Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Reference, Psychiatry, Psychopathology 

With The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk explores how traumatic experiences physically rewire the brain and disrupt traumatized people’s relationships with their bodies. In the first two sections, van der Kolk recounts his own experiences researching trauma and explains the current neurological understanding of trauma: exposure to life-threatening situations where one is helpless to protect oneself triggers a fight-or-flight reaction that can remain with someone their entire life, even long after the exposure is over. He blames much of the prevalence of mental illness and substance abuse on trauma from child abuse and neglect, and criticizes psychiatrists for failing to consider children’s emotional disturbances in terms of their trauma history, and instead relying on superficial diagnoses based on their behavior. He also distinguishes between normal and traumatic memories: unlike normal memory, which is social and used to make meaning of our lives, traumatic memory is physical – the body replays the sensations of the trauma even if the mind cannot remember the exact circumstances of the event. As part of treatment, van der Kolk believes that it is crucial, though not sufficient, to integrate traumatic memories into our life stories to better understand them. In the last suggestion, he suggests a variety of treatments, including eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), yoga, and theater to get the body and the mind in tune and to process traumatic events.