Quotes from Tian Dayton

Neural repatterning comes as we enter into and sustain new types of relationships that allow us to reregulate our sense impressions slowly and over time.

All the wisdom in the world cannot put in one's heart the love one yearned for as a small child.

One of the problems with shutting down feeling is that we begin to live in our heads. We tell ourselves a story about what we think we're feeling or what we think we should be feeling rather than feeling our genuine emotions and allowing words to grow out of them so we can accurately describe our inner experience. When we can feel our feelings and then translate them into language, we can use our reasoning ability to play a role in regulating our emotional experience.

Change also comes when we learn to do something different, to make choices in our thinking and daily routines that interrupt a downward spiral and create an upward one.

When our anger sits within us and never gets worked through, or when we don't have constructive ways of processing or dealing with it, we may try to get rid of it by projecting it at someone else, or we may try to drown out our frustration, resentment, and pain with alcohol, drugs, food, or compulsive behaviors.

In other words, they are doing the necessary therapy to understand their trauma-related issues, but they are ignoring the needs of their bodies and not balancing their daily stressors with support and stress relief.

We can take a daily inventory of how much exercise we get, how much sleep we get, our network of relationships, the meaning and sense of purpose that drives us, and the amount of stress we have. This inventory allows us to see if our lifestyles are supporting or undermining our ability to actualize positive change.

One does not need to create some powerful therapeutic intervention in the life of a CoA in order to make a big difference. An open door, a couch to curl up on, an after-school snack, or a place to play can make the essential difference for CoAs: they just need a place to go that isn't in a state of chaos, somewhere where they feel they can relax.

I can live a comfortable life. The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

In fact, it is precisely those early experiences that lay down the neural template from which we operate for the rest of our lives.

Intimacy, with its accompanying feelings of vulnerability and dependence, brought up every insecurity, unresolved wound, and frantic hope I had stored in me. All chickens came home to roost.

When we grieve, we naturally allow ourselves to feel the anger, hurt, disorientation, and sadness that are a part of processing pain. As we grieve, we let go of some of our hypervigilance. When we understand that feeling these feelings are part of the healing process, and that by feeling them we can allow them to dissipate, we begin to see light at the end of the tunnel.

The more I worked with clients' grief issues, the better they were getting. Additionally, trauma was not being talked about as a relational issue; it was talked about as if it happened just within a person. It was during this period that it also became clear to me that the trauma I was seeing in clients was the direct result of relationship pain, and that if it remained unresolved, it would continue to drive dysfunctional relationship patterns.

But even blessed and intelligent families lose it when their emotional problems overwhelm them. For our families it appeared to be alcoholism that led to relationship trauma … or was unhealed relationship trauma the prequel that led to using alcohol to self-medicate emotional pain?

The same taboos against genuine feeling that were in place in his childhood will clamp down around him all over again and he'll become what we might call emotionally illiterate. He won't put words to his feelings, much less talk them over. So the more frustrated his wife becomes, the more he'll withdraw or blow up or freeze. In this vicious circle, a past issue comes to life in the present.

Otherwise, we may not understand how yesterday's experiences are driving our behavior today. One-to-one therapy, 12-step programs, and group therapy are all places where this repair can occur. I have found the role-play techniques of psychodrama particularly useful here. Being able to momentarily inhabit the role of the confused, wounded, or even elated child, for example, allows the child within us to have a voice while the adult in us looks on.

Confrontation reduces the effects of inhibition," reversing the detrimental physiological problems that result from inhibition. When we make a lifestyle of openly confronting painful feelings and we "resolve the trauma, there will be a lowering of the overall stress on the body." Confrontation "forces a rethinking of events. Confronting a trauma helps people understand and, ultimately, assimilate the event.

Our experiences combine together forming a brain/body template, from which we operate throughout our lives. This may be one of the most important understandings we can have. Our early experiences literally weave themselves into our neural systems, becoming a neural basis for self-regulation and emotional sobriety.

After reading it, I knew I had a serious problem. I don't drink, so that wasn't it. But everything else that characterized addiction—"stinkin' thinking"; the kind of thinking that is loaded down with circular rationalizations, distortions, and denial of reality that made you feel either you're crazy or everyone else is; repeating the same dysfunctional relationship patterns over and over and over again—I had it all.

even though the false self is meant to protect the more vulnerable self, it actually has the effect of weakening it. When people who have become dependent on false-self functioning go into therapy or enter a 12-step program, they can go through a period of feeling very vulnerable and shaky because they are removing their coping strategy and exposing the pain underneath it. But over time, new healthy emotional habits get created, and new ways of healthy coping get practiced and adopted.

There are essentially three forms of memory, implicit or unconscious memory, explicit or conscious memory, and sensory or body/kinesthetic memory. Much of our childhood experience becomes part of our implicit (unconscious) memory and our sensory (body) memory.

Our bodies don't really distinguish between physical danger and emotional stress. The natural fear response associated with our fight/flight apparatus causes the body to react to physical or emotional crisis by pumping out sufficient quantities of stress chemicals, like adrenaline, to get our hearts pumping, muscles tightening, and breath shortening, in preparation for a fast exit or a fight.

We have understood and recognized how emotional trauma changes not only the mind and heart of a person, but the body as well; how living with chronic emotional pain affects what we now know to be our limbic system; how when the limbic system is impacted, our ability to regulate our emotions is undermined; and why we can't "just get over it" when we have been impacted by the repeated mobilization of our own fear/stress response.

Science can now illuminate why approaches like psychodrama, 12-step programs, group therapy, journaling, bodywork, yoga, exercise, and massage work; why one-to-one therapy can help us learn a new style of attachment; why changing the way we live and the nature of our relationships can change the way we think and feel, and vice versa; and why quick fixes don't work but why a new design for living does.