- Book Title: The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
- Author: Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.
- Publisher: Penguin Books
- Year Published: 2015
- Number of Pages: 464
- Purchase: Amazon.com
What is ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ About?
The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain, and Body in the Transformation of Trauma transforms our understanding of traumatic stress. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a leading expert on trauma, applies modern scientific approaches to reveal just how trauma reshapes both the body and the brain. With over 30 years of research and working with survivors, Van der Kolk teaches us how our bodies confine us to the past despite any effort of the mind to leave it behind. While powerfully arguing that trauma is one of the world’s most urgent public health issues, he explores innovative treatments that offer new pathways to recovery by utilizing the brain’s natural ability to heal.
Key Takeaways from ‘The Body Keeps the Score’
- Trauma is universal and occurs more frequently than we tend to think. One doesn’t have to a veteran to experience it- trauma happens to our family members, friends, and neighbors.
- Trauma not only affects those directly exposed to it but those around them. Healthy relationships become extremely challenging to maintain, ranging from issues such as substance abuse to emotional absence.
- Van der Kolk asserts that the safest way to help traumatized children is to provide them with a safe environment, allowing them to connect with others, learn to self-regulate, and develop autonomy around their own lives.
- Survivors are often triggered, forced to endure the powerful memories of the trauma. Physical responses to these memories are common, and flashbacks cause people to relive the trauma’s mental and physical experience.
- While normal memories dissolve and shift, traumatic memories are vivid, unchanging, and easily triggered. Van der Kolk discusses the effectiveness of EMDR, a common treatment intervention for trauma, in which many of his patients have witnessed incredible results.
- We can learn to regulate our own physiology through movement and breath. Mindfulness, yoga, dance, healthy supports, and new therapeutic interventions such as neurofeedback are vital tools for survivors as they discover how to accept, cope with and recover from their life-changing experiences.
The Body Keeps the Score Review: Overall Rating
The Body Keeps the Score is an essential read for anyone interested in comprehending and treating traumatic stress. This book begins to provide a new method in effectively dealing with the horrific events that so many of us endure.
Healthcare professionals can appreciate Van der Kolk’s long-standing argument that PTSD should be a separate diagnosis from C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) and developmental trauma disorder. As of yet, these new diagnoses haven’t been accepted by the American Psychology Association but have made a significant difference in the way we understand trauma in patients.
Although The Body Keeps the Score isn’t a quick or easy read, it’s informative and comprehensible even without a healthcare background. Not only does this accessible book offer inspiration to those who care for sufferers of trauma, but this valuable information presents hope for survivors and their families seeking meaningful treatment from the ongoing pain.
Mindsplain Caduceus Rating
The Caduceus is the staff carried by the Greek god, Hermes. This symbol contains a staff spiraled by two snakes and often topped with a set of wings.
The Caduceus represents Hermes and all domains associated with him. Some of the most well-known associations with Hermes are trades, occupations, commerce, negotiation, printing, writing, and eloquence.
However, the characteristics of the Caduceus invoked here are its power to awaken the sleeping, put the conscious to sleep, ease the pain of death, and revive the dead.
Book APA Reference
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
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