Implicit Memory Quotes

“May we each find a forest-bathing path that can be a daily balm in this taxing world.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We are never too old or too wounded to receive healing waves of the personal delight of another.

... at its best, it transcends being delighted with a particular happening and is instead the reflection to us, and often to one another, of an enduring bond that is bigger than any single occurrence between us.

When we are small and see that look on our parents faces, there is such an affirmation that we are good, lovable, welcome.

These experiences go deep into us and become an implicit foundation for drawing in warm companions throughout our lives.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We can perhaps hold both the desire to separate from these bodily memories and the willingness to be with them in the broad embrace of welcome and compassion.

I do believe this kind of acceptance is a lifetime's work that inevitably leads to 'failure' at times. Our biology wants to protect us from what may harm us, and the arising of implicit memory can feel quite threatening.

If we can soften towards our own tendency to want to move away and offer to begin again with gestures of inclusion, this is likely what is possible and optimal for us humans.

Humility and grace are perhaps the gifts of this tension, gifts that we can then extend to our people in the form of honoring their struggle.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“In any attachment encounter, there is both what we perceive being offered and our embodied response to it.

If we call to mind, heart and body three or four people with whom we've had particularly close relationships, how do our bodies respond to their offers of connection?

We can begin by being with muscles, belly, heart and breath. How does our body want to move?”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“I was transfixed by the way her internal mother had simply arrived and begun to tell her story in the sand.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“The bodily experience we have taken in from [other people that our body has internalized as 'imported parts'] will affect our muscles, belly and heart brains, autonomic nervous system, eyes, ears and vocal cords when they are active in us. While carrying this much of others can feel like an overwhelming burden, it is also the open door to healing, since their aliveness inside us means they can be touched with the ... care that others might offer us.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We are so immersed in an acclimated to the experience of our fast-paced, digital lives that it is challenging to gain a sense of the traumas subtly embedding each day.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“This is where all the work we have done with ourselves to sense the connection between our bodily sensations and implicit memories comes to help our person. Our conviction that this is the doorway to the deeper places provides a foundation, through resonance, for him to slow down and attend to his body.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Interpersonal Neurobiology of Group Psychotherapy and Group Process

“We internalize not only living people, but characters who come alive in our reading and viewing.”
― Bonnie Badenoch

“we may never know exactly when or how this began, but if we acknowledge this little one, she will somehow know that we are listening to her.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We have a brain in our belly, a very sophisticated one, and it responds to everything that’s happened in our lives, so it accumulates a lot of stories over time.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“For me, hearing a relational history at the beginning of our work helps me form pictures of some encounters that bought pain and others that offered empathic support. Early in life, who comforted this person? Who kept her safe? Who was distant? Who needed her to regulate them? Who felt dangerous? Who bought confusion or chaos? Who criticized and who was accepting? We might quickly discover that one person brought contradictory experiences - the confusing one also comforted, or the dangerous one at home was a primary support of safety in the outside world. All this helps us begin to feel into the qualities of relatedness our person has taken in.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“All of us develop the protections our implicit memories need to keep what are perceived to be worse dangers from us. ... Our initial work is ... about respectfully acknowledging that our people's system is acting wisely in this moment, no matter what it looks like on the outside. Holding this firmly in our own body, heart and mind is of inestimable benefit to those who come to us.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“A client's seemingly irrational, out-of-control presenting symptom is actually a sensible, orderly, cogent expression of the person's existing [experience] of self and world, not a 'disorder' or 'pathology”
― 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

“How we speak about the awakening of these memories may influence the ferocity with which they arrive ... One therapist says this: 'even the gentlest sensory breeze can touch and awaken these old memories in our bodies. We are so tender and so available for healing.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“If we can approach these implicit arisings as a gift rather than an attack, as an opening towards healing, we may be able to help our people get into relationship with their implicit world in a more compassionate and collaborative way.

Perhaps we can begin with considering these memories, no matter how challenging, to be messengers of life-giving truth.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“... when an experience is too strong for our current internal and external regulatory resource to manage ... [chemical changes activate to] tuck these pathways into our ... body.

In this way, our ongoing lives are protected from the constant incursion of the raw pain and fear and the injured parts of ourselves are partly shielded from new injury.

We might say they have been enwombed, awaiting the arrival of support.

At the same time, the memories also remain malleable enough that they can be touched and awakened, which is essential for healing.

However, we also remain vulnerable to them being brought into activity when support isn't available... a frowning face (man or woman), certain breathing patterns, and even sensory fragments (the color of a person's shirt or hair, the smell of alcohol on someone's breath) all have some probability of awakening the terror.

The widely dispersed individual streams that make up these memories are all gathered into the neural net that formed at the time of the initial experience, and when our outer or inner world tugs on any strand, there is some probability that more of the neural net will open, bringing the rush of embodied feelings. Most often, the explicit memory does not arrive at the same time, so there is no context for the flood of sensations and emotions, which feels as if they are related to what is happening right now ....

What can look like an out-of-proportion response to what is happening in the moment is exactly in proportion to what is unfolding internally.

If we sense this so deeply that this knowing is viscerally available when our patients are having strong emotional experiences, we will be able to offer them acknowledgement of the validity of their experience rather than having to control or change it.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“How we are seen can literally call parts of us into existence and shape new selves in the image of the one seeing us.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“It sometimes surprises me that people don't find questions addressed to their bodies silly, especially in therapy, but they rarely do”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We stayed with the one who felt dead inside, acknowledging his protective value, even though we had no cognitive awareness of who and what he was sheltering ...

'What is this depression, this one who is so still, wanting to tell us?”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“When we experience a break in connection followed by repeated attempts at repair until the bond is restored, we build implicit pathways of resilience.

We come to know in a visceral way that when things break down interpersonally, someone will return to help us come back into relationship.

That wired-in optimism and expectation makes it much more likely that we will form relationships that have this quality.

Most of the people who come to us haven't had this experience consistently in their lives, so when they encounter it with us, it is often surprising to the point of tears.

As we accept and then rejoice in our humanness, we offer this vital gift of rupture and repair to those around us.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“This wasn't a cognitive idea, but an embodied anticipation and certainty about how things work that required her body to behave in a particular way.”
― Bonnie Badenoch