The Body Keeps the Score

We were talking about mothers and daughters, and she looked up at me and she said, "I want you to read these books," and she wrote them down.

And one of them was Bessel van der Kolk's, The, uh, Body Keeps the Score, and said, "I want you to go and read them, and they're really good around understanding trauma." And I remember I wasn't insulted, but I was, remember a bit...

It was discordant.

I thought, "Oh, trauma.

Did your understanding of her, of your relationship with her, shift at all through taking MDMA?

It did.

I mean, the first shift was reading The Body Keeps the Score and all of that work.

So she too had an incredibly violent childhood, but also quite socially isolated, um, in the cane fields of Northern Queensland.

Like, I really...

You know, I was reading the self-help books for PTSD caregivers, and they were giving me advice like, "Build a safe room in your house.

Like, remain eye, like, maintain eye contact with your partner at every moment every time he talks."

Hmm.

Yeah

...

but when you're writing to write books that people might read, there is a moment where you have to let go of control of the story.

Mm.

Question number eight.

Authored by Bessel van der Kolk, the 2014 bestselling book that explains how psychological trauma physically reshapes the brain and body is The Body Keeps the Score.

Moving on to round five.

So as always, round number five is our connection round.

In those times, there was times I would like be realizing, oh, my body needs this or my body's doing this and I was trying to be hyper aware of it.

But what I found over time in the book, The Body Keeps Score, they kind of talk about how a body's reaction can be a trauma response rather than a physical, you need this.

I think a lot of spiritual people have it all wrong.

If you feel anxiety about this, that means back away from it.

Yeah, that's really helpful.

And, you know, I want to jump now maybe to get a little bit more specific here and think about, you know, there's a really popular book, you know, it's very, very well received in the, you know, kind of wider context of just, you know, even the average person reading it, but that would be the book, The Body Keeps Score.

Yeah.

And so, well, I mean, there's many secular and Christian thinkers, right? They've praised it for mapping out how trauma alters the nervous system.

He's a psychiatrist that spent decades with trauma survivors.

He has a book called The Body Keeps Score.

You probably heard this book.

It's very popular.

And that part leans on contested frameworks.

What's reasonable? Trauma clearly has psychological effects.

The reach though, the part that's a bit of a reach is the literal tidy, the body keeps score mechanism as popularly understood.

So he's basically validating the book, but overselling the science.

I think we've talked about this a lot over the years, but when we're triggered and we have trauma in our past, it can feel like it's happening all over again.

Everyone's different, but I mean, in Bessel van der Kolk's book, Body Keeps the Score, we learn that there's cellular memory.

Like, our actual cells of our body remember.

And so when we, you know, are Or triggered by a smell, by something that we see, by a place, by a sound.

...

in our world, and books like "The Body Keeps Score"-

Mm-hmm

... have an awful lot to say about trauma in our day.