Daniel Maté

In many children—and I was certainly one—early reactions like these become embedded in the nervous system, mind, and body, playing havoc with future relationships.

The home becomes a place where we unwittingly re-create, as I did, scenarios reminiscent of those that wounded us when we were small.

Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you

Raw wound or scar, unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people. Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be. By impelling us to suppress hurt and unwanted parts of the psyche, it fragments the self.

fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world. That fracturing is the essence of trauma.

An event is traumatizing, or retraumatizing, only if it renders one diminished, which is to say psychically (or physically) more limited than before in a way that persists.

A traumatized nervous system, on the other hand, never gets to unfreeze.

choose vulnerability over victimhood

Among the most poisonous consequences of shame is the loss of compassion for oneself. The more severe the trauma, the more total that loss.

Our beliefs are not only self-fulfilling; they are world-building.