this embodied change is also influencing our patient and the quality of the connection.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Protocols we have learned have the opportunity to become supplies when they encounter the solvent of this moment's need, softening to become flexible and adaptive.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We were holding this together, and our joined windows of tolerance seemed able to contain the physical and emotional intensity. Witnessing and empathizing at the same time, it seemed we were able to bring some ventral presence to this world.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“The majority of research-related articles I read move automatically towards suggestions for doing something to the brain - finding new medications, applying techniques to train the brain, and other ways of treating the brain like an object that is separate from ourselves. In addition to this objectification, there is perhaps the greater danger that when we are viewing ourselves or another that way, we have already stepped away from being truly present, so the person being so scrutinized will not feel safe or have a felt sense of being heard, seen, or held. This includes our relationship with ourselves.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“These two viewpoints offer us different ways of orienting to the world that lead to strikingly different values, ways of relating, and behaviors ...

The essence of the right-hemisphere perspective involves attending to relationship, embodiment, and what is unfolding in the unique moment in the space between. We could say that from this viewpoint, the central metaphor here is living beings in relationship with each other in this moment.

In contrast, the left-hemisphere viewpoint steps out of the relational moment to focus on division, fixity, disembodiment, and the creation of algorithms (standardized step-by-step solutions to problems that do not take individuality and context into account). The central metaphor here is the machine, with our bodies, our brains and our very selves viewed as mechanisms to be analyzed and shaped.

We might immediately sense that the perspective of each hemisphere has substantial consequences for how we are able to be present with one another.”
― Bonnie Badenoch

“Whenever I’m near you, I’m standing with an army, a force that nothing can take down.”
― Kaylee Stepkoski, Ever: The Alliance

“Laying here with you
On this couch.
Lost in this quiet sacred cove
We’ve come to call our own.
Just you and I, no outside world to contend with.
Skin to skin, I wander in search of your heart.
With every intention of getting lost.
Come what may, if I become thirsty
I have your lips to replenish me.
The intimacy of drinking water together,
You fill me, as forever long we get to lay here.
An eternity more when I must leave.
The outside world continues.
Here in the quiet sacred cove of your arms
I am safe and without worry.
Here in the quiet sacred cove of your arms
I have found your heart.
And threw away any claims to a map.
There isn’t a need to discover what’s been there
The whole time
And that is your love.”
― Kewayne Wadley, Twelve Midnight

“Weird, wayward, willful, wild,
Salt in the air, laugh like a child
Stars in our hair, a charm in our smiles
Write our names in silver sand.
Three sisters dancing, hand in hand.”
― Laura Wood, Under Your Spell

“They can call me cursed if they want to,
But if I had three wishes,
Each one would be for you.
You.
You.
You.

And as his voice breaks on the last note, so do I.”
― Laura Wood, Under Your Spell