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

challenging slow-paced

4.5

Dense and lengthy but insightful. Over 30 years of research into trauma is crammed into this work, and a lot of it makes for unbearable reading – it can be very neuroscience heavy and academic and there are very graphic descriptions of patient experiences. That said, I would still recommend it because our world is becoming an increasingly traumatic place. 
 
Pluses: I’ll be real. As a survivor of PTSD, this was an exhausting read. I found my body reacting very viscerally. Ideally, I should have processed it piece by piece and read it over a few months, but it was long overdue at the library, so I decided to just crank it out (bad idea lol). Totally worth it, as you can see from my stick notes, but not remotely easy. Even so, I think this is a must-read for everyone. In my master’s program application, I argued that trauma is the greatest threat to our national well-being. The more life I live, the more I see that we are all impacted, directly or indirectly, by trauma. And we are absolutely regressing – dare I say, failing – at addressing this public health crisis. Bessel is truly a pioneer and this book has fundamentally changed the way we study trauma. 
 
Wishes: 1. As with anything, especially a book written by a white man, it could have been more intersectional. It seems to be a glaring omission to talk about trauma without talking about intergenerational trauma, or the effects that oppressive social conditions have on psychology. It’s pretty shocking to be that he can spend so much time talking about the way that family units and early formative social experiences shape our psychology without paying ANY attention to the ways that other social forces like institutional racism and poverty likewise have an effect on people’s emotional lives. 2. The way he discussed rape victims put a bad taste in my mouth. 3. It felt disturbingly voyeuristic. It is not important that we know every detail of a person’s trauma in order to empathize or address it.
 
Teachers are not perfect, so I will take what is helpful and leave the rest.
 
I recommend this to anyone interested in trauma’s hijacking of the brain and body, and to anyone suffering from trauma or living with someone who is working with people that are. (So… basically all of us?)
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