Bessel van der Kolk

1 card

1. 01

   What remains of an overwhelming experience is not its memory but a setting of the body — pulse, breath, muscle tone, vigilance — that goes on answering a danger long since over.

   The Body Keeps the Score · 2014

   Trauma is not stored as a story but as a state of the body.

   Van der Kolk's argument starts from an old clinical observation: people who have been through hard things can narrate coherently what happened to them and remain, at the same time, completely non-functional. Conversely, others have no words at all and yet their body says everything — they flinch at a slammed door, breathe shallowly, cannot sit with their back to a room. His conclusion is that trauma is not stored as narrative but as a physiological state, and that a therapy working only on the story touches only half the problem. Hence his interest in approaches that go through the body: theatre, yoga, rhythm, synchronised movement. With children, the relevant part is that behaviour read by adults as cheek or laziness can be, literally, an alarm state: a hypervigilant child scans the adult's face instead of following the lesson, and one who has learned to disconnect looks absent exactly when attention is asked of them. The book has also been criticised — some of the therapies it champions have thinner evidence than the enthusiasm with which they are presented — but the distinction between story and bodily imprint has stayed useful.

   “Trauma is not the story of something that happened back then; it is the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain and body.”

   Open the card →