The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
Note: I first picked up this book 3 years ago at McNally Jackson and opened it to a random page. I couldn’t get through it – I felt too exposed and seen, like the author was describing me all too well. I shut the book, put it back on the shelf, cried and left the bookstore. In November 2024, I restarted therapy and in our first session we talked about my inner child and trauma which made me think of this book. I read it in 3 weeks.
My reflections are still processing but pretty sure I have an abandonment wound and it has impacted by relationships. I feel curious to do the work, to acknowledge it and befriend it. Bessel says we can heal our wounds. My therapist disagrees, he says that we only learn to live with them and they never heal. My belief is that I can heal, I’m committed to the innerwork and I’ve got the warmest social support. I’ll write more on this soon.
Anyway, here are my takeaways:
For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.
When researchers played a loud intrusive sound, mice that had been raised in a warm nest with plenty of food scurried home immediately. But another group, raising in a noisy nest with scarce food supplies, also ran for home, even after spending time in a more pleasant surroundings. Scared animals return home, regardless of whether home is safe or frightening.
When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present. They are just as furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed, or frozen. After the emotional storm passes, they may look for something or somebody to blame. When we cool down, hopefully can admit our mistake.
If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play and cooperation. If you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.
Our emotions assign value to experiences and thus are the foundation of reason
Pavlov’s “Reflex of Purpose” which he called “the most important factor of life.” All creatures need a purpose– they need to organize themselves to make their way in the world, like preparing shelter for the coming winter, arranging for a mate, building a nest, and learning skills to make a living. One of the most devastating effects of trauma is that it damages this Reflex of Purpose.
Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health. Social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma.
Many of my patients have survived trauma through tremendous courage and persistence only to get into the same kinds of trouble over and over again. Trauma has shut down their inner compass and robbed them of the imagination they need to create something better (luckily I felt like I’ve imagined a better life for myself since I was 6 years old, visions from God)
As we enter this world, we scream to announce our presence. Children are also programmed to choose one particular adult with whom their natural communication system develops. This creates a primary attachment bond.
Avoidant toddlers are likely to become adults who are out of touch with their own feelings and those of others. As in, “I got hit and it made me the success I am today.”
If your caregivers ignore your needs or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hospitality or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter but your body is likely to remain in high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation or abandonment.
“What cannot be communicated to the mother cannot be communicated to the self.”
Learn to tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.
Children are programmed to be fundamentally loyal to their caregivers, even if they are abused by them.
Our patients did not have the option to run away or escape; they had nobody to turn to and no place to hide. Yet they somehow had to manage their terror and despair. They probably went to school the next morning and tried to pretend that everything was fine. <<<< that was me.
How much a mother rat licks and grooms her pups during the first 12 hours after their birth permanently affects the brain chemicals that respond to stress. The rat pups that are intensively licked by their mothers are braver and produce lower levels of stress hormones under stress than rats whose mothers are less attentive. They also recover more quickly– an equanimity that lasts throughout their lives. They develop thicker connections in the hippocampus, a key center for learning and memory, and they perform better in finding their way through mazes.
While politics and medicine turned their backs on the returning soldiers, the horrors of the war were memorialized in literature and art.
Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress
Memories that are retrieved tend ot turn to the memory bank with modifications. As the story starts being told, particularly if it is told repeatedly, it changes. The act of telling itself changes the tale. The mind cannot help but make meaning out of what it knows, and the meaning we make of our lives changes how and what we remember. As long as a memory is inaccessible, the mind is unable to change it.
To regain control, you need to revisit trauma. You need to confront what has happened to you and find ways to cope with feeling overwhelmed by the sensations and emotions associated with the past. The engines of posttraumatic reactions are located in the emotional brain which manifests itself in physical reactions: gut-wrenching sensations, heart pounding, breathing becomes fast and shallow, feelings of heartbreak. Only way to consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness. What is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we’re feeling, befriend it.
Think about the role that oxygen plays in nourishing your body and bathing your tissues with the energy you need to feel alive and engaged
The body is physically restricted when emotions are bound up inside. People’s shoulders tighten; their facial muscles tense. They spend enormous energy on holding back their tears. When physical tension is released, the feelings can be released. Movement helps breathing to become deeper.
Being traumatized is not just an issue of being stuck in the past; it is just as much a problem of not being fully alive in the present.
As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally as war with yourself. Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy, it saps your motivation t o pursue worthwhile goals and it leaves you feeling bored and shut down. Stress hormones keep flooding your body, leading to problems with your bowels. Only after you identity the source of these responses can you start using your feelings as signals of problems that require your urgent attention.
Freud wrote that trauma “immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying effect, and when the patient had described the event in the greatest detail and had put the effect into words.”
Communicating fully is the opposite of being traumatized.
One system creates a story for the public consumption, and if we tell that story often enough, we are likely to start believing that it contains the whole truth. The other system registers a different truth: how we experience the situation deep inside. It is the second system that needs to be accessed, befriended, and reconciled.
Small children are particularly adept at compartmentalizing experience
Let your body tell the story it wants to tell
Traumatized people need to learn that they can tolerate their sensations, befriend their inner experiences, and cultivate new action patterns. Simply noticing what you feel fosters emotional regulation.
2 most important phrases in therapy, “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Approach the body with curiosity rather than fear and everything shifts.
Awareness that all experience is transitory changes your perspective on yourself
We all know what happens when we feel humiliated: we may get furious and plot revenge. We may decide to become so powerful and successful that nobody can ever hurt us again.
Pushing away intense feelings can be highly adaptive in the short run, it may help you preserve your dignity and independence; it may help you maintain focus on critical tasks like saving a comrade, taking care of your kids, or rebuilding your house. The problems come later.
Beneath the surface of the protective parts of trauma survivors there exists an undamaged essence, a Self that is confident, curious, and calm, a Self that has sheltered from destruction. Once it is safe, the Self will spontaneously emerge, and the parts can be enlisted in the healing process.
If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished.
Being validated by feeling heard and seen is a precondition for feeling safe, which is critical when we explore the dangerous territory of trauma and abandonment
The more early pain and deprivation we have experienced, the more likely we are to interpret other people’s actions as being directed against us
Treating trauma through theater - “Training actors involves training people to feel deeply and convey that feeling at every moment to the audience so the audience will get it.” - Tina Packer, Shakespeare & Company founder
Competence is the best defense against the helplessness of trauma