Bessel van der Kolk is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brooklyn, Massachusetts. Throughout his experience, he has learned more and more about the psychology of dealing with trauma and how it affects every aspect of your body.
Join us in the next ___ minutes as we see how overwhelming experiences affect the development of brain, mind, and body awareness.
Part One: The Rediscovery of Trauma
Lessons from Vietnam Veterans
Van der Kolk recalls his experience with Vietnam veterans and what he learned about PTSD from their stories.
Since van der Kolk’s first meeting with the veterans from Vietnam decades ago, there has been a better understanding of trauma and post-traumatic stress. In learning about trauma, we have further learned more about not only the structure of our brains, but also the processes by which they heal.
Revolutions in Understanding Mind and Brain
When you are a patient instead of a participant in someone’s healing process, you end up separating suffering people from their community. Because of the limitations in prescription drugs at the time, this led van der Kolk to wonder if there were other, more natural ways to help people deal with their post-traumatic stress.
Looking into the Brain: The Neuroscience Revolution
Through advanced fMRI scans, van der Kolk found that there was a significant decrease in a part of the brain of someone who had experienced severe trauma; this part of the brain helps you put your thoughts and feelings into words.
Traditionally, it is common understanding that simply talking about upset feelings will help resolve them. But with trauma, this can make things seem impossible. It is easier for someone to talk about what has been done to them than to put into words the reality of their internal experience.
Part Two: This is Your Brain on Trauma
Running for Your Life: The Anatomy of Survival
Trauma affects not just the brain, but also the mind and body as well. When our brain’s alarm system goes off, it triggers some of the most primal escape plans we are programmed with until we can “regain our senses”
In order to fully live in the present, it is important to bring back your brain structures that may have gone away when they were overwhelmed by trauma. Otherwise, life is going to pass you by.
Body-Brain Connections
When we feel heartache or that our chest is going to cave in, it is normal to want to make these feelings go away. Because of trauma, however, it becomes difficult for our brains to decide whether it is time to relax or start defending ourselves.
Experiencing trauma may trap us in fight/flight or just a chronic shut-down, so it is important to know how to deactivate these defensive maneuvers.
And while this is not impossible, our educational system often times looks past these methods.
Losing Your Body, Losing Your Self
When we feel distress, it’s common to seek out people we trust and feel supported by. But when we don’t have that, what do we do? If you are traumatized, you may even feel unsafe in or separated from your own body.
Trauma victims cannot recover until they learn to befriend their body and its sensations again. Simply noticing sensations for the first time may be overwhelming, but it’s important that you reeducate your mind in order to begin slowly reconnecting with yourself.
Part Three: The Minds of Children
Getting on the Same Wavelength: Attachment and Attunement
By conducting research through children, van der Kolk was able to make discoveries about trauma that can be traced back to early childhood. Even children at the most innocent of ages were able to stir up the most intense emotions as a result of their trauma and abuse.
The effects left the children hyperalert to the slightest features of anger, while also feeling disorganized within themselves.
To combat this, van der Kolk suggests restoring your synchrony. By resonating through sounds and movements that connect, you can be in synch with the daily rhythms of your life as you foster a sense of attunement and communal pleasure.
Trapped in Relationships: The Cost of Abuse and Neglect
Trauma, whether it be from abuse or neglect, has also shown how it can affect personal relationships. From strained trust to a radically different worldview, it can be difficult learning and relearning what is and is not safe.
Trauma is not locked away in your mind as a story with a beginning and an end. Despite the overwhelming feelings of helplessness a survivor of abuse may feel, their intense dedication to survival makes the process of healing the trauma possible in the first place.
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
Child abuse is our nation’s largest public health problem, and traumatic experiences during childhood are more common than you may believe.
When van der Kolk interviewed trauma patients, he was shocked to learn that one out of four patients could not recall anyone they felt safe with as a child. The focus of his diagnosis on singular terrifying events for trauma had now expanded to long-term effects stemming from childhood. The lack of love and affection a child might experience will impact the rest of their lives whether they realize it or not.
Developmental Trauma: The Hidden Epidemic
While it may be tempting to blame dysfunction on ‘bad genes’ this is usually not the case. Van der Kolk references Stephen Suomi’s ‘Nature versus Nurture’ study with monkeys to once gain conclude that safe and protective environments are important in protecting children from long-term trauma.
This trauma, as stated earlier, has extreme long-term effects. Young girls who are sexually abused are not only more likely to drop out of high school, but also have an entirely different developmental pathway. If the United States invested more money into helping parents raise their children, van der Kolk suggests that this would certainly help fight this epidemic of abuse.
Part Four: The Imprint of Trauma
Uncovering Secrets: The Problem of Traumatic Memory
Sometimes, the memories of trauma can be repressed by the victim and they can be forgotten about entirely until the victim somehow uncovers the traumatic memories again. These memories can be reactivated and replayed in fragments, and often times the victim might not know what is real or fake.
Whereas most memories depend on how meaningful they were to us, traumatic memories take this to the extreme. Depending on the severity of the incident, traumatized people can either remember too much or not enough about what happened.
The Unbearable Heaviness of Remembering
When asking patients about traumatic memories, van der Kolk recalled two major differences in how people talked about memories and traumatic experiences:
How the memories were organized Their physical reactions to the memories
While memories like weddings or graduations can be remembered with beginnings and ends, the same cannot be said for traumatic experiences.
The gravity of trauma can make it feel like you are living two separate lives: One where everything is as it seems, and another where the past refuses to go away.
Part Five: Paths to Recovery
Healing from Trauma: Owning Your Self
Nobody can “treat” a traumatic experience, but they can be dealt with. For most people, recovering from trauma includes:
- Finding a way to be calm
- Learning to maintain that calm
- Finding a way to be engaged in the present
- Not having to keep secrets to yourself
These steps can overlap, and some may be more difficult than others depending on the circumstance, but they are not meant to be impossible. You cannot put traumatic events behind you until you acknowledge that they happened and recognize what you are struggling with.
Language: Miracle and Tyranny
Traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words.
While this is true, it is even more true that remaining silent about trauma has its own list of consequences. Not speaking about trauma only reinforces the isolation of trauma. If you have been hurt, it is important that you acknowledge and name what happened to you.
Hiding from the facts of your trauma will keep you vulnerable to triggers in a state of fight-or-flight. The silence will take enormous amounts of energy as you keep fighting yourself about what happened to you.
Letting Go of the Past: EMDR
Letting go of the past can seem almost impossible regarding trauma.
However, Van der Kolk recalls using a procedure called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) on a victim of a traumatic eye injury. He used the process in order to make painful recreations of the trauma a thing of the past, as this can help the patient finally leave the trauma behind.
EMDR spends little time actually revisiting the trauma because the focus is more on opening up the associative process for the patient. Although we don’t precisely know how EMDR works, it has proven to be effective in removing elements of the past regarding trauma.
Learning to Inherit Your Body: Yoga
With trauma comes intense feelings of helplessness, and these feelings are often stored in the body as muscle tension or feeling of weakness. Numbing these pains becomes the focus of trauma survivors, and they will turn to whatever can make these feelings go away.
The most effective remedy for these feelings, however, is yoga, which helped the patients learn self-regulation. By becoming one and feeling safe with their bodies, the patients were then more likely to open up and translate the memories that once overwhelmed them.
Putting the Pieces Together: Self-Leadership
Mindful self-leadership is fundamental to healing from trauma, as it actively steers us in the right direction towards self-care.
When the self is no longer in charge, the self identifies with a part. Notice the difference in “I hate you,” and “A part of me wishes you were dead.”
Filling in the Holes: Creating Structure
Growing up, our parents are credited with creating stability and structure for their children, but if a child does not have this, the defects will manifest and relationships will later suffer as a result. Structure should bring feelings of delight and protection, and it should be universal.
Undoing trauma or what has happened is out of our control. All we can do is create new emotional scenarios real enough that can defuse and counter the older, more intense ones.
Rewiring the Brain: Neurofeedback
Neurofeedback therapy is an intervention used to teach self-control of brain functions to patients by measuring brain waves and providing a feedback signal. For victims of trauma, neurofeedback is effective in that it can stabilize the brain and allow us to develop more choices in how to respond.
Patients with trauma have habitual brain patterns that were created by the trauma. Neurofeedback makes it easier for these brain patterns to relax so the patient can focus on ordinary events instead.
Finding Your Voice: Communal Rhythms and Theater
Our sense of agency, how much we feel in control, is defined by our relationship with our bodies and its rhythms.
This is the opposite of dissociation and depression. In theater, you have complete control of your rhythm and body along with your own sense of power.
Trauma victims may be afraid of conflict, but conflict is central to theater. While the essence of trauma is isolating and feeling cut off from others, theater requires you to push through and discover your own truth so that it can emerge from your body and voice on stage.
Trauma today is our nation’s most urgent public health issue. While we now have the knowledge and technology that is able to respond effectively, real change will depend on whether or not we choose to act on what we know.