The Body Keeps The Score

This profoundly humane book offers a sweeping new understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma, offering hope ... (more)

This profoundly humane book offers a sweeping new understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma, offering hope and clarity to everyone touched by its devastation. Trauma has emerged as one of the great public health challenges of our time, not only because of its well-documented effects on combat veterans and on victims of accidents and crimes, but because of the hidden toll of sexual and family violence and of communities and schools devastated by abuse, neglect, and addiction. Drawing on more than thirty years at the forefront of research and clinical practice, Bessel van der Kolk shows that the terror and isolation at the core of trauma literally reshape both brain and body. New insights into our survival instincts explain why traumatized people experience incomprehensible anxiety and numbing and intolerable rage, and how trauma affects their capacity to concentrate, to remember, to form trusting relationships, and even to feel at home in their own bodies. Having lost the sense of control of themselves and frustrated by failed therapies, they often fear that they are damaged beyond repair. The Body Keeps the Score is the inspiring story of how a group of therapists and scientists -- together with their courageous and memorable patients -- has struggled to integrate recent advances in brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments that can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past. These new paths to recovery activate the brain's natural neuroplasticity to rewire disturbed functioning and rebuild step by step the ability to "know what you know and feel what you feel." They also offer experiences that directly counteract the helplessness and invisibility associated with trauma, enabling both adults and children to reclaim ownership of their bodies and their lives. Readers will come away from this book with awe at human resilience and at the power of our relationships -- whether in the intimacy of home or in our wider communities -- to both hurt and heal. (less)