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A book by renowned trauma expert Bessel Van der Kolk, MD, explains how trauma lives in the body — and why the body needs to be engaged in recovery.
Real Change for Trauma Survivors
“The act of telling the story doesn’t necessarily alter the automatic physical and hormonal responses of bodies that remain hypervigilant, prepared to be assaulted or violated at any time,” he writes. “For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.”
Van der Kolk outlines how a number of body-based practices help people recover from what he calls the “imprint” of trauma. They include yoga, theater acting, and singing in groups, which help people use and feel their bodies instead of perpetually dissociating from them, as well as more targeted physical treatments like neurofeedback and EMDR (or “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing”) treatments that help integrate traumatic memories so they fade into the past instead of hijacking the central nervous system every time one encounters a trigger. (This is different from suppressing that response, which is what pharmaceuticals typically do.)
In addition to helping diffuse traumatic memories, physical practices help us recover more quickly from subsequent triggers. So when an external event sets off a survival response (something worrisome in the news, a fierce argument) and the body freezes in anticipation of an attack, something as simple as picking up a kettlebell can break that spell. Such actions prove, at a cellular level, that we are not helpless. This feeling of capability is what trauma takes away. It is also, according to Van der Kolk’s research, what the body gives back.
