Coregulation Quotes

“emotional regulation flows naturally from being in the presence of someone we trust”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“James Coan says, "In truth, because so many neural structures are involved in one way or another in attachment behavior, it is possible to think of the entire human brain as a neural attachment system.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We humans are always seeking the warmest attachments we can imagine”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Since we began with a felt sense of safety this day, several neural streams are initially supporting the renewal of our connection.

In our midbrain, the energies of the SEEKING system are animating the CARE system, which can both foster the good feelings between us and support offers of repair should we have a rupture (Panksepp & Biven, 2012).

Once in connection, our ventral vagal parasympathetic system is affecting the prosody of our voices, our facial mobility, and the attentiveness of our listening, maintaining social engagement (Porges, 2011). Since ventral lateralizes to the right hemisphere, we more easily stay rooted in the right-centric way of attending that keeps us in connection with this moment and with each other (McGilchrist, 2009).

In this intimacy, our brains are coupling in many regions, so there is an experience of social emotional engagement and embodied communication as we become a single system in two bodies (Hasson, 2010).

Because we are trustworthy partners in this healing process, social baseline theory tells us that our amygdalae are calming just because we are together (Beckes & Coan, 2011).

All of this is happening without doing anything, even without saying anything, in microseconds below conscious awareness because of the safe space we have cultivated over time.

We can more clearly understand why Porges says, "Safety IS the treatment".”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Our brainstems take in the rhythmic movements of [our mother/primary attachment] as she attentively follows our bid for play, our drift towards sleep, our signal that it is time to be quietly together.

In our midbrain, our SEEKING system finds the waiting eyes and arms of our mother's CARE system in times of PLAY or GRIEF, patterning the expectation that connections will be restored when they are momentarily lost, that ruptures will call forth repairs.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“The path of waiting and listening forgoes certainty and exposes us to a sense of tentative unknowing, which is often uncomfortable at best.

This may only be tolerable when we have developed some degree of trust in the inherent healing capacity built into the human system and the power of interpersonal receptivity to animate the process.

For most of us, this trust arrives because we have experienced it ourselves and can now embody it for others.

As this deep learning proceeds in us, we may be able to rest more easily into the waiting because the unknowing is increasingly being held within our expanding window of tolerance.

As we are able to work in this way, I believe our people get a felt sense of our profound and enduring respect for their inherent wisdom, something that is likely a unique and healing experience given their history of traumatic relationships.

I don't believe I have found any offering that is more empowering than respect.”
― 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

“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.”
― 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

“Paradoxically, the kind of leading we want to offer is the opposite of taking control.

Instead, it begins with accepting responsibility for getting support for our inner world and healing process to such an extent that the need for control recedes in favor of trust in the inherent healing capacity that is awakened when the necessary interpersonal sustenance arrives.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“our brains are continuously yearning for the arrival of a co-organizing other”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

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

“Through resonance and internalization of us as companions, our way of holding them may gradually become the way they are able to hold themselves.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Over our years of practice and in our daily life, we will have many opportunities to become aware of our vulnerabilities. It isn't helpful to imagine they will one day all be healed, although some will surely lessen as they receive the care we need.

One or two trustworthy people with whom we can safely share even what feels most embarrassing to us, knowing we will simply be received without judgement, are the indispensable companions for this walk.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“We can dedicate ourselves to staying connected to supportive people who will receive us without expectations or judgments.

In that process, we will internalize them as they nurture our wounded ones. They will then join and foster those parts of ourselves who can be present with the ones who come to us in their suffering and recovery.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“When we consider our rich inner communities, we will find it is quite possible that more than one pattern of attachment can arise at the same time, sometimes in support of the others and sometimes in conflict.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Our infant muscles let go and mold to the shape of our mother's bodies when we are securely held.

Our bodies learn the meaning of the sensations of hunger and thirst from the interpersonal sweetness of our need being seen, met and satisfied by our mother as food is offered.

We take in her attentiveness along with the nourishment, and this shapes our openness to all kinds of nurturance throughout our lives.

Our hearts beat more slowly and our amygdalae calm when she is in a ventral state, her presence reassuring us of the possibility of safety in connection.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“If we focus on the means to change a person's state in the direction of what we believe is greater health, we are also stepping out of empathic connection. This is a violation of our innate expectation, at every biological level, that we are meant to be embedded in a nest of warm relationships.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“Relational neuroscience increasingly assures us that we are continually shaping one another's embodied brains, and that the safety provided by deep listening offerings a unique support for engagement. However it is one thing to believe it cognitively and quite another to grow into the practice of this belief.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships

“An implicit foundation of assumed security has slowly grown beneath our feet so that we believe we will go forward together through whatever stumbles may come.”
― Bonnie Badenoch

“Struggles between our people and us over the pace of therapy can disregulate the process into a frenzy or stall it. Returning to following and responding may ease this.”
― Bonnie Badenoch, The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships