In this video, I will give a summary and my takeaways from the seminal book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk.
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*** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. **
Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I will give a summary and my takeaways from the seminal book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk.
The scope of this book is so huge and so impactful that I'm really going to struggle to do a single video on it. Based on the enormous impact of trauma, particularly childhood trauma, on our society and our communities -- this book really needs to be required reading for everyone -- whether you have personal experience with it or not. Bessel van der Kolk, along with Judith Herman, are pioneers in the field of trauma research. Both of them have specific experience with victims of childhood incest and have advocated for a new diagnostic category called complex trauma, which looks slightly different from, and can be harder to recover from, than standard Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. This book is chock full of information and it's presented in a way that is accessible and easy to understand for anyone.
I'm a mental health therapist in training and, once I started seeing clients, I quickly determined that this is the one area I really needed to have more knowledge. Like medical doctors, a mental health professional's first principle is to do no harm. With clients who have experienced trauma, you can easily stumble into material while in therapy that provokes a flashback or panic attack and just not know how to handle it. This is one of the books that I needed to read just to get a foundational understanding of trauma and the paths to healing.
Van der Kolk covers, not just the neurobiological underpinnings of trauma, research findings, case studies, and best practices, but also provides a bit of a memoir and history of trauma from his perspective. He is a psychiatrist that came of age before trauma was a diagnosable condition, so he had not only a front seat view, but was able to help steer the bus to where we are now in our understanding of trauma. He started out by treating Vietnam Veterans at the VA Hospital. But he quickly determined that trauma not only impacts veterans and survivors of disasters, but also victims of childhood trauma. There are insane numbers of people impacted: 1/4 of all war veterans develop PTSD, 1 out of every 6 women has experienced rape or attempted rape -- 1/2 of those occurred before the age of 15. 3 million reports are made of child abuse each year -- and those are only the ones that are reported. You get the picture and it's horrifying. Many times those people are haunted not only by what happened to them, but also by what they may have done to survive -- whether it's a war veteran or a child raped by her father.
Van der Kolk goes into all of the neurobiology behind trauma including the nervous system, brain, and the role of stress hormones -- all pretty fascinating stuff. He talks about the issues around the medical model, which is based on the question -- what is wrong with you? Trauma-sensitive institutions are now beginning to ask the question “what happened to you?” instead. Throwing prescription drugs at this problem is also not particularly helpful. And it ignores these four fundamental truths:
- Humans CAN hurt each other -- but we can also heal each other
- We heal in community by feeling safe enough to interact and talk together
- We can use our body's natural systems to help calm us down, and
- We need to change the policies and social conditions that perpetuate trauma.
Van der Kolk tells us that traumatic memories are not stored the same way that regular memories are stored. Normal memories are stored like a ribbon with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Traumatic memories are stored like shards of glass -- each shard is an emotional or sensory experience -- like scents, visions, and sounds. People who have been traumatized can have flashback or triggers out of the blue -- these will make them feel like the trauma is happening right now -- not in the past. Even when they are not experiencing that terror, they are like a house with the smoke detectors constantly going off. They are stressed out, irritable, jumpy, and always on high alert and they can get stuck in that place of hyper vigilance. Conversely, some people, in an effort to make the constant alarms less terrifying, shut down many of their senses so that their experience is distant, hazy, and flat -- but that coping strategy also serves to deaden their ability to experience positive emotions like joy, love, and connection . . .