The Body Keeps the Score is a book by Bessel van der Kolk, MD. This well-written, essential guide for those with trauma covers many of the challenges associated with recovering from trauma. The author is compassionate and wise in offering hope and direction to trauma victims. Clinically, she highlights the mistaken tendency to consider trauma a simple psychological issue. Instead, Dr. van der Kolk explains how the body can entrap emotions when children or adults are exposed to trauma.
Trauma represents a unique category of psychological experience. There is an intense moment, or moments of fear, which impacts how the brain functions from that point forward. Then, out of embarrassment, shame, or pure fear, traumatized victims are often reluctant to discuss their trauma. Finally, once they share their story, the treatments offered have typically failed to help.
For example, traditional therapy has been notoriously ineffective in helping with trauma. Despite the idea that talking about past pain will resolve it, this treatment model does not work.
In addition, Dr. van der Kolk emphasizes that antidepressants have been remarkably ineffective in helping children and adults who struggle with depression. We have been misled to believe that antidepressants will solve the problems associated with past trauma and depression, but in fact, the rate of depression has increased over the years.
What Does Work for Trauma?
Dr. van der Kolk discusses two effective methodologies for resolving trauma. One very practical and effective treatment approach involves neurofeedback, a technology that utilizes biofeedback of brain waves to change and release stuck patterns of thought and emotion in the brain. She notes that this technology is frequently helpful with traumatized patients.
As an adjunct, EMDR is a treatment methodology that is also beneficial in helping to release stuck patterns from a history of trauma.
Why Humans are so Affected by Trauma and Get Stuck in Patterns?
Humans have remarkably complex brains of almost 100 billion neurons, each capable of perhaps 20,000 connections each. Thus, the capacity for learning and growth is almost unlimited and, in many ways, inconceivable in it’s potential. Yet, this complex brain has several biological mechanisms which limit its capacity to grow and evolve.
One of these stems from the impact of intense emotions, such as those that occur with trauma. Whether a child or adult, a traumatizing moment (i.e., overwhelming fear) releases not only a flurry of neurotransmitters but also powerful hormones of stress within the body. This combination causes the brain to abandon its higher cortical functions in service of more primal responses.
In other words, in a moment of trauma, there is a deep fear, and this either leads to a fight/flight syndrome or, even more devastatingly, it leads to a more reptilian-based response of simply freezing.
Either way, the trauma and the resulting intense emotions create a preferred neural network that overrides more logical, advanced cognitive functions. This sets up the victim to fall into one or two tendencies: First, there is the reactive tendency, which flows from the fight-or-flight network in the brain. Under stress, such individuals will react intensely, running away from stress or engaging in a battle. Often, this produces considerable conflict in relationships.
The second tendency is the reptilian response, which leads to freezing up when exposed to even mild levels of stress.
Either of these patterns greatly debilitates children and adults because the brain chooses a more primal reaction in response to any stress or fear, and sophisticated cognitive processes are simply not available.
Why Neurofeedback Works with Trauma?
Neurofeedback can help with trauma because this technology works to change how the brain processes information. With trauma, those preferred primal responses are a locked-in network that overrides wiser, more tempered responses. They’re like neural loops that are easily accessed under the slightest condition of stress.
Neurofeedback technology is capable of interrupting those stuck patterns and pointing the brain toward more resourceful ways of looking at the world and coping with stress. Over 40 years of research suggest that neurofeedback can change the most difficult psychological conditions.
Trauma need not be your destiny. Dr. van der Kolk explains how this is true regardless of the complexity of your trauma.
While other therapies have failed, neurofeedback is remarkably effective at breaking up stuck patterns that other approaches simply can’t touch. This is particularly the case when clients utilize EMDR or similar methods to assist with changing these unconscious loops.
Check out this information to learn more about how we use Neurofeedback to help our clients.
Why the Book Should Be Titled:
“How the Mind/Body Keeps the Score”
In my view, a more appropriate title would have been “How the Mind/Body Keeps the Score.” Why is this the case?
It’s pretty straightforward. There is no ‘body memory’ without the mind. There’s also no mind that is relevant without the body.
To change how we experience life after trauma, we certainly must address the mind while appreciating how the body sustains those memories. Neurofeedback is the technology that changes how the mind holds the memory in the body.
Yet, at the same time, it is also valuable to utilize yoga, stretching, breathing, and massage as tools to help the body release more kinesthetically anchored emotions.
When utilizing neurofeedback to open those loops in the mind, it is useful to engage the body in actions that provide more freedom of movement and open the door to a release of physically held emotions. However, for decades, those physical/body-based practices have helped those with trauma cope, but they have not provided a full release.
True psychological freedom is possible when the brain can release those stuck patterns through technologies like neurofeedback. Your brain is still quite neuroplastic and capable of change. Break out of your stuck patterns now.
Learn more about how neurofeedback works by checking out our information here:
