I'm going to be referencing this book forever. A compendium of medical and psychiatric scholarship on trauma, personality, illness, and the body. IncrI'm going to be referencing this book forever. A compendium of medical and psychiatric scholarship on trauma, personality, illness, and the body. Incredibly helpful....more
A phenomenal exploration of psychiatry, diagnosis, narrative, and mental health that seamlessly integrates medical literature, journalism, critical thA phenomenal exploration of psychiatry, diagnosis, narrative, and mental health that seamlessly integrates medical literature, journalism, critical theory, and personal narrative. Deeply moving, resonant, and incisive in its insistence that we get curious about the stories that have become calcified about ourselves. It's haunting, implicating, disconcerting, and extraordinarily beautiful at times. A remarkable feat of literature that will stay with me forever....more
As someone who suffers from chronic pain I’ve found it difficult to find resources about the connection between trauma + physical pain. This is becausAs someone who suffers from chronic pain I’ve found it difficult to find resources about the connection between trauma + physical pain. This is because the mind-body connection are (I think intentionally) underdeveloped in Western medicine which so often rehearses the body outside of context.
Van der Kolk shows how trauma can shape every aspect of our psychology + physiology: making us attracted to dangerous/painful situations, affecting our perception of time + space, dispossessing us of the ability to describe our discomfort, causing chronic muscle pain, headaches, + autoimmune disorders. We live in a world that constantly underemphasizes the emotional trauma even though the same parts of the brain are impacted by emotional pain as by physical violence. Heartbreak, betrayal, neglect, depression physically hurt. This continual undervaluation of emotional stress means that it accumulates, depletes significant energy + attacks our most vulnerable organs.Van der Kolk describes chronic pain as when your brain gets trapped in a pre-programmed escape route, stuck in perpetual fear. For him, the goal is about how to develop coping strategies for trauma that don’t retraumatize us: reintegration, not repression. Healing is possible when we commit to this reintegration. Talk therapy isn’t enough: we can’t just describe the problem, we have to experience “immobilization without fear.”
As a doctor, his book has a clinical bent + outlines various strategies like EMDR + biofeedback which help break trauma cycles. I wish that there had been more discussion of people who have complex trauma where there is no “before” or “after” to the traumatic event. I’m thinking here about how racism + transphobia are continual forms of trauma that we can’t move out of. There was so much important info in the book, but I was kind of turned off by the clinical language where complex people became case studies and cultural rituals became Western mindfulness practices without appreciation for context.
As a survivor of abuse this book can be difficult to get through, so serious content warning. ...more
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