Name: The Body Keeps the Score
Uploaded: 2021-05-12T19:33:40.000Z
Duration: 6 min 3 s
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"The Body Keeps the Score" is the beautiful and suggestive title of a book published in 2014 by a Dutch professor of psychiatry at Boston University called Bessel van der Kolk.

The book has proved immensely significant because it emphasizes an idea that has for too long escaped psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Van der Kolk stresses that people who are suffering emotionally are unlikely to do so just in their minds.

Crucially, their symptoms almost always show up in their bodies, in the way they sit or breathe, in how they hold their shoulders, in their sleep patterns, in their digestion processes, in the way they treat their spots, and in their attitude to exercise.

Taking the body more seriously opens up new avenues for both the diagnosis and treatment of emotional unwellness.

Instead of simply seeing a person as a disembodied mind, which must talk its way to a cure, a therapist is advised to see the body as a kind of score sheet of the emotional experiences that its owner has been through.

A score sheet that should be read and attended to as carefully as any mental account.

To take one example, many people who have grown up having to deal with the overwhelming rage of a parent will have learned to suppress their own anger and their desire to hit back at those who hurt them.

In their minds, they will have become meek and precisely attuned to fulfilling the wishes of others.

But as importantly, in their bodies, they will have learned to be very still, almost frozen, because a part of them associates the expression of anything exuberant or powerful with the risk of bringing about retaliation from others.

These people might sit in a particularly stiff way or have an ingrained resistance to running that has nothing to do with laziness.

What is at stake is a fear of one's own vitality.

In trying to treat such people, van der Kolk goes beyond advising traditional talk therapy.

He would also recommend that they try, under the supervision of a therapeutically trained teacher, kick boxing or karate, competitive running or swimming,

sports these people might long have resisted because of a coward relationship to their strength.

They might also try out rhythmically chanting or drumming, thereby additionally releasing pent up longings to assert one's right to be.

Traumatized people tend to have bodies that are either too alert, responding to every breath in touch, flinching and bristling at contact, or else too numb, shut down, heavy and immobile.

Treatment seeks to find a more comfortable halfway house between these two extremes.

Van der Kolk's book helps us to think a new of how to deal with people who, at the start of their lives, were not properly held, caressed and soothed in the way that young children desperately need to be, in order to feel at home in their own skin.

As part of their work, van der Kolk and his team opened up a Sensory Integration Clinic in Boston, a sort of indoor playground for children and adults, where one can get back in touch with a body that was not properly, and by loving hands, touched or cuddled, gently swung from side to side or hung upside down for a giggly moment.

In the Sensory Integration Clinic, under the instruction of a therapist, one might dive onto foam filled mats, have a roll around in a ball pool, jump on a swing and balance on a beam.

It sounds childlike and is meant to be, offering a serious chance to go back a step to correct a longstanding alienation.

Those who were once neglected by emotionally stunted parents have often almost literally withdrawn from their bodies.

They own them, but they do not properly live in them.

They might be rendered deeply uncomfortable.

If anyone touches their shoulders or strokes their back, they might intuitively think their body was disgusting because that's how it once seemed in the eyes of those who were meant to look after them.

For such people, van der Kolk might advise a therapeutically informed massage to help rebuild a basic trust in one's skin and limbs.

As he puts it, he wants the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage or collapse that resulted from trauma.

It is no doubt deeply unfortunate that a difficult past appears to give us physical as well as mental symptoms.

But the body's travails can, in Van der Kolk's optimistic account, also become a source of memory and evidence when our minds have otherwise seized up or fatally doubt the legitimacy of their own feelings.

We can start to remember what might have happened to us by asking ourselves questions in therapy and, at the same time, by taking a look at how we are sitting, how we breathe, and how we feel when someone we love proposes to hold us.

Then we can hope to be healed, not only by wise arguments and kind voices, however consoling these might be, but also by dancing, swaying from side to side on a gigantic swing, chanting in unison, or, best of all, surrendering ourselves to a very long and very nourishing hug from someone we have quietly dared to trust.

"How to Overcome Your Childhood" is a book that teaches us how character is developed, the concept of emotional inheritance, the formation of our concepts of being good or bad, and the impact of parental styles of love on the way we choose adult partners.