Book Review - The Body Keeps the Score

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What happens in the body and mind of people who have experienced trauma? And why is it so difficult to find relief from it?

In this book, you’ll learn why traumatic experiences haunt us. Then, you’ll understand how trauma patients perceive their environment. Finally, you’ll know why there’s hope for traumatized people and how trauma can be healed.

Trauma isn’t just something faced by war veterans - it’s far more prevalent in our society than we realize. The truth is that trauma can happen to anyone, and it’s time we found out what this means.

Traumas result from an experience of extreme stress or pain that leaves an individual feeling helpless or too overwhelmed to cope with adversity. For example, war incidents typically result in traumas, but violent crimes and accidents cause them. 

Traumatized people often have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), leading to depression and substance abuse. In addition, traumatized people tend to mistrust anyone who hasn’t experienced the same suffering and assume that nobody can understand them. 

Establishing a rapport with someone suffering from PTSD is a challenge, so just imagine trying to maintain a marriage, a close friendship, or a stable parent-child relationship. Unfortunately, traumatized people find it difficult to trust even those who love them most, including partners and kids. It can be very tough on friends and families, often leading to estrangement or divorce. 

When someone who has PTSD remembers their trauma, their body and brain enter a high-stress mode since they experience the memory as if it were real. This is called a flashback, an impact of trauma that the author studied in an experiment he carried out with his patients. It turns out that being reminded of trauma can be almost as horrifying as experiencing the traumatic situation itself.

Traumatic experiences are hard enough to deal with as an adult, but there is nothing more complicated than facing trauma as a young child. With brains that aren’t fully developed, children who undergo trauma are at greater risk of experiencing many negative consequences. These consequences surface in the years immediately following their experiences and later in adulthood. Traumatized children often expect bad things to happen. These thinking patterns often persist into adulthood. 

In general, we don’t tend to memorize the sensory details of events. Most of us remember what we did or how we felt in general but don’t store vivid memories about the room's smell or the exact details of someone’s face. But it’s a different story about traumatic memories - we remember these situations vividly, and the memories don’t change over time. Trauma stays with you, both in your body and your brain. So how do people learn to live with it?

One technique that works well is known as EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It involves only a finger moving back and forth across a patient’s field of vision. While the patient follows the finder with their eyes, they’re guided through a traumatic memory and encouraged to make new associations. It helps patients by integrating traumatic memories. Once a memory is integrated, it can finally become another past event in a patient's life and cease having a troubling life. 

Our body and mind share a close relationship. To live a balanced, stable life, we need to understand how our emotions work and how they impact our bodies. Unfortunately, trauma can make this very difficult. 

Trauma often leaves people with a hypersensitive alarm system in their bodies. Those who suffered sexual abuse as children, for example, find that they experience crippling panic in harmless situations, such as cuddling with their partner. 

To avoid this, traumatized people often attempt to numb their feelings by drinking too much, taking drugs, and even overloading themselves with work. These provide a temporary solution but do more damage than good to a person’s mental health. Thankfully, yoga is a healthy way to cope with overwhelming emotions after trauma.

For trauma sufferers, yoga offers a safe way to get in touch with their emotions and understand how the body experiences them. Additionally, mindfulness is about maintaining a conscious awareness of your body and feelings rather than denying them. It is especially tough after trauma, as painful memories cause us to repress our emotions rather than address them. 

None of us like to feel sad, angry, or broken, mainly when memories of trauma trigger these feelings. But by pushing these feelings away, you also lose the opportunity to confront your trauma and start the healing process. 

Mindfulness can alleviate trauma's psychological and physiological impacts, from depression to stress to psychosomatic conditions like chronic pain. It can also improve immune responses activate regions of the brain that help regulate emotions and balance out stress hormone levels. 

Aside from mindfulness, supportive personal relationships are indispensable on the road to recovery from trauma. By building a network of family members, friends, and mental health professionals, patients can ensure they always have someone to turn to when they need help. 

Although trauma can happen to anyone, not many know how traumatic experiences impact our mental and physical health, even decades after the event. Mindfulness, support networks, eMDR, yoga, and new techniques like neurofeedback are essential tools for trauma sufferers to learn to accept, cope, and recover from their trauma.