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

emotional informative slow-paced

4.0

This is heavy reading and it took me a long time to get through it. But it is very worthwhile and fascinating reading too, and I think I would like to own a copy. It's just such an important book, and important work. It isn't going to give you ways to heal your own trauma directly or immediately, it's more about understanding the ways trauma affects us - but that understanding can be a profound help in a long term sense, I think. It's pretty academic in nature, but it provides an overview of many personal experiences and studies of a lot of different therapies and approaches to addressing trauma, and I think there's a lot you can glean and perspectives you can use for yourself even if treatment isn't readily available to you. But treatment absolutely should be available, to all of us, and I wish we as a culture were willing to address trauma and traumatized people differently. This book shows us the many, many ways American culture is shaped by its complete refusal to address developmental trauma, and how far reaching and negative those impacts are...and how we could change that, if we (especially government and health care systems) were willing to try in a systematic way.

It is important to note that the author describes in detail many, many horrifying personal experiences, and that it has the potential to be extremely triggering. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Child abuse, Death, Rape, Sexual assault, Violence, and War