The Body Keeps the Score By Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D pdf

Details about The Body Keeps the Score By Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D PDF

Book Name: The Body Keeps the Score
Authors: Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D
Pages: 560
Genre: Self-help book
Publish Date: 24 September 2015
Language: English

Book review:

The Body Keeps the Score By Bessel Van Der Kolk M.D this book for a particular reason because i think it's a book that's near and dear to many trauma survivors and people who work in the trauma field it's an excellent book if you're starting on this journey it's a book i would really recommend

i'm going to take you through this book why i recommend it yeah the basic nuts and bolts of what it covers at the end of that i'm going to share with you what i also had a problem with the book and it wasn't actually the content of the book itself and then i'm also going to share with you a little trick about

this book or a little function of this book that is a little bit got nothing to do with the book but it can help you in another way and i'll get to that right at the end of the video so bessel van der klock is a psychiatrist and neuroscientist

that's been working and researching the field of childhood trauma and trauma for the last 30 to 40 years and this book came out in 2014 which is basically a summary of all his research and it's part of a growing body of work related to the treatment of childhood trauma and ptsd and adult trauma

that is kind of now at the cutting edge of how trauma is approached and that is really what it's considered to be a bottom-up top-down method which is looking at the somatic and physicality of trauma it isn't just a psychological or emotional or cognitive process that it's looking at trauma as being something that is lodged in our bodies so hence the title of the book the body keeps score

the body remembers the body keeps a count of what you've forgotten 30 years ago that maybe you've suppressed or just kind of discarded your body remembers your mind may not you may have switched off but your body remembers and it's that old saying what you don't remember remembers you and what

he's really laying out both with science case studies and just his own lived experience is how does that trend what's the science of that this is what he's really presenting is the science of how our body keeps score and he does that a number of different ways and and there are things

i really like about this book and and i i found the the the way it's all presented i think makes a lot of sense it flows very smoothly so first he kind of goes over the history of trauma like what's you know how we got here like how do we get to this point he goes all the way back 100 years or so ago and looks at you know the models and methods of approach and how really that kind of didn't work or miss things and how we've got to this point here he then looks really

at trauma in the brain so like how does if you go through a traumatic experience if you're in a war and you see someone head their head blown off right next to you or something extremely traumatic what's what does that

do to your neurobiology and it does something and this is really what he lays out in the book it does something it's not just a psychological thing or an emotional thing that that has an immediate and lasting effect on someone's brain on someone's physiology and he goes through what that is and why that is and the mechanisms of that and it's it's fascinating

sad all at the same time that this these experiences we have these so so social interactions and and life experiences are not just in our minds they lodge and and remain in our bodies often in a very negative or difficult way so it goes through the trauma of the brain then he looks at like what happens to tr

to what happens when trauma happens to children and he looks at various case studies and the science behind traumatizing children if you're beaten on a regular basis as a child or you're sexually abused or you go through emotional neglect you go through adverse childhood experiences what does that

what lasting impact does that have on a child's physiology biology nervous system neurobiology etc etc etc and he just lays all that out he just unpacks it you do this this happens you go through this experience it'll have this type of effect on the body and whatever you've psychologically processed whatever you've gone through in therapy with have a cognitive behavioral therapy whatever it is if that hasn't really been the physiology of that impact hasn't

been addressed understood and come to grips within our bodies then a lot of that work will feel like it's not really getting you anywhere and if you read the reviews of this book on amazon a lot of the people who gave it five stars say wow this totally changed my understanding now i realize why

i was going nowhere in therapy or why i was going nowhere in this or that or the other it's like ah i get it so a light bulb kind of moment for people and then he looks at the the the imprint trauma leaves on our physiology so that's the the the the last part of that section because the book's really broken

up into kind of this is the problem this is what it looks like here's the science behind how trauma stays in the body and what it looks like from a neuroscientific point of view to a nervous system point of view and the second half of the book she looks at what are the solutions what can we actually

do about this and so the the last section of the what is the problem part looks at how trauma is imprinted like so you go through these traumatic experiences you go through them during your childhood how does that show up as an adult what does it do to our memory what does it do to our ability to emotionally connect with people and and again he kind of unpacks all that and what he does in this book is he it's quite i mean parts of it quite heavy it's not

a john grisham kind of pulp fiction read it does take some degree of concentration but he does punctuate it with case studies and stories and experiences and his kind of view on things so you know it does get a bit science-y in parts but i didn't find it was too much or too saturated it's not a academic paper it is definitely written for the consumer for the survivor for the professional

i feel like it was done quite well in that regards i didn't find it got too heavy too much he's the editors have laid it out in quite a good way and the second half of the book really gets to the solutions like given all this given this is where we end up this is where you find yourself you read all that

you think oh that's me i can relate to that what do you do and he goes through various methods from mindfulness to yoga to somatic therapies to neurofeedback to really get it how do we get a sen a sense of our physicality again how do we get back in touch with our bodies how do we how do we re-feel and reconnect to that somatic sense of self and why that's so critical in

the healing process and and it's really good you know so it's it's it lays out some really great science and research and it's very it's very informative instructive and kind of like wow and he lays out some very concrete solutions and practical methods but in addition to that throughout the book i think he's also quite he does a pretty good critique of the social and economic structures that perpetuate that from education to criminal justice to kind of like this isn't just a an individual with a therapist kind of problem this is a wider social issue about

how we understand ourselves how we how we relate to each other and i think he presents a very com compassionate understanding of trauma and you can feel that in his writing this is a man that has a real vocation for helping people heal and although he's a scientist and the book is grounded in science i think what comes through very clearly is a lot of warmth a lot of compassion

a lot of insight and understanding for his clients and just for people in large and i really like that about the book it had a real feel of this is a person who really cares and really gets the kind of the fundamental issues and what he presents in the book is a very hopeful picture that at the end of the day our wounds come from our relationships our trauma comes from generally people traumatizing

us and us being traumatized in relationships and to regain our health emotionally we have it's found in our relationships and this is where he presents the paradox i think for a lot of trauma survivors of that on one hand our wounds come from our relationships they come from being hurt and we we end up protecting ourselves from that intimacy but at the same time we deeply

need that intimacy so we end up with this dilemma on one level that the thing we need to do to heal is the very thing that hurt us and and obviously what he's presenting in this book is to address that we have to get down to our bodies we have to get back in our bodies and to feel the intelligence of our bodies the pain of our bodies the trauma of our bodies and gradually through

some of the methods he presents is reconfigure and re-experience ourselves in a way where we can be disarmed with others where we can feel like we can let our guard down and be close and connected in a way that is safe on one level and he kind of presents that so look i think it's a great book

i think that's a must read one problem i did have with the book and this definitely wasn't the book itself is i read it when it first came out in 2015 i think or maybe 2016 and i read it just at the beginning of my when i started getting therapy my my therapist recommended i read it and as i read it i found it a little bit confronting i found a little bit like uh as i was reading

particular stuff about childhood the the childhood trauma and the effect it had biologically and neurologically and the lasting effects it can have in that regards and i felt yeah i found a bit confronting it's a little bit like finding out you have type 2 diabetes and you know it's no big deal lots of people have it then you start reading maybe i'll have to get my feet amputated maybe

i'll go blind maybe i'll have kidney failure and you think oh actually that's pretty bad that's that's not no biggie that's a big deal i need to take this thing seriously and i had the same kind of experience whereas like i was reading and thinking this idea i had in my mind at the time that

i was just going to get therapy for six months kind of sort out all my childhood trauma and i'm just going to get on with my life it kind of brought that to a crashing end it was a realization this is this is serious there is lasting physiological impacts of what i went through that

i can't just kind of flick a switch and fix and so i found it i found it hard to get through at certain points and i put it down and came back to it but you know i persisted and i'm glad i did get through to the solution part because that's obviously a lot more hopeful and it kind of says this is how these things can be reversed or certainly live with better so in that regards

i did have a problem with it in that regards not the content of the book but just i did find it a bit of a reality check it's certainly poured water and that idea that i could just kind of get therapy and be done with it um but in a good way i think it kind of it shook me a little bit but i found it was helpful because

it made me take this healing process a lot more a lot more seriously the last thing i wanted to mention this is like it's not a trick it's just more i think one of the functions of this book can serve is also to inform you of where people are at in their understanding of trauma and if you are in the beginning of this journey and you are seeking a therapist or you're working with a psychologist or a trauma recovery coach and you ask them oh what do you think of

this book and they say to you i've never heard of it or i've i don't know of it i would give that person a wide birth and because you know this book and the books around it the body remembers is really at the cutting edge now of how trauma's being understood

if you're dealing with a therapist that's meant to be helping you heal your childhood trauma and they really have no idea of this author and all the authors surrounding this author then in my humble opinion i would say they're not really suitable to treating childhood trauma so that's just something to keep in mind not that you go around testing people on their knowledge of it but yeah if you are beginning a journey and you are genuinely looking for a therapist this is something that must be on the recommended reading list

i believe so i think it's good to use it as a little bit of an asset test to determine where someone is so look i hope this has helped as i said i'm going to be doing more book reviews in the future because i there's so many books that have helped me and i really like to share that with you.

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