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A review by nicmargan
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
3.5
I took a detour from natural-disaster books to learn about trauma this month.
At the start of the book, we meet a soldier who won’t take his pills because he feels he must remain a living memorial to the friends he lost, so their deaths won’t have been in vain. This introduces the idea that some part of traumatised people remains stuck in the past.
This idea is borne out in studies presented later, in which it is shown that the bodies of some people after a traumatic event will continue to secrete stress hormones long after any threat has passed. This emotional information can make rationalising difficult, so that a small problem can be blown out of proportion because of the inability to self-regulate.
One of the main features of what makes an event potentially traumatic is if the event endangers the person’s sense of safety around other people. This could be from experiencing the horror of what people are capable of in war, or the horror of being sent to war by a government you trusted, or abuse or neglect by a carer or loved one. One study showed that the security of children’s attachments to their mothers consistently predicted the amount of morphine children in a burns unit needed to control their pain.
Trauma can also affect memory. The details of events become repressed or are experienced unlike other memories (in a sequence or narrative), but in sharply exposed, jumbled and incomplete sensations. Historically, trauma has been deemed made-up or the fault of the victim. When soldiers after World War II were treated for PTSD, doctors ‘almost invariably found the root cause in pre-war experience: the sick men were not first-grade fighting material… The military proposition is [that it is] not war which make men sick, but that sick men can not fight wars.’
Most of the second half of the book looks at treatment options and I appreciated that so much space was given to solutions.
Though I struggled at times with the long, technical and heavy nature of this book, it achieved the admirable task of identifying a set of social problems that are so pervasive they are often regarded as normal, and giving a roadmap as to how they don’t have to be.
At the start of the book, we meet a soldier who won’t take his pills because he feels he must remain a living memorial to the friends he lost, so their deaths won’t have been in vain. This introduces the idea that some part of traumatised people remains stuck in the past.
This idea is borne out in studies presented later, in which it is shown that the bodies of some people after a traumatic event will continue to secrete stress hormones long after any threat has passed. This emotional information can make rationalising difficult, so that a small problem can be blown out of proportion because of the inability to self-regulate.
One of the main features of what makes an event potentially traumatic is if the event endangers the person’s sense of safety around other people. This could be from experiencing the horror of what people are capable of in war, or the horror of being sent to war by a government you trusted, or abuse or neglect by a carer or loved one. One study showed that the security of children’s attachments to their mothers consistently predicted the amount of morphine children in a burns unit needed to control their pain.
Trauma can also affect memory. The details of events become repressed or are experienced unlike other memories (in a sequence or narrative), but in sharply exposed, jumbled and incomplete sensations. Historically, trauma has been deemed made-up or the fault of the victim. When soldiers after World War II were treated for PTSD, doctors ‘almost invariably found the root cause in pre-war experience: the sick men were not first-grade fighting material… The military proposition is [that it is] not war which make men sick, but that sick men can not fight wars.’
Most of the second half of the book looks at treatment options and I appreciated that so much space was given to solutions.
Though I struggled at times with the long, technical and heavy nature of this book, it achieved the admirable task of identifying a set of social problems that are so pervasive they are often regarded as normal, and giving a roadmap as to how they don’t have to be.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Child abuse, Domestic abuse, and Emotional abuse