Top 160 Bessel A. van der Kolk Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “As long as a memory is inaccessible, the mind is unable to change it. But as soon as a story starts being told, particularly if it is told repeatedly, it changes – the act of telling itself changes the tale. The mind cannot help but make meaning out of what it knows, and the meaning we make of our lives changes how and what we remember.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

52. “Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

53. “In the culture people talk about trauma as an event that happened a long time ago. But what trauma is, is the imprints that event has left on your mind and in your sensations... the discomfort you feel and the agitation you feel and the rage and the helplessness you feel right now.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

54. “If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished. If you come from an incomprehensible world filled with secrecy and fear, it’s almost impossible to find the words to express what you have endured. If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

55. “The structures along the midline of the brain are devoted to your inner experience of yourself, those on the side are more concerned with your relationship with your surroundings.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

56. “I discovered that my professional training, with its focus on understanding and insight, had largely ignored the relevance of the living, breathing body, the foundation of our selves.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

57. “Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

58. “Over the years our research team has repeatedly found that chronic emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation.1 Sherry turned out to be a living example of these findings: Not being seen, not being known, and having nowhere to turn to feel safe is devastating at any age, but it is particularly destructive for young children, who are still trying to find their place in the world.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

59. “Trauma devastates the social-engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing, and the ability to function as a productive member of the clan. In this book we have seen how many mental health problems, from drug addiction to self-injurious behavior, start off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of adequate human contact and support.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

60. “If you criticize others, they don’t dare to hurt you. If you are perfect, nobody can criticize you.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

61. “We can hardly bear to look. The shadow may carry the best of the life we have not lived. Go into the basement, the attic, the refuse bin. Find gold there. Find an animal who has not been fed or watered. It is you!! This neglected, exiled animal, hungry for attention, is a part of your self.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

62. “Study after study shows that having a good support network constitutes the single most powerful protection against becoming traumatized.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

63. “Managing your terror all by yourself gives rise to another set of problems: dissociation, despair, addictions, a chronic sense of panic, and relationships that are marked by alienation, disconnections, and explosions. Patients with these histories rarely make the connection between what has happened to them a long time ago and how they currently feel and behave. Everything just seems unmanageable.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

64. “In one year alone Texas Medicaid spent $96 million on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children – including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

65. “Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

66. “Long after the actual event has passed, the brain may keep sending signals to the body to escape a threat that no longer exists.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

67. “Sigmund Freud had said about trauma in 1895: “I think this man is suffering from memories.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

68. “Pat Ogden and Peter Levine have each developed powerful body-based therapies, sensorimotor psychotherapy29 and somatic experiencing.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

69. “Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage – a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

70. “Trauma breeds further trauma; hurt people hurt other people.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

71. “I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

72. “Trauma causes people to remain stuck in interpreting the present in light of an unchanging past. The scene you re-create in a structure may or may not be precisely what happened, but it represents the structure of your inner world: your internal map and the hidden rules that you have been living by.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

73. “One day he told me that he’d spent his adulthood trying to let go of his past, and he remarked how ironic it was that he had to get closer to it in order to let it go.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

74. “Effectively dealing with stress depends upon achieving a balance between the smoke detector and the watchtower. If you want to manage your emotions better, your brain gives you two options: You can learn to regulate them from the top down or from the bottom up.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

75. “The lack of literature on the topic was a handicap, but my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them – and from our own experience.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

76. “If the people whom you naturally turn to for care and protection terrify or reject you, you learn to shut down and to ignore what you feel.22.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

77. “In contrast, children with histories of abuse and neglect learn that their terror, pleading, and crying do not register with their caregiver. Nothing they can do or say stops the beating or brings attention and help. In effect they’re being conditioned to give up when they face challenges later in life. BECOMING.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

78. “Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

79. “Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated? Tom.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

80. “If you mistake someone’s solution for a problem to be eliminated, not only are they likely to fail treatment, as often happens in addiction programs, but other problems may emerge.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

81. “What would you call this patient – schizophrenic or schizoaffective?” He paused and stroked his chin, apparently in deep thought. “I think I’d call him Michael McIntyre,” he replied.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

82. “Since emotional regulation is the critical issue in managing the effects of trauma and neglect, it would make an enormous difference if teachers, army sergeants, foster parents, and mental health professionals were thoroughly schooled in emotional-regulation techniques. Right now this still is mainly the domain of preschool and kindergarten teachers, who deal with immature brains and impulsive behavior on a daily basis and who are often very adept at managing them.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

83. “Talking about painful events doesn’t necessarily establish community – often quite the contrary. Families and organizations may reject members who air the dirty laundry; friends and family can lost patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt. This is one reason why trauma victims often withdraw and why their stories become rote narratives, edited into a form least likely to provoke rejection.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

84. “The greatest hope for traumatized, abused, and neglected children is to receive a good education in schools where they are seen and known, where they learn to regulate themselves, and where they can develop a sense of agency.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

85. “Children from low-income families are four times as likely as privately insured children to receive antipsychotic medicines. These medications often are used to make abused and neglected children more tractable. In 2008 19,045 children age five and under were prescribed antipsychotics through Medicaid.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

86. “Erasing awareness and cultivating denial are often essential to survival, but the price is that you lose track of who you are, of what you are feeling, and of what and whom you can trust.5.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

87. “It is especially challenging for traumatized people to discern when they are actually safe and to be able to activate their defenses when they are in danger.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

88. “Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

89. “It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge? Tom.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

90. “Modern neuroscience solidly supports Freud’s notion that many of our conscious thoughts are complex rationalizations for the flood of instincts, reflexes, motives, and deep-seated memories that emanate from the unconscious.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

91. “Marlantes tells us that his road to recovery required learning to tell the truth, even if that truth was brutally painful.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

92. “It stopped the dissociation. I can use my feelings; I’m not running away from them. I’m not held hostage by them. I can’t turn them off and on, but I can put them away.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

93. “Like Maier and Seligman’s dogs, many traumatized people simply give up. Rather than risk experimenting with new options they stay stuck in the fear they know.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

94. “One tragic example of this orientation is the rampant prescription of painkillers, which now kill more people each year in the United States than guns or car accidents.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

95. “Lacking a filter, they are on constant sensory overload. In order to cope, they try to shut themselves down and develop tunnel vision and hyperfocus. If they can’t shut down naturally, they may enlist drugs or alcohol to block out the world. The tragedy is that the price of closing down includes filtering out sources of pleasure and joy, as well.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

96. “In our society the most common traumas in women and children occur at the hands of their parents or intimate partners. Child abuse, molestation, and domestic violence all are inflicted by people who are supposed to love you. That knocks out the most important protection against being traumatized: being sheltered by the people you love. If the people whom you naturally turn to for care and protection terrify or reject you, you learn to shut down and to ignore what you feel.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

97. “Suppressing our inner cries for help does not stop our stress hormones from mobilizing the body. Even though Sandy had learned to ignore her relationship problems and block out her physical distress signals, they showed up in symptoms that demanded her attention. Her therapy focused on identifying the link between her physical sensations and her emotions, and I also encouraged her to enroll in a kickboxing program. She had no emergency room visits during the three years she was my patient.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

98. “Healing, he told us, depends on experiential knowledge: You can be fully in charge of your life only if you can acknowledge the reality of your body, in all its visceral dimensions.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

99. “Social support is a biological necessity, not an option, and this reality should be the backbone of all prevention and treatment. Recognizing the profound effects of trauma and deprivation on child development need not lead to blaming parents. We can assume that parents do the best they can, but all parents need help to nurture their kids. Nearly every industrialized nation, with the exception of the United States, recognizes this and provides some form of guaranteed support to families.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk

100. “We deliberately tried to collect just isolated fragments of their experience – particular images, sounds, and feelings – rather than the entire story, because that is how trauma is experienced.”

— Bessel A. van der Kolk