Did You Know: The Body Keeps The Score?

Here are the 3 most helpful lessons this book teaches about trauma and recovery:

1. EMDR is a slightly mysterious technique that the author uses to help trauma patients recover, and with wonderfully positive results.
2. You can connect your body and mind through yoga to help you deal with your troubling past.
3. Having a network of supportive people and practicing mindfulness are two more ways that bring healing.

Ready to find out how to recover from your most difficult experiences that still haunt you? Let’s dive right in!

Lesson 1: Trauma patients who go through the EMDR technique have seen incredible results in recovery.

Difficult events can have a long-lasting negative effect. Just remembering them can raise blood pressure and deactivate rational thinking parts of a victim’s brain.

Many of these experiences came from childhood and have been around for a long time.

But there is hope for even the nastiest of demons you face. 

One technique is as simple as moving a finger across a patient’s vision. As they follow the finger with their eyes, audio cues from the medical professional help them make new associations.

EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing might sound crazy, but it’s wildly effective at helping people recover from trauma. 

The reason it’s so helpful is because of the way it allows victims to integrate their traumatic memories.

Part of the problem with these events is that their memory can play out as if it’s happening in the present.

The author used this technique to help a woman named Kathy who had just attempted suicide for the third time.

At a young age, she’d been raped, assaulted, and abused by her father. 

Using EMDR, van der Kolk helped Kathy re-imagine these memories in a helpful way.

She imagined a bulldozer destroying her childhood home and the memories that came with it. Another visualization had her thinking about locking her dad out of a cafe.

She progressed well and 15 years later the author reconnected with her to discover she was happy and healthy.

Lesson 2: Dealing with your troubling past is easier when you practice yoga to help you connect your mind and body.

Your body and mind are more connected than you might think.

Figuring out how your emotions work and impact your body is essential for balance and stability in life. 

Trauma makes this really hard because of the way it puts a sort of alarm system in our bodies.

A child who was sexually abused, for example, might feel panic when doing something as simple as cuddling with their significant other. 

People usually try to numb these feelings with drug or alcohol abuse, or by overworking themselves.

But these temporary fixes only put a bandage on rather than getting to the root of the issue.

That’s where unifying the body and mind with yoga comes in handy. 

Yoga allows trauma victims a way to understand emotions and how their body handles them.

The author had a patient named Annie who had been raped and suffered from PTSD that decided to give it a try.

It was tough at first because just a simple pat on the back triggered her alarm system. 

Lesson 3: Mindfulness and a support network of friends and family who care are also great ways to experience healing.

The aim of mindfulness is to mentally connect with and become aware of your body and emotions instead of just denying them.

It’s difficult to do this after adversity because we don’t like to deal with painful emotions like sadness or anger.

But suppressing them, as many victims do, just leads to more problems. 

Only by confronting your demons can you begin to heal from them.

Meditation techniques help you reconnect with the way you really feel so that you can start this process. 

This unique tool can calm the impacts of trauma on the mind and body. Whether it’s depression or chronic pain, mindfulness can help.

It’s also known to strengthen your immune system, help you regulate emotions, and get your hormones in better balance.

Relationships are another vital component of the recovery process.

Your network of family, friends, and medical professionals can help you always have someone to turn to for help.

You can connect with other helpful people through local AA meetings, religious groups, and veterans’ organizations.