The Body Keeps the Score Summary

The book delves into the ways that trauma can affect the body and mind, and how it can be treated.

1. The Nature of Trauma: Dr. van der Kolk begins by explaining what trauma is and how it can shape an individual's brain, body, and perception of the world.

2. Brain Changes: Trauma can alter the brain's structure and function. The author delves into how different areas, like the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, are impacted by traumatic experiences.

3. Survival Mechanisms: Traumatized individuals may exhibit behaviors such as dissociation or freezing as a way to cope with threatening situations.

4. Developmental Trauma: The book also covers the impact of trauma on children and how early traumatic experiences can shape the developing brain and influence adulthood.

5. Paths to Recovery: Dr. van der Kolk outlines various therapeutic approaches that can be effective in treating trauma. This includes talk therapy, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), neurofeedback, yoga, and more.

6. The Social Aspect: emphasizes the importance of community and social connection in healing trauma.

“Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way the mind and brain manage perceptions.”

Trauma reshapes our cognitive framework, affecting how we perceive and interact with the world. Recognising this helps in understanding behaviours in oneself and others. Leaders should approach their team members with empathy, knowing that past traumas might influence their reactions.

It is easy to acknowledge the direct impacts of trauma but some of its more life altering impacts are what it has on the mind.

In addition to the impact from the direct interaction, the imagination is not only stunted but also becomes a place where you relive the origin of the trauma, over and over, snowballing new trauma from the imagination with the initial trauma, maimed by things like regret and guilt.

Eventually, the imagination only becomes familiar with the past, being rooted only in what has happened and not being able to fathom a future any different.

The imagination is the mind's eye: how we perceive & even interact with intangibles in the cosmos.

When we experience trauma, the imagination relives the moment over & over, searching for ways to avoid the experience in the future or overcome it. With every replay of that moment, we experience a second hand trauma compounded on our original experience.

Eventually, we blame ourselves for what happened, taking on guilt, shame & regret. Through repetition in the mind, the imagination conforms to a reality where only shame, guilt & regret are the only thinkable outcomes. This stunts our perception.

In other instances, instead of guilt, shame & regret, we seek to escape from a reality that we feel is too much to bear. We begin to fantasize on the what ifs, & explore those mythical timelines in our imagination. Slowly, we begin to yearn more for the fantasy as it temporarily eases our stress, but it also removes us from the present & in turn impede our ability to impact it for the better.

Fantasizing may seem harmless at first but it is teaching the mind to interact with the unreal parts of your experience. The escape isn't just from the pain, but also a vacancy from your driver's seat.

1. Though we have the capacity to destroy one another, we also have the capacty to heal one another.

2. Language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences to help us define what we know and find a common sense of meaning.

3. We have the ability to regulate our own physioogy.

4. We canchange social conditions to create environments in which children and adults feel safe, where we can thrive.

Release or it will make u sick

When I first heard this, I felt like:" okay; there it is, this Great book that describes me so well , has told me a about the trouble , but has left me stuck with it , as.if there's little more person can do about their PTSD then to pronounce surround, has some type of wannabe Shakespeare actor, and to be honest, I felt sort of disrespected by you, as if a lifetimes worth of attempts at trauma recovery give me trivialized by sang, will just put them in all in theater groups and they’ll be better🤣