The Body Keeps The Score

The Body Keeps The Score teaches you how to get through the difficulties that arise from your traumatic past by revealing the psychology behind them and revealing some of the techniques therapists use to help victims recover.

Difficult events can have a long-lasting negative effect. Just remembering them can raise blood pressure and deactivate rational thinking parts of a victim’s brain. Many of these experiences came from childhood and have been around for a long time. But there is hope for even the nastiest of demons you face.

One technique is as simple as moving a finger across a patient’s vision. As they follow the finger with their eyes, audio cues from the medical professional help them make new associations. EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing might sound crazy, but it’s wildly effective at helping people recover from trauma.

The reason it’s so helpful is because of the way it allows victims to integrate their traumatic memories. Part of the problem with these events is that their memory can play out as if it’s happening in the present. Integration allows for them to simply add these events to a memory bank instead of thinking they’re real.

The author used this technique to help a woman named Kathy who had just attempted suicide for the third time. At a young age, she’d been raped, assaulted, and abused by her father.

Using EMDR, van der Kolk helped Kathy re-imagine these memories in a helpful way. She imagined a bulldozer destroying her childhood home and the memories that came with it. Another visualization had her thinking about locking her dad out of a cafe. She progressed well and 15 years later the author reconnected with her to discover she was happy and healthy.

Your body and mind are more connected than you might think. Figuring out how your emotions work and impact your body is essential for balance and stability in life. Trauma makes this really hard because of the way it puts a sort of alarm system in our bodies. A child who was sexually abused, for example, might feel panic when doing something as simple as cuddling with their significant other. People usually try to numb these feelings with drug or alcohol abuse, or by overworking themselves. But these temporary fixes only put a bandage on rather than getting to the root of the issue. That’s where unifying the body and mind with yoga comes in handy. Yoga allows trauma victims a way to understand emotions and how their body handles them. The author had a patient named Annie who had been raped and suffered from PTSD that decided to give it a try. It was tough at first because…