ALT "When we don't have vision for ourselves, when we don't have hope and belief and imagination for things to be different, then we need to get that hope from outside ourselves."

ALT "We're consumed by shame and that belief in our inherent badness, and we daren't reach out for anything better, because we don't want to be disappointed. So we're protecting ourselves from future pain, the pain of shattered hopes, by not hoping at all. And we just try to manage our symptoms and cope hour by hour, and we daren't lift our eyes to the horizon and wonder what's beyond."

ALT "The gaps between therapy sessions can be as developmentally important as the therapy sessions themselves."

ALT "As trauma survivors we missed out on some fundamental developmental stages as babies, as toddlers, as young children, and instead we were exposed to the most horrific forms of abuse and emotional distress. And then we grew into adulthood thinking there's something wrong with us as people: that we're evil, we're toxic, we're bad, we're faulty – because we struggle to manage our emotions."

ALT “What eventually occurred to me, after many long years of resisting the idea, was that kindness begets kindness. That actually I’ll grow and develop and become a better person, and a kinder person, if I treat myself with kindness. And that, I think, is revolutionary.”

ALT “Recovery doesn’t mean living a lie and pretending that the trauma didn’t happen. Recovery just means that trauma doesn’t dominate our life any more.”

ALT “Kindness doesn’t judge us. Kindness puts an arm around us and encourages us to keep going. And that’s what we need. We don’t need keyboard warriors pointing out all our inadequacies and shaming us for our imperfections. We need kindness kings who will give us the benefit of the doubt, who’ll treat us with dignity and respect, who’ll honour our efforts, who will see the good in us.”

ALT “I don’t want to talk in the impersonal, soulless terms of diagnoses and labels. I want to talk in terms of human suffering that needs a solution.”

ALT “Dissociative identity disorder is when it is too painful to be ourselves and we have to become other versions of us just to cope with the pain of being alive.”

ALT "We don't want to be too far in our comfort zone that we don't grow, and we don't want to be so far outside it that we overstretch and fall on our faces."

ALT "The neurobiology of trauma is a neurobiology of freeze and a neurobiology of stuckness – of staying safe by staying still. It keeps us alive, but we live life with the handbrake on."

ALT “Recovery from trauma starts with acknowledging the existence of ‘bears’. It requires the involvement of a safe tribe. It necessitates the telling of our story and the healing of our wounds. And it requires action to keep us safe from further bear attacks.”

ALT "Trauma isn't just a very distressing event. It's qualitatively different, not just quantitatively different. Trauma involves life-threatening powerlessness and leads to a fundamental change in our neurobiology."

ALT "Society can tolerate us as having experienced trauma, as long as we've got over it. As long as we've put it behind us. As long as we've moved on. As long as we're not stuck in the past. It's like the very first mention of trauma seems to trigger in people the need to know that we're over it."

ALT "Our bodies have evolved to be regulated first by other humans, before we can learn to do it for ourselves – and yet beyond childhood this is somehow frowned upon. I believe that we need to revisit the developmental stages we have missed out on in childhood, of learning to be soothed and developing the brain apparatus then to do this for ourselves."

ALT "Society can tolerate us as having experienced trauma, as long as we've got over it. As long as we've put it behind us. As long as we've moved on. As long as we're not stuck in the past. It's like the very first mention of trauma seems to trigger in people the need to know that we're over it."

ALT "Trauma isn't just a very distressing event. It's qualitatively different, not just quantitatively different. Trauma involves life-threatening powerlessness and leads to a fundamental change in our neurobiology."