The Body Keeps the Score

A pioneering researcher and one of the world's foremost experts on traumatic stress offers a bold new paradigm for healing

Trauma does not just happen to other people - it happens to us, our friends and family and our neighbours. While humans are able to rebound from relentless wars, family violence and manmade disasters, experiences like these inevitably leave traces: on our minds, our emotions and even on our biology and immune systems. This matters not just to those who are directly affected, but to the people around them: the wives of men with PTSD tend to become depressed, abused children often go on to have violent relationships, soldiers are prone to terrorizing their families.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Dr Bessel van der Kolk shares thirty years of experience in dealing with the traumatized to offer a new paradigm for treating traumatic stress and restoring the capacity for pleasure, intimacy and joy. Standard talking and drug therapies, he argues, have not been proven to resolve the imprint of trauma in sufferers' lives. We now understand how traumatic experiences literally rearrange the brain's wiring and how, under the right circumstances, the areas of the brain dedicated to feelings of meaning, engagement, control and trust can be activated again. That understanding has allowed us to develop tools to help traumatized people regulate their emotions and engage fully in life, ranging from neurofeedback to trauma processing, mindfulness meditation to play and yoga. The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the impact of trauma that could alleviate the suffering of millions of people.

Dr Bessel van der Kolk is one of the world's foremost experts on traumatic stress. He is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Boston, USA, and director of the Complex Trauma Treatment Network. A past professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, Dr van der Kolk is the author of several scholarly books and over a hundred scientific articles.