Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is only tangentially related to what I do, but it is related enough that I think it is worth discussing in this context rather than in my regular monthly book post on my personal blog. The central thesis of the book is that traumatic events change our bodies and change our brains. We live after trauma differently than we did before.
Dr. Van Der Kolk cites tons of data and provides pictures of brain scans, EEG readouts, and plenty of other things to support his thesis. He, as a psychiatrist, doctor, and trauma researcher, then interprets this data to suggest how to treat trauma survivors effectively. In most cases, our culture simply throws a bunch of labels at people and gives them drugs. Drugs certainly have a role in treating depression, anxiety, and the like, but they are not the whole story. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is also not an answer all by itself.
What Dr. Van Der Kolk suggests is a more holistic approach, one that reconnects sufferers with their bodies, helps to reassure their survival brains that they can find safety, and reignites the ability to play, laugh, and create. One of the many treatments that he has found to be effective is yoga, with an emphasis on the pranayama and meditative aspects, but he also mentions Pilates as a useful tool to help the mind and body attune to each other.
It is not an easy book to read—story after story of people who have had to deal with horrific events can be tough to take—but it does shed some interesting light on how we function and how we might want to approach helping those of us who need it most.
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