Sublime

IFS recognizes that the cultivation of mindful self-leadership is the foundation for healing from trauma. Mindfulness not only makes it possible to survey our internal landscape with compassion and curiosity but can also actively steer us in the right direction for self-care.

In the traumatized person, these resources are diminished. Often, any stimulus will activate the frozen (trauma) response rather than the appropriate orienting response (i.e., upon hearing a car backfire, a traumatized vet may collapse in fear).

was simply not an option—could have entrapped me. My global activation was “all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

The body is a resonator; attuning to the energies of the world, it knows them.

People who were conditioned into this pattern also need to gently and gradually unfreeze the places where they froze in shock a long time

If Darwin was right, the solution requires finding ways to help people alter the inner sensory landscape of their bodies. Until recently, this bidirectional communication between body and mind was largely ignored by Western science, even as it had long been central to traditional healing practices in many other parts of the world, notably in India

What ethologists call tonic immobility—the paralysis and physical/emotional shutdown that characterize the universal experience of helplessness in the face of mortal danger—comes to dominate