The Body Keeps the Score
I was delighted to read an article about Bessel van der Kolk in the Guardian’s G2 yesterday. The journalist Zoe Williams interviewed him because his book The Body Keeps the Score has become a huge pandemic hit, topping bestseller lists this summer, despite being first published seven years ago.
That van der Kolk’s work is receiving this attention right now fills me with hope. The Body Keeps the Score was first recommended to me by a yoga teacher friend of mine some years ago, and then it formed one of the core texts on the syllabus for my Yoga Therapy training. My copy is now dog-eared, with thoughts and ideas scribbled everywhere and fluorescent highlighter pen marking passages throughout. For me reading it was a series of light-bulb moments. I knew Yoga helped me find a peace and comfort in my body that I didn’t find anywhere else, but before reading The Body Keeps the Score I didn’t understand why. Van de Kolk’s work goes a long way to explain this. It’s filled with real life experiences of the many people he has worked with over the years, from war veterans to survivors of childhood abuse. These people bring his work to life so beautifully and their journeys to healing and self-acceptance post-trauma are deeply moving. Their stories filled me with a determination to work with the body therapeutically to try to offer this same healing to others. So this book is partly why I am doing this work today.
Van der Kolk has committed his life’s work to understanding trauma. He is a psychiatrist, but even as a young doctor many years ago, while his peers diagnosed their patients with everything from alcoholism to schizophrenia, he connected the dots and saw what was at the root of their symptoms: trauma. And then, rather than focusing solely on talking and drug therapies his experience led him to treat his patients as a whole person – not just as a brain. So he brought the body into the equation too.
Part of Van der Kolk’s thinking is to allow “the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage or collapse that result from trauma”. And this is exactly what we do in Yoga Therapy. (We also do many other things, but this is a very good place to start.)
There’s a passage I love in The Body Keeps the Score that beautifully outlines the whole ethos behind my work as a Yoga Therapist. It’s Van der Kolk’s list of what he calls “four fundamental truths”:
“ 1. Our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being;
2. Language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning;
3. We have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching;
4. We can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive.”
He goes on to write: “When we ignore these quintessential dimensions of humanity, we deprive people of ways to heal from trauma and restore their autonomy. Being a patient, rather than a participant in one’s healing process, separates suffering people from their community and alienates them from an inner sense of self.”
These “four fundamental truths” and enabling the person to be the participant rather than the patient in their healing process, are something that form the beating heart of my work. In fact I would say they lie at the core of my whole belief system around healing.
If you’re interested in trauma – and in healing for you or the children in your care – I highly recommend reading The Body Keeps the Score. There is so much more to it that I can’t possibly reflect here in so few words. Alongside that, do please get in touch if this blog post brings up anything you would like to discuss.