The Body Keeps the Score – Book Summary by a Therapist w/o the Triggering Bits

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I think a lot of people are intimidated by “The Body Keeps the Score”, to be honest I was too. It’s pretty long, and it has a lot of triggering examples of real-life trauma. But it’s a great book for understanding how trauma affects the brain and body and that’s probably why it’s been on the NYT bestseller list for like 5 years! 

And also that’s probably because trauma affects all of us, and Psychiatrist Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk has written the modern user’s guide to understanding it. There’s so much to talk about with Trauma and PTSD and the book is over 350 pages long, so I’m going to summarize the essentials without the triggering bits. And, you can download the free pdf summary linked in the description.

OK So, I’m excited to tell you what Dr. Van Der Kolk has learned about trauma treatments that are surprisingly effective, but first let’s look at the broad impacts trauma has on the brain, body, and relationships.

Trauma’s Big 3 Impacts

Okay, let’s start with a basic question. How would you define trauma? Most of us think of it as an event that is deeply disturbing. But really, trauma is about how different people might respond to the same event with either an adaptive response, or a traumatic response that gets the brain and body stuck reliving the trauma. And that’s one of the defining parts of trauma, that it continues to affect a person in damaging ways. 

Van der Kolk says:

“Trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present.”

So while trauma starts with an event, the brain and body’s reaction can keep a person stuck as time moves on. Rather than live in the present, survivors focus their energy on suppressing the inner chaos that arises when a trigger makes them remember (and re-experience) their past. And that affects their relationships with the people around them. 

I saw this with one of my neighbors several years ago. We have a neighborhood Facebook group where people ask to borrow stuff, post about lost pets…anything neighbors can help with. One year around the Fourth of July, a war veteran neighbor posted a request. He planned to escape to the quiet of the mountains for the 4th of July to avoid the fireworks that night, but he asked if we all could please not set off fireworks for the days around the holiday. He added that each time these unexpected fireworks went off, he would hit the floor and see desert palm trees. He’d feel like he was back in Iraq, hoping to not get hit by a mortar. He was stuck in a survival response. He said it was a very difficult week for him, and I truly feel for him. But can you see how his trauma had him stuck? He was asking his family to miss the holiday and asking our entire neighborhood to cut our celebrations to accommodate his trauma.

Trauma is not just a mental or emotional problem; it affects the whole person. Let’s look at three of the places trauma lives on in its survivors:

Trauma in the brain; trauma in the body; trauma in relationships.

Trauma in the Brain

To understand what happens in traumatized brains, it’s helpful to know that the brain has three sections that respond to threats differently.

  • The Brainstem, which some people think of as the Reptilian Brain, is in charge of survival functions and reflexes.
  •  The Limbic System manages emotions and social behavior. This is where the fight, flight, or freeze responses are triggered.
  • The Prefrontal Cortex takes care of rational thinking and decision-making. This is the part of the brain that we would normally consider as “Thinking”, and it helps us manage our life. 

But when danger is present, the prefrontal cortex shuts down and the reptilian brain springs to action, kicking us into flight, fight, or freeze. When flight-fight-freeze has worked, and we have escaped the danger, we can go back to our normal brain function. 

The body’s part in a dangerous situation is to run, scream, fight back or take some other action against the threat. Then the brain knows the threat has been handled. 

But when we can’t fight back or flee, the body’s last resort at safety is to Shut down mode.This can happen in a war zone, a car accident, or assault when running away isn’t possible. As Van der Kolk says, “Immobilization is at the root of most traumas.” Being unable to do anything about what is happening is what makes the event traumatic.

With the freeze and shut-down response, the parasympathetic nervous system takes over, which results in a slower heart rate, shallow breathing, loss of muscle tone. You might feel numb, detached or some people faint, others dissociate and find themselves watching the abuse or event as an observer, like it’s happening to someone else. 

As part of the shut-down response to trauma, some people experience depersonalization, which is when a person loses their sense of self, feeling like they are separated from their body. Researchers in the Netherlands scanned the brains of trauma survivors, and saw that the fear centers in the brain simply shut down when they recall their traumatic event. 

Now shut down is one way the brain protects itself–but you can’t selectively numb. So getting stuck in a chronic freeze or shut-down state leaves people feeling numb or detached in many areas of their lives. Burnout at work, disconnected relationships, and a general loss of the joy of life. 

The 1976 Chowchilla kidnapping is a fascinating case study. A school bus filled with 26 children and their driver was hijacked by three men in Chowchilla, California. The kidnappers drove the children and the bus driver to a quarry, where they were forced into a buried moving truck trailer. The kidnappers planned to demand a ransom but fell asleep, giving the hostages time to escape.

Understandably, the hostages developed PTSD–except for one 14-yr-old. So what was different about Michael Marshall? He led the bus driver and other children to dig their way out of the buried trailer. This act of taking control and being physically engaged in his survival is believed to have protected him, at least in part, from the severe trauma experienced by the others. I’m sure that each person on the bus went through the stages of Fight, Flight, and then Freeze. The kids reported that the bus driver shut down after realizing their situation.  But being able to take action, whether during the event or after the trauma can help victims restore their sense of wholeness. 

Trauma also impacts the victim’s ability to store and retrieve memories. Some memories get stuck as vibrant and real as the day it happened, and other memories can be repressed for years or decades. Memory loss is a common symptom of trauma.

When trauma is unresolved, after the event is over, the lower brain doesn’t know that it can stop telling the body to escape a threat that is now gone, so it will continue to secrete stress hormones, especially when something triggers the memory of the traumatic event. It could be years or decades after the trauma happened, and the amygdala will still jump into overreaction mode. That’s PTSD.

Military veterans deal with this. Their rational brain knows they are home, the war is over. But any trigger can jumpstart their lower brain. This all happens beneath the reasoning of the more evolved part of the brain, and is not a failing of willpower. Their amygdala is stuck on constant high alert, and harmless situations can trigger the survival brain to fight, flee, or freeze–sometimes all at once as the thinking brain tries to stay in control.

This can result in panic, a rage attack, or terrified cowering. People with PTSD frequently experience flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety, and emotional numbing. These symptoms often get in the way of maintaining relationships, holding jobs, and living normal lives.

Van der Kolk says:

“Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.”

The author likes the Rorschach Test as a way of seeing how his patients think differently than non-traumatized people. You’ve probably heard of these inkblots before.  Because this test is all about what meaning a person draws from the inkblot, the test can’t be faked. The patient is asked what meaning he sees in each inkblot. So for example, most people say this looks like a bat, butterfly or moth. But a traumatized person might see something that is broken or ruined, or some sort of aggressive act. Or they might not be able to imagine that this looks like anything at all. Van der Kolk says “that traumatized people have a tendency to superimpose their trauma on everything around them.” So an innocuous comment feels like an attack. An article of clothing might elicit intense shame. Or the smell of food might trigger an intense fear response. Louis Zamperini, from the Book “Unbroken” describes how a waiter once brought him white rice and he flew into a rage because it triggered memories of his time in a Japanese POW camp. PTSD disintegrates your sense of safety. 

Trauma in the Body

Most people don’t think of trauma as being anything beyond a mental health issue, which is probably why the book’s title is a good wake-up call. Since the amygdala will keep triggering a survival response, even when it’s not needed, for a person living with PTSD or in recurring trauma, such as abuse, the body continues to send out stress hormones long after the traumatic danger has passed. 

Over time, being in a near-constant state of fearful stress affects memory, attention, sleep, mood, and physiological health. Physical symptoms of unresolved trauma include obesity or rapid weight gain or loss, anorexia, chronic back and neck pain, migraines, some types of asthma, digestive problems, spastic colon/IBS, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, and other autoimmune diseases. Being under constant stress from past or present trauma also makes a person vulnerable to depression, heart disease, and cancer.  Many trauma survivors become addicted to numbing behaviors, including overeating, anorexia, addiction to exercise or work, drugs or alcohol. Some do the opposite and seek sensations that will overpower the effects of trauma they feel in their body. These people try high-risk activities including risky sex, gambling, bungee jumping, bullet biking, etc. 

For some people, trauma has the opposite effect. As a defense mechanism the brain will stop registering terrifying sensations–but it can’t selectively numb, so it will compromise all bodily sensations. This is called depersonalization. The sensory perceptions are just gone. These patients stop being able to feel whole parts of their bodies.

Imagine that someone blindfolded you and handed you an object to identify. Most people would be able to identify a car key, a quarter, or a can opener with their eyes closed. But people with PTSD often can’t put together the sensations of the object’s weight, shape, texture, etc. Their brain can’t integrate the senses coming from the body, and they can’t guess what object they’re holding. 

Guess what happens when the brain and body are unable to connect and integrate? A person cannot feel fully alive. They don’t feel physical sensations such as pleasure or pain. This leads to losing their sense of purpose and direction, even their sense of self. In severe cases, traumatized patients can’t even recognize themselves in a mirror.

Whether a trauma survivor experiences chronic pain and illness, or is not able to feel any sensations at all, it’s important for doctors and therapists to see that trauma may be at the root of what is going on. In that case, these physical problems won’t heal unless the person faces their traumatic past in a way that lets the body heal along with the mind. And I promise we’re getting to the many options for healing, but first I’ll quickly summarize what the book said about trauma in relationships.

How Trauma Impacts Relationships

It makes sense that trauma almost always gets in the way of intimate relationships. After all, if you were a soldier causing violence in war, or a victim receiving violence through abuse, the trauma makes it very hard to trust oneself or someone else.

But a lack of trust is not the only issue at play here. The book shares some of the research done by Dr. Ruth Lainus. She researched how brains react to social situations and found something amazing. For someone who has not experienced trauma, when someone attempts to make eye contact with them, the prefrontal cortex is activated and they become curious about the other person. Their mirror neurons pick up on the person’s intentions and the thinking part of the brain works through whether this person is safe or not. 

But for people with PTSD, the prefrontal cortex does not get activated with eye contact. Instead, a part of their emotional brain called the Periaqueductal Gray area lights up and generates self-protective behaviors. In survival mode when meeting strangers, a PTSD patient will often break eye contact and feel intense shame, believing they are broken because they feel afraid around people.

Also, when we look at people who had childhood trauma, more than half of them had learning or behavioral problems in school. They don’t outgrow the problems, and learn to instead hide them with secrecy or shame. In adulthood, this shame leads to missing work frequently and financial problems, which gets in the way of work and personal relationships.

Child Abuse and Neglect, the ACEs Study

Before we talk about how to treat trauma, it’s super important to say that the majority of trauma can be prevented. Van der kolk says that “child abuse and neglect is the single most preventable cause of mental illness, the single most common cause of drug and alcohol abuse, and a significant contributor to leading causes of death such as diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke, and suicide.”

I made another video about the ACE’s study, but I’ll summarize it real quick.  ACE is short for Adverse childhood experiences. This includes observing or experiencing abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or losing a parent to death or divorce or incarceration. The groundbreaking ACES study found two things. 

  1. A massive percentage (64%) of people experience at least one ACE in their life, and 16% experience 4 or more. 

And 2. ACES have a massive impact on physical and mental health for the rest of your life. Kids who experience four to six traumatic events are up to five times as likely to have chronic depression. Suicide attempts are 5,000 times more likely, alcoholism is seven times as likely, IV drug use is 4,600 percent greater, adult rape of child-abuse victims is 6 times as likely, and the list of additional traumas or high-risk behaviors goes on. And ACES drastically increase your risk of heart disease, cancer, stroke, obesity, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, I could go on and on.

Maybe you know what it’s like to be one of these kids. To live in a world that is filled with triggers. To live with multiple symptoms that are showing up in your adult life, which have their roots in childhood trauma.

Maybe your doctor is treating your physical symptoms, and while they are less bothersome, they never go away. Maybe you’re taking medication that helps a little, but isn’t getting to the root of the problem.

Much of our country’s trauma could be prevented. It might not be popular to talk about, but child abuse in all its forms is way too prevalent. Eliminating child abuse, through training and support for parents, would prevent most trauma and would solve a multitude of health conditions and societal and economic problems. If you’re watching this video, you’re already taking the first step to preventing childhood trauma. We can all make the world a better place by being trauma-informed and working to raise kids in supportive, safe families. 

Solutions for Healing Trauma

Okay, we’re finally to healing! Because trauma gets stuck in the body, the body must be treated along with the mind so it can release the emotions it has held onto in the form disease, bad habits, or reactive behaviors.

 

Before we talk about healing trauma, it’s helpful to understand what that looks like. There are basically two ways to know when trauma has been healed:

  1. You don’t rely on Trauma related coping strategies anymore. You feel safe enough that the self-protective behaviors, compulsions, panic attacks, rage attacks, substance abuse, numbing behaviors, self-destructive behaviors, passivity and so on no longer show up. 
  2. You can remember the past while staying here in your body in the present. You’re able to integrate both your memories, and your body’s sensations. You can have memories come up in your mind and sensations in your body and make space for them in a calm way. 

 

There are three main ways to address and reverse the damage of trauma: 

  1. Taking medicine to dial down some PTSD symptoms so that you can work through them
  2. Working top down, through talk therapy, reasoning, and connecting with others.
  3.  Working bottom up, by calming the body’s physical tensions and letting it have visceral experiences that contradict the emotions of trauma. We experience emotions in the heart and gut, so instead of accessing those stuck emotions through the brain’s cognition, treatment needs to address emotions like anger and fear and resolve them through the body.

 

Most people need a combination of these options. Some of these bottom-up methods are well-known, but others might surprise you. It’s worth noting that Van der Kolk doesn’t have a favorite treatment method. He practices all the treatments discussed in the book, depending on the specifics of the trauma and the person processing it.

Medication for PTSD or Trauma

Medications can be a powerful tool to help patients stay calm enough to revisit their traumatic experiences so the rational brain can integrate them.  Some medications like SSRIs, ketamine, and psychedelics may help the brain improve neuroplasticity- the ability to adapt, learn and grow. Medication doesn’t heal the trauma, it’s a tool that helps us do the work to process trauma. The point is to eventually get the body grounded in the calm and safe present so the brain can revisit the past. And then, integrate it all by letting the body take the fight or flight actions it couldn’t take during the event that caused the trauma, and then returning to a sense of calm. 

Somatic/Body Based Therapies for Trauma

When the author starts working with a patient, he helps them to first recognize sensations in their body. He wants them to recognize and name what anger or fear physically feel like: tingling, tense muscles, churning gut, feeling hollow, etc. He also helps them recognize and name relaxing or pleasurable sensations, such as sleepy muscles, or an openness in the chest when you breathe. This is a type of mindfulness exercise, which strengthens the medial prefrontal cortex. Sensing, naming, and identifying what is going on inside the body is the first step to connecting the trauma in the mind and body.

Let’s get into the body-centric trauma healing by going back to New York City in September 2001. Knowing that people would need trauma therapy, the experts recommended that therapists primarily use analytic talk therapy and/or cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). But guess what? Almost no one showed up for sessions. Dr. Spencer Eth, who ran the psychiatry department at one of New York’s hospitals was curious what survivors had done instead to get help. He surveyed 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Here is a list, in order, of what survivors found to be most helpful in overcoming any trauma they’d experienced: acupuncture, massage, yoga, EMDR. For rescue workers, massage was at the top of the list. Would you have guessed acupuncture or massage could treat trauma? At the time, almost no one did. Some other modalities that the author mentions to be helpful are freewriting, art, music, and dance. These might be surprising to those of us in the Western world, but in many other parts of the world, therapy includes physical movement, breathing, and meditation. For example, Tai Chi and Chi Gong in China, rhythmical drumming in Africa, martial arts in Brazil, Japan and Korea, and yoga in India.

Yoga as a Treatment for Trauma

We know that healing happens when we integrate our current state of safety with our past bodily memories of trauma.  Because our sense of self is anchored to our bodies, we must be in tune with our bodies, not dissociated or numbing. Yoga therapy helps patients get curious about what the body is telling them rather than resisting and fearing its sensations. Practitioners focus on both their breath and bodily sensations while leaning into physical stress and discomfort. Once they can breathe calmly and stay physically relaxed, survivors have the ability to add in talk therapy to process their horrifying memories without freezing up. 

As an additional benefit, better breathing improves problems with anger, depression, and anxiety. Yogis have a connection to their bodies in which they feel wholly alive and safe in their bodies. But as Van der Kolk learned with his patients, yoga’s poses can at first feel really intense for trauma survivors. So when using yoga therapy, he recommends starting very slowly and gently with an instructor trained in trauma-informed care. I’ll include three websites down in the notes that the author recommends for yoga and mindfulness.

Communal Rhythms and Theater as Treatment for PTSD

I’ve explained what the book says about dissociation. The author says that treatment for dissociation needs to include attunement and mirroring to help the patient find his voice. That brings us to two treatment options that might not sound like therapy, but they are surprisingly effective.

The first is what Van der Kolk calls Communal Rhythms. Basically, this is music in a group setting, and it’s great for teaching attunement. Rhythmic activities, such as drumming, dancing, and singing, can synchronize brain waves, regulate the nervous system, and promote a sense of unity and safety. Anyone who’s been in a marching band or a dance troupe understands the unity that happens when everyone attunes to the beat to create a great performance.

Dramatic Theater is another wonderful place to find one’s voice. Van der kolk describes how participating in theater can help trauma survivors work through their emotions with scripts, allowing them to feel deeply but in a controlled setting. It’s like because they’re playing a role through someone else, there’s a buffer to help tone down the intensity while still allowing them to process their trauma. 

While more research is needed to fully understand how theater contributes to healing, Van der Kolk presents it as a powerful and promising tool for trauma recovery. And at the very least, he strongly recommends that schools not cut programs like drama, chorus, art and PE that help kids who are dealing with trauma stay connected to their bodies and their group of safe people. 

EMDR for PTSD

You may have heard of EMDR, which is short for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. EMDR helps survivors process traumatic memories to make them less distressing.

Researchers believe that EMDR reproduces what happens in deep sleep. During deep sleep, there’s a sleep stage called REM- Rapid Eye Movement, and while you’re sleeping, your eyes literally move side to side. During this sleep stage the brain is processing your memories and information from the day, without emotions, and basically integrating those memories and filing them away.  More time in REM sleep reduces depression and helps people work through tough emotions. Unfortunately, for people with PTSD, those memories of trauma are often so intense that when their brain is trying to process those memories and file them away, instead the memories come up as intense nightmares with strong emotions, this wakes the person up, interrupts their sleep and interrupts the emotion processing. This often makes the PTSD memories and flashbacks worse. 

Francine Shapiro,found that when she processed painful memories during the day while also moving her eyes side to side, those memories weren’t as painful anymore.  So she created a systematic treatment approach that helps PTSD patients use that bilateral movement to help them process through traumatic memories. And now EMDR is one of the most effective, evidence based treatments available for PTSD. 

Therapy involves the patient recalling distressing events while doing some kind of bilateral movement, like watching a moving light. The patient doesn’t have to talk about the details of the traumatic memory, but she’ll report feelings or reactions that come with the memory. Interestingly, EMDR can help even if the patient doesn’t fully trust the therapist.

One example in The body keeps the score was a woman who was in a car accident and her young daughter was killed. Despite trying talk therapy, she was experiencing debilitating symptoms, but after a few sessions of EMDR she no longer experienced PTSD.

Research shows that EMDR

  • Significantly decreases PTSD scores.
  • Performs better than placebo or Prozac.
  • Cured 60% of patients.
  • Decreased depression scores. 
  • But, Adults with histories of childhood trauma, or people who experienced repeated trauma  instead of a single instance do not respond as well to the treatment. 

Neurofeedback for Trauma

Neurofeedback is another therapy that needs better research for psychiatric application, but its use for treating trauma is promising. In a neurofeedback session, a patient wears a cap or other device with electrodes that measures brain waves and works with a computer to give you positive feedback–a tiny dopamine reward–when the brain waves come close to the desired wave pattern. This trains the brain to relax and get good at making the desired waves. 

For patients with PTSD, their brain repeatedly fires circuits that keep them stuck in fear, shame, and rage. But if the patient’s brain can be trained to relax, they are mentally more resilient and can work on integrating all the ways that the trauma is recorded. 

The book shares the story of a woman named Lisa for whom neurofeedback was the key to her healing from trauma. Lisa had been abandoned by her father and physically tortured by her mother. As a teenager, she spent time in mental hospitals, shelters, foster families, group homes, and living on the street to escape her mother. As an adult, she was stuck in a dissociative state and talk therapy did nothing but put her into a panic. 

When she started neurofeedback therapy, Dr. Seburn Fisher started by rewarding healthy brain waves in the fear center of Lisa’s brain. After a few weeks, Lisa noticed that some of her constant fears dropped away and she was more relaxed around people. After six months of treatment, she stopped dissociating and started gaining her sense of self. I really love the way she describes it:

“I now can actually talk about things like my childhood. For the first time I started being able to do therapy. Up ‘til then…I couldn’t calm down enough. If you’re still in it, it’s hard to talk about it. I wasn’t able to attach in the way that you need to attach and open up in the way that you need to in order to have any type of relationship with a therapist.” When explaining what life is like for her after neurofeedback, she said, “I’m not held hostage by [my feelings]…I’m not in fight-or-flight all the time…Neurofeedback freed me up to live my life the way I want to….” Lisa went on to graduate from nursing school and, as of the publication date of the book, she worked as a nurse at a hospital.

IFS- Internal Family Systems for Trauma

The next type of therapy for PTSD is Internal Family Systems therapy, or IFS. I’ll make a future video about this topic, so here’s a quick summary.

IFS works with the idea that we all have different parts inside of us. You might have a playful or adventurous part of you, a short-tempered part, and a friendly and relaxed part. IFS is similar in that it calls the different parts of a person that person’s internal family. If this sounds familiar, that might be because the movie “Inside Out” was based on this form of therapy. 

For trauma survivors, their internal family parts all work to hide or manage the part who is hurt by the trauma. In IFS therapy, the mindful Self learns to take charge. The mindful Self is the calm, undamaged essence who can lead the other parts to healing by taking care of them. The other parts can come to trust that the Self will handle things well. This creates self-compassion within the person. The way the book puts it, “the Self is like an orchestra conductor who helps all the parts to function harmoniously as a symphony rather than a cacophony”. There’s plenty of research showing that IFS is an effective treatment approach for PTSD.

Active Participation in Therapy for PTSD

When it comes to trauma treatment, people need to actively participate in their healing, and not be just a passive patient accepting medicine. Van der Kolk says, “Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”

Healing from trauma is a process, not an event, and you’ll probably have to keep trying new things, learning and growing through your experience, rather than simply be healed by a single intervention. 

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You also can’t do it alone, a community is for a person to heal. For children, the presence of attuned and responsive caregivers is crucial. Adults, too, recover in the context of relationships. AA or veterans’ groups, religious communities, and loved ones can all provide the physical and emotional safety needed for a person to process their trauma. Research shows that the first thing people do when facing a severe threat is look around them for someone to help them. When enveloped in the love of a parent, spouse or other protector, their body can return to a sense of safety. Loving, attuned relationships can even prevent a traumatic event from being traumatic to the person.

But, when it’s the caregivers who create the trauma, patients rely on the relationship with their therapist. They need to know their therapist cares about them as a person. One of Van der Kolk’s teachers taught, “The job of therapists is to help people ‘acknowledge, experience, and bear’ the reality of life” I also hope that all of you can develop strong relationships with a support group, a faith community, friends and family. But a therapist might just be the first person in your tribe. 

3 Takeaways from “The Body Keeps the Score”

I got three big takeaways from The Body Keeps the Score.

 

First, it’s helpful to remember that mental illness can’t be defined as precisely as most physical illnesses. Therapists, teachers, doctors, and everyone really,  need to recognize that a variety of behavioral problems may have trauma at their root.

 

For example, a patient may be diagnosed with bipolar disorder because of her mood swings, depression because of her despair, and ADHD because of her lack of attention. She could be medicated to treat the symptoms for all of those things. But a good therapist would look at that whole picture and recognize there is likely an underlying trauma that needs to be healed.

 

Second, there are lots of ways to heal trauma, and most survivors need a combination of methods. Van der Kolk groups them into six categories:

  1. Dealing with hyperarousal – Medication, yoga, and rhythms help here.
  2. Mindfulness – Slowing down to bring self-awareness to how the body is doing when the brain thinks about past trauma will help to process the trauma.
  3. Relationships – Connecting with others who provide physical and emotional safety to process the trauma.
  4. Sensory integration – Communal rhythms and playing together in groups restore attunement to others and self.
  5. Physical touch and bodywork – Methods such as therapeutic massage and cranio-sacral therapy release emotional tension and help a dissociated person wake up to the parts of the body being touched.
  6. Let the body take action – Survivors who were forced to submit and be still when abused or attacked need to be able to act on the physical impulses that they couldn’t take in the middle of the trauma. They need to be able to hit, push, or run away.

 

This takes me to my third takeaway, which is that we can heal our traumas. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is about a woman whose childhood was filled with abuse. She enrolled in what is called the model mugging program, which teaches women to recondition their freeze response and to turn fear into fighting energy. Shortly after finishing the program, this college student was walking alone when three male attackers jumped out of some bushes and demanded her money. Her new response was to take a karate stance and yell back at them, “Okay, guys, I’ve been looking forward to this moment. Who wants to take me on first?” All three attackers ran away!

 

I love this! It’s a wonderful example of how a person can be empowered through their healing. We can process trauma in such a way that the brain stays online, we stay connected to language and story, and the body stays calm, all at the same time.

My Review of The Body Keeps the Score

Okay, so what did I think of this book? I really liked it. When it was published back in 2014, Van der Kolk said that “we are on the verge of becoming a trauma-conscious society”. I think this book has contributed to our society talking about what was once taboo and ignored, and that’s a really good thing.

I still wouldn’t recommend this book to everyone, because there are a lot of triggering stories. But I would recommend it to school teachers and other caregivers, or those who have friends or loved ones who are dealing with PTSD. You’ll come away with a good understanding of how deeply trauma affects the whole person.

If you do know a trauma survivor who could benefit from therapy, please share this video with them so they can see there are many options for healing trauma. Hopefully at least one of the treatment methods I’ve mentioned will click for them. And I have a pdf for you with a list of the different therapy methods in the book. Print it off and talk to your therapist about different options, or see what is available in your area.

If you’d like to learn how to regulate your nervous system I’ve got a free online course “Grounding Skills for Stress, Anxiety and PTSD. You’ll learn to work through that fff response and return to a state of calm. Link’s in the description. 

If you are living with the effects of trauma, I hope this video helps you know your next step toward healing, because healing is possible. Thanks for watching and take care.

Spend time with Emma in a live webinar every month, as well as get access to all her courses by joining the Therapy in a Nutshell Membership. 

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