“Many people don’t like being touched if they are angry, but women seem to have more trouble than men with arousal if they are upset.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“The difference in our bodies’ responses may make male-female connection especially tricky in such moments: this one simple difference in female reaction to different ways of being spoken to is one enormously significant reason that so many sexual approaches from men to women in long-term relationshi…”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“The woman literally often can’t take an intimate touch if her lover has recently been verbally disrespectful, or has failed verbally to soothe 'the Goddess in her' at some point beforehand, priming the release of oxytocin and vasopressin in her body and preparing the parasympathetic nervous system t…”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“Just as being valued and relaxed can heighten female sexual response, “bad stress” can dramatically interfere with all of women’s sexual processes.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“To enter the transcendental state that takes the female brain into “high” orgasm, you absolutely need to feel safe; safe from “bad stress,” in the sense of knowing you are entering a trance state in the presence of someone who will protect you if necessary at the very least, and not endanger you or…”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“The brain gets very confused. And that leads to problems with excessive anger, excessive shutting down, and doing things like taking drugs to make yourself feel better.”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org
“If you’re an adult and life’s been good to you, and then something bad happens, that sort of injures a little piece of the whole structure. But toxic stress in childhood from abandonment or chronic violence has pervasive effects on the capacity to pay attention, to learn, to see where other people a…”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org
“It's about becoming safe to feel what you feel. When you're traumatized you're afraid of what you're feeling, because your feeling is always terror, or fear or helplessness. I think these body-based techniques help you to feel what's happening in your body, and to breathe into it and not run away fr…”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org
“We just did a study on yoga for people with PTSD. We found that yoga was more effective than any medicine that people have studied up to now. That doesn't mean that yoga cures it, but yoga makes a substantial difference in the right direction.”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org
“But if you're in an orphanage for example, and you're not touched or seen, whole parts of your brain barely develop; and so you become an adult who is out of it, who cannot connect with other people, who cannot feel a sense of self, a sense of pleasure. If you run into nothing but danger and fear, y…”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org
“The human brain is a social organ that is shaped by experience, and that is shaped in order to respond to the experience that you’re having. So particularly earlier in life, if you’re in a constant state of terror; your brain is shaped to be on alert for danger, and to try to make those terrible fee…”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org
“Mindfulness has been shown to have a positive effect on numerous psychiatric, psychosomatic, and stress-related symptoms, including depression and chronic pain.”— Bessel Van Der Kolk, amazon.com
“Many of the signals that either stoke or diminish female desire have to do with the female brain’s question: Is it safe for her?”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“The female body reacts in the same way to “bad stress” whether the context is the birthing room or the university or the workplace. If the female brain senses that an environment is not safe, its stress response inhibits all the same organs and systems, regardless of setting.”— Naomi Wolf, amazon.com
“If you’re an adult and life’s been good to you, and then something bad happens, that sort of injures a little piece of the whole structure. But toxic stress in childhood from abandonment or chronic violence has pervasive effects on the capacity to pay attention, to learn, to see where other people a…”— Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, sideeffectspublicmedia.org