A review by katiebartmess
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

5.0

This book was very hard to read. It took me about 8 months to read a few chapters at a time and sit with them. Not because of a lack in quality writing or teaching (which was excellent) or because of poor content. The content is unfortunately very interesting, but also very, very real. It was an incredible source of information and perspective. The book is very academic and so hugely informative, I could easily see this being used as educational material or a selected work for university classes, etc., but it did a great job of explaining things in simple terms that individuals who are not psychology scholars could still understand. It was also deeply compassionate, encouraging, and hopeful, and it could certainly be considered "a self-help" book too. Certainly, this book is not for everyone, and it was not ~written~ for everyone. The topics covered are uncomfortable, scary, dark, and unsettling, but to the 70% of adults who have experience with trauma, it can be a step towards a lifeline. Hopefully, the title alone is enough to warn of trigger warnings in this book. Plenty of the content is deeply upsetting (It is a book that is explicitly about physical, emotional, and sexual trauma and abuse), so be sure to pace yourself and look up trigger summaries if you are worried about something like that. 
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