Quotes by "Bonnie Badenoch"

Sometimes people begin, discover how much pain and fear they are holding, and adaptively decide to take whatever gains they have made and stop. Occasionally we reach the limits of our competence or capacity and must help one of people find someone or a nest of people who can hold their wounds when we can't. We could likely add other situations in which we have parted with someone early in the relationship or at a time that seemed premature. All of this is part of human limitation in both of us.

implicit memory can change

profound resources of inherent wisdom and health are alive in us

The depth at which we take in the preceding generations astonishes me. There is likely an epigenetic component to this as well as transmission through the internalizations that get passed down through the generations. Whole cultures are carried forward that way, so it makes sense that family legacies might be transmitted that way as well.

This was the unexpected ... unforeseeable resolution of the paradox ... her personal goodness was no longer the issue because it had been replaced by the sweetness of relationship.

I have other stories just as mysterious, just as beautiful, just as sacred, but it seems good to stop here and wonder if it is possible for us to begin to let go of our expectations about the shape in which healing may arrive, to trust the treatment plan lying dormant and waiting within our people, to cultivate a gradually gathering stillness so that, in the safety of the space between, healing pathways have the possibility of revealing themselves.

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.

We humans are always seeking the warmest attachments we can imagine

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.

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.

... 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.

As we make the journey inward with our people, we will come to the next challenge to our compassion: those inner community members who have actively bought harm to the young ones inside. This is such tender territory, a place where we need to acknowledge the suffering our people have sustained without demonizing and alienating the ones who bought it, for they are now part of the ones in our care as well. This can be radical inclusiveness at its most healing, widening our joined windows of tolerance to truly accept every part.

Bit by bit, our people begin to embody the changed anticipation of being cared for and treated with kindness and respect. Part of what strengthens this new way of being comes from us having co-internalized one another. We continue to be their reflective companion on the outside, and they will also feel how we continue to carry them with us in our inner world. It is quite beautiful to watch this healing unfold, often revealing itself as changes in body, feeling, behavior, relational choices first, then later affirmed in more frequent words of tenderness toward themselves.

Each of our parents and others close to us offer their unique version of attachment, so while we have four categories to give us a general outline of what may occur, we will find that each person's expression of each style is as individual as a fingerprint.

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?

We live within and beyond our own skin at the same time.

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.

Traumas embed when our system is overwhelmed by pain and fear without having sufficient internal resources or companionship to help integrate the experience ... Our people may see others being present, but as either unavailable for support or actively injurious, or the experience may have been so terrifying that even had someone tried to help, our people might not have been able to receive it ... what remains now is a sense of isolation with the remaining anguish and terror. Over the years, I have found that as soon as a sense of accompaniment enters the memory, there is a new foundation for doing the work. Just as our people have internalized those who injured them, that same capacity can bring us inside to support processing the emotions and to resolve this primary wound of being alone.

our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other

May we each find a forest-bathing path that can be a daily balm in this taxing world.