The Body Keeps the Score: A Book Review

Hello all. I wanted to start by saying you won’t see many book reviews on my blog, but I thought this one was special, so I wanted to share. Full disclosure, I listened as an audiobook as opposed to traditional reading. For those of you who struggle to sit down and read, I strongly recommend audiobooks. You can even get them for free from your local library.

Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, author, researcher, and educator. He has started and studied several psychological methodologies and programs related to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) with a focus on veterans and extreme childhood abuse. He disagrees with the mainstream practice of medicate and release. He argues that this does not offer a long-term solution or the ability to heal. He believes that we need to focus on reintegration of the self through different therapy and activity methods so that we can be happy, healthy, and most importantly, whole.

The argument is that trauma fragments us. He explains a lot of neurology about how memories that are formed very early in life or during major traumas can be incorporated in fragments, meaning that when recalled, our brain can’t always make the distinction between now and then. Thus, our body will respond as though the threat is current. We may also see the memory as though it is happening now, what we think of as a flashback. To survive trauma when we have little to no control, we may also learn to dissociate from our body or a part of ourselves, from as simple as numbing out to as complicated as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Trauma results in an increased risk of body problems, such as rheumatoid arthritis, autoimmune disorders, and chronic fatigue or pain. Trauma also impacts our ability to maintain relationships and get along with people.

Doctor Kolk emphasizes the need for:

• Somatic therapies
  • Types of therapies where the body is processed instead of the mind. It could include massage, dance, or yoga therapy as examples. It can include touch or being exposed to different body sensation or focus on sensory awareness.
  • Somatic means being of the body, separate from the “mind.” He discusses, at length, the need to feel in your body (the opposite of dissociation).
  • Most of the book seems to emphasize these types of therapies (hence the name of the book).
• Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy
  • A person goes through and tells their story (can be out loud or silently) while their eyes follow a finger (or something) moving back and forth across the vision. It’s believed that this somehow (maybe related to REM sleep) allows the brain to reprocess the event correctly and properly encode it in memory without the problematic side effects.
• Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy
  • This approach (as I understand) seems to embrace the idea that we have many internal personas, which I believe. It takes a look at different aspects and basically addresses them as though they were separate individuals (including different ages) until we can integrate better and form healthier protective measures and heal the wounded parts.
• Neurofeedback training
  • Learning to intentionally produce certain brainwave patterns to learn to relax or strengthen certain parts/patterns of the brain. He mentioned a story of this helping with ADHD which definitely caught my attention.
• More creative therapies like school interventions and making the internal ideas of family external through a sort of improv(ish) theater therapy
  • Ideas that sadly, you are less likely to find in wherever you live (so I won’t spend much time on them).

The good news is some of what he discusses can be achieved without a direct need for a therapist. Obviously, if you have severe PTSD or suffered from extreme childhood abuse, especially sexual, you will probably want a therapist to help you cope with what comes up during this work, but for most of us, we can probably handle the stress and annoyance as we work through things on our own.

So what are the parts we can do ourselves? The most exciting option he mentions? Get regular massages! Of course, it’s not that simple, but what an easy place to start if you can afford it. From there, we start getting to work. Things like yoga, group singing & dancing, theater, martial arts, basically anything that requires you to be present in your body and aware of it. If you want to improve your mental health, he recommends these as places to start as they bind us to others while centering us on our body. Theater also allows us to try on different roles and personas so that we can grow in directions we like with less upfront risk to our ideas of self.

He takes time at the end to discuss how the removal of extracurriculars at school, like music, theater, and sports could backfire on our society as these may be the best methods of mitigating childhood trauma effects. He heavily stresses that these are often removed from the schools in the most difficult living areas, leaving students who already experience more trauma than average without a way to process everything. This costs society in obvious ways, like higher expenses for adult mental health issues, criminal incarceration, higher job turnover, higher unemployment and in less obvious ways, like less aware parents, unkindness to people we meet, and a lack of caring for our neighbors.

It is a long book, but I would recommend for anyone who want to see a broader picture of how we can improve the state of humanity or even just their own life.

Big takeaways for me were the need to get more in my body. I will definitely be getting more massages. I need to give more thought to what else I want to do, but a short yoga routine or joining a martial arts program sounds like a good idea. I miss dancing, but I’m not sure my knees will cooperate with that one.

What about you? Have you read the book? Will you? What is something you already do or plan to do that will improve your connection to your body? Did you already take up one of these activities and notice an improvement in your mood or health? We’d love to hear about it.