The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

And it’s this disconnection of mind and body where trauma lives. Our mind can’t talk that part of us into feeling safe again. But the parts of us that are more automatic that manage and respond to threat - our body doesn’t forget that. But our body - and that’s an imprecise term here. It obscures the memories or convinces us our victimization was our fault or it covers the event in a shame so thick, we refuse to discuss it. So when we face an event that could rupture our relationship with the community or the family, particularly for children of the family that we depend on, the mind often talks us out of it. And our minds evolve to manage our social relationships. The mind - it hides and warps these traumatic events and our narratives about them in an effort to protect us. The devastating argument it makes is not that the body keeps the score, it’s that the mind hides the score from us. That is when an experience becomes a trauma - when it disconnects us.Īnd this is a part I didn’t understand from the way the book is talked about. They can disconnect our body and our mind. It is about traumatic experiences: sexual assault, incest, emotional physical abuse, war and much, much more. Certainly subversive in how it will leave you thinking about yourself and those around you. The core argument is - I want to use the word “subversive” here. Got it.īut I was really wrong about that. So even though I hadn’t read it, I thought I knew it: trauma lodges in the body, we carry a physical imprint of our psychic wounds, it’s all very hard to heal. I’d heard it discussed so many times, and I’d read it written about. “The Body Keeps the Score” is one of those books people have told me to read for a long time.

I’ll be honest of my own history of it here. That so many of us are turning to it, it says something profound about where the national psyche is in this moment of, yeah, trauma. This is a book very largely aimed at other psychiatrists. And it’s pretty clearly written with a professional audience in mind. “The Body Keeps the Score,” it is a searing read about the way trauma disconnects our minds and our bodies. And if you know what this book is, that is wild. It’s number one, as I write this, the book’s 147th week on the paperback nonfiction list - 147th. “The Body Keeps the Score,” which is a book about trauma from 2014, was back up near the top of the New York Times list. And a few months ago, I began to notice something strange.

So one of the things I do for the show is I try to keep an eye on the best seller lists. I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” Transcript This Conversation Will Change How You Think About Trauma The author of “The Body Keeps the Score” on how trauma transforms the body and the brain.

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk