Morgan Blackledge's Reviews > The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

The Body Keeps Score is my jam. It's better than that. It's like my slammajam. This is my fave book of the year so far, by a bunch.

It's a rich treasure trove of information from the frontiers of trauma research, etiology, diagnosis and treatment. It's changing the way I do therapy and it's changing the way a interpret human behavior.

And to think. I almost didn't read it.

When I entered the mental health field I had intended to specialize in Somatic Experiencing (SE) trauma therapy. But I quickly rejected the model when I realized it was way outside the mainstream and lacked randomized control trials (RCT) that demonstrated its effectiveness compared to other "first line" treatments such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Prolonged Exposure Therapy (PE).

I saw the author Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk lecture at the Evolution of Psychotherapy conference in 2013. He was awesome, and he really reinvigorated my interest in doing somatically oriented trauma work. But something about the experience as a whole left me feeling woozy.

Perhaps my experience was negativity impacted by the mass, prolonged exposure to the unwashed throngs of other psychotherapists (never a good thing), some of whom were from the San Francisco Bay Area (a deadly combination).

Don't get me wrong. There are lots of mental health professionals (even ones from the Bay Area) that are highly functional, sober, top notch folks.

But there are also a bunch of kooky, crazy as fuck people in the field (Particularly in the Bay Area), and there were a bunch in the crowd, and I think I was feeling a bit (or perhaps a lot) of shame for my profession. A pathological shame that was clearly a sequallia of my own dark hippy shadow.

I myself lived in the Bay Area for around a decade. I came to therapy from an unconventional "hippyish" background. I went to art school as an undergraduate. I have practiced yoga and meditation for over 30 years. Plus I have a couple of crappy tattoos. When I entered the field I was dreadfully afraid no one would take me seriously.

So I somewhat consciously but mostly unconsciously tried to distance myself from my own freaky roots.

I was probably still up in my head about all that when I was listening to Dr. Van Der Kolk. I was loving what he was saying, the parts I could understand any way (he speaks in a thick Dutch accent), but I also remember looking around the room and thinking "I have to distinguish myself from these nutty hippies".

Perhaps it was at that point I unconsciously gripped up and rejected somatic trauma work (again) in favor of the more "masculine" "serious" "evidence based", behaviorally oriented, here and now stuff that I currently practice.

Which, by the way, is Acceptance Comment Therapy (ACT). A mindfulness based variant of CBT which is incidentally a "hippy as fuck" therapeutic modality by many standards.

Anyway.

When I first saw that the book was released, I was like "hey, that looks pretty good" but then I had a flash back from the psychotherapy conference.

It was an intrusive mental image of a patchouli smelling, chubby middle aged hippy chick in a mauve knit poncho sweater and dream catcher earrings saying "your fifth level is emitting too much teal energy" and I reflexively withdrew my enthusiasm for the whole somatically oriented trauma treatment program.

Anyway. I did eventually get over myself (and my hippy phobia) and got the book and man is it good. It's extremely, extremely triple extremely good. It's like, organically, cosmically, spin your chakras at a dead show good.

And despite Dr. Van Der Kolk's activist agenda, he's actually a pretty reputable (Harvard affiliated) scientist and clinician and widely regarded as one the the worlds foremost authorities on trauma and trauma sequelae (yes I used the term seguelae twice in the same review, actually three times if you count the time I just used sequallia in this parentheses, oops, better make that four).

And, yes, Dr. Van Der Kolk also apparently does yoga and meditation and has probably smoked tons of weed and hung out at Eslen. But I am willing to forgive the man for that because I too have been guilty of similar behavior in my woolly headed, not so distant past.

Before I became a therapist, I was on my own journey to recovery from addiction, trauma, depression, anxiety etc.

BTW: when I hear other therapist start talking about their recovery, I cringe. Please forgive me if you're feeling cringy. But sometimes we all have to go there in order to communicate certain important points.

Anyway.

The foundation of my recovery was self-care. For me, self-care was (and still is) founded on basics such as: healthy sleep, exercise and nutrition. It also included good therapy and a little 12-step. But the rocket fuel of my recovery was yoga, loving kindness meditation and mindfulness meditation.

Now, one of my primary intentions as a therapist is to assist my clients in developing self compassion and embodied mindfulness skills for utilization in their recovery.

While the secular mindfulness revolution thing that has been happening over the past two decades has normalized mindfulness and provided ample scientific evidence for the clinical use value of mindfulness training e.g. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

And mindfulness-based psychotherapeutic modalities such as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) have provided evidence-based mindfulness integrated psychotherapeutic frameworks.

The evidence for somatically oriented (embodied) therapeutic modalities has lagged. Dr. Van Der Kolk's work is providing this evidence and is blazing the trail for mainstream acceptance of somatically oriented practices.

Dr. Van Der Kolk's work is also foundational for changing the way the field conceptualizes and diagnoses trauma.

Additionally Dr. Van Der Kolk is lending legitimacy to some cutting-edge and very exciting trauma treatments such as Neural Feedback and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR).

I, like millions of other people, have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. In early recovery I received lots of good therapy for trauma and I'm happy to report that I am no longer impaired by PTSD symptoms.

Out of all of the therapy I received, anecdotally speaking, I have to say, some of the most effective was EMDR. I had phenomenal results from an equally phenomenally brief treatment time (two, one hour sessions).

This is standard EMDR testimonial. People very commonly report that it works and it works fast.

Again, as a nascent therapist in training, I had intended to train in EMDR. But EMDR is like the dirty redheaded stepchild of psychotherapy. Despite ample evidence of its efficacy, nobody can figure out why it works, so the model has been widely rejected by the mainstream mental health community.

I sort of drank the Kool-Aid and jumped on the anti EMDR bandwagon. But after reading this book, I'm feeling very enthusiastic about treating trauma with EMDR.

I could go on and on, but I'd rather just urge you to do yourself a big favor and read this book.