CairnsMoir Connections
  • Home
  • About CairnsMoir
  • Visit our Store
  • Book of the Month
  • Training & Events
  • Other Resources
  • Contact us
  • Home
  • About CairnsMoir
  • Visit our Store
  • Book of the Month
  • Training & Events
  • Other Resources
  • Contact us
for those living or working with the impact of trauma

The Body keeps the Score AUDIOBOOK CD - Book of the Month May 2017

1/5/2017

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Body keeps the Score –
Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma
 
by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D  

NOW UNABRIDGED ON AUDIO CD
​read by Sean Pratt.
Duration: 16 hours 20 minutes
£35
 
What a wonderful book – authoritative, erudite, compassionate and beautifully written.

Dr Bessel van der Kolk combines the curiosity and analytical mind of the scientist with what Judith Herman calls, “the passion of the truth teller”, and the refreshingly humble outlook of a man in awe of his patients.

But a word of caution, this book is a challenge. Think twice if you are easily shocked, offended, or likely to wallow in guilt for doing what you believed to be best practice at the time. All we can ever do is our best and our best changes all the time, as van der Kolk himself has also had to acknowledge in his 30-year career.
 
To summarise the content I’m going to start in the middle of the book because it is here that van der Kolk makes the bold statement that developmental trauma is “the hidden epidemic” in society. As a trainer I talk to parents and teachers about attachment and trauma, many of whom think trauma is a fringe topic affecting a minority of children.  Van der Kolk would argue otherwise. He compares the (US) public health budget devoted to both heart health education and smoking cessation with the barely mentioned topic of childhood abuse, the cost of which exceeds cancer and heart disease in the USA.  To halve the rate of depression, drastically reduce alcoholism, IV drug use, domestic violence, suicide, prison admissions and improve workplace performance he believes we need to eradicate child abuse.
 
Even obesity comes in for a radical rethink. Diets, bariatric surgery even a sugar tax may look like a solution to a major health crisis, but for the trauma survivor society’s problem may actually be their solution, eg, being big may be a health risk in the long term, but for now being the biggest boy in class may be a way to feel safe from bullies, or being an overweight girl may stop unwanted sexual attention. Brace yourself for the research from one chief of medicine that most of his morbidly obese patients were survivors of child sexual abuse. Van der Kolk wants to get this “hidden epidemic” out in the open. When he asks, “how do you turn a newborn baby with all its promise and infinite capacities into a thirty-year-old homeless drunk?  He gets us to acknowledge how much relationship rather than genetics shapes development. So, while there may be a gene for alcoholism, for example, stressful experiences impact on genetic expression both in the womb and after birth.
 
Throughout the text van der Kolk gives us a glimpse of his own childhood and family traumas. He also tours the many dubious practices of the psychiatry profession over the course of his career, from the brutal to the inspired, focusing frequently on the profession’s more recent obsession with pharmaceuticals. Drugs such as Prozac transformed the lives of many depressed patients from the late 1980s onward, but in van der Kolk’s experience they did not work for war veterans with PTSD. The difficulty arose when medication was seen as the go to “fix it” for mental health problems rather than being part of a holistic treatment package. Drug benefits lay in their ability to dampen reactions not heal the illness. In the case of the half a million US children on antipsychotic drugs, medication has improved things for adults by making the children easier to control! Van der Kolk reports huge over prescribing in the children of low-income families and children in foster care. Shockingly, even thousands of under fives have been prescribed antipsychotics, reducing their aggression but also their motivation, playfulness, curiosity, general functioning and socialization.
 
Thankfully, amid the horror stories are accounts of the author’s inspirational teachers, such as the psychiatrist Elvin Semrad who discouraged him from relying too heavily on psychiatry text books and diagnostic labels which obscured his perceptions of real patients. Instead, he urged getting to know and respect the person while acknowledging that, “most human suffering is related to love and loss”. Teachers have also appeared in the form of patients such as Marilyn who told him his reassuring platitudes only made her more lonely and isolated because, “it confirms that nobody in the whole world will ever understand what it feels like to be me.”
 
Through his experience of working with patients Van der Kolk has  concluded that “all trauma is preverbal” whether it happens in infancy or adulthood. This doesn’t mean that it can’t be talked about but that talking rarely gets to the truth because it reactivates the experience of trauma in the body. Experiments with fMRI scans show that trauma activation stops the brain’s speech centre (Broca’s area in the cortex) from functioning. Consequently, the traumatised continue to live in isolated “speechless horror”. He questions accepted therapeutic practices in the light of what we now know from brain scans, research and experience and advocates alternatives such as yoga, EMDR, mindfulness and others that put trauma survivors back in touch with themselves.
  
There is so much in this book that cannot be summarised. I have only selected morsels to tempt and tantalise. In doing so, I feel that I have done it an injustice by missing out so much of the content on attachment, traumatic memory, the anatomy of survival, neuroscience and the numerous and varied paths to recovery. There is a huge focus on relationship and connectedness and our innate drive to be part of a tribe, which goes against the cultural norm of being an individual, competitive and self made. You have to read it to begin to grasp the breadth and depth of its reach but I’ll leave you with this summary by the author himself, “Trauma results in a fundamental reorganisation of the way the mind and brain manage perceptions… 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. [We need] to think differently not only about the structure of the mind but also the processes by which it heals.”
 
Happy listening!
 
Reviewed by Sheila Lavery

0 Comments

    CairnsMoir Connections

    Check out our
    Book of the Month
    - expert reviews and special offers!

    RSS Feed

    Categories

    All
    Activities With Children
    Anxiety
    Attachment
    Autism
    Bereavement
    Children's Book
    DDP
    Education
    Empathic Behaviour Management
    Empathy
    ESSENCE
    Executive Functions
    Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder
    Grief
    Mindfulness
    Neuroscience
    PACE
    Parenting
    Play Therapy
    Polyvagal
    Self Esteem
    Self Harm
    Sensory Processing
    Shame
    Sleep Issues
    Theraplay
    Transitions
    Trauma
    Young Adult

    Archives

    February 2025
    October 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    January 2024
    November 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015

Tweet
CAIRNSMOIR CONNECTIONS LTD  is a company registered in Scotland  No. SC488337   [Returns Policy | Privacy Policy]
Registered address: 92 Glasgow Road Bathgate United Kingdom EH48 2AH  For telephone enquiries please leave a message at 0771 242 1250
  • Home
  • About CairnsMoir
  • Visit our Store
  • Book of the Month
  • Training & Events
  • Other Resources
  • Contact us