Bessel van der Kolk
Description
"One of the first things you need to ask is, how did you survive this? This is amazing that you're still here. It's amazing that you still have the guts to go on with your life. What is allowing you to function? What are you good at? What gives you comfort?" Bessel van der Kolk. Research undertaken for the DSM-IV revealed that survivors of repeated and severe childhood trauma generally experience a common set of problems as adults. This video series...
Description
"People have a range of capacities to deal with overwhelming experience. Some people, some kids particularly, are able to disappear into a fantasy world, to dissociate, to pretend like it isn't happening, and are able to go on with their lives. And sometimes it comes back to haunt them." Bessel van der Kolk. In this program, Bessel van der Kolk and others examine how dissociation functions as a defense against overwhelming stress, how the mind processes...
Description
Over the past several years, many therapists have found that working with clients to identify where and how they hold trauma in their body and helping them to release it can be far more effective than traditional talk therapy alone. They've learned that somatic approaches can help trauma survivors to befriend their body, which they so often have come to see as the enemy. In this three-part series, researchers and clinicians share their perspectives...
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"What we really need to do to help these children is not that difficult, it's not that hard. It's something that could conceivably be available in every school system, available to every child: someone who can empathically listen to what the child is saying and work towards having them establish an environment of some safety." Joyanna Silberg. This video series describes the assessment tools and therapeutic approaches that the presenters have found...
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"We saw that things like intractable smoking, things like promiscuity, use of street drugs, heavy alcohol consumption, etc. , these were fairly common in the backgrounds of many of the patients. . . These were merely techniques they were using, these were merely coping mechanisms that had gone into place." Vincent Felitti, MD. When Dr. Vincent Felitti, head of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Kaiser Permanente in San Diego, began to delve...
Description
"While the therapeutic relationship is very important, and an important substrate to the patient doing his or her work, in some ways we may have to be more like plumbers than like priests. And the task of the plumber is to unplug the toilet, not to have a warm relationship with the person whose toilet is plugged. And so maybe the task of the therapist is to provide the patient the skills that allow them to manage their lives." Bessel van der Kolk....
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"As we've come to learn more and more about dissociation, we've come to recognize that for highly traumatized individuals, that's a pretty normal process that many go through in order to defend themselves or maintain their safety, or to keep material split away because it's much too difficult to integrate it." Christine Courtois. Since dissociative disorders were rediscovered in the 1970s, enormous progress has been made in understanding how best...
Description
"In order to investigate a case of suspected child abuse or litigate that case, you have to not only understand the legal issues, which are complex enough, but one really has to understand something about child development, about the impact of traumatic experiences on children, in order to understand how they react to it and to understand how we react to them." John E. B. Myers, JD. Abuse and neglect can have profound effects on children's neurological...