BITESIZE | How To Begin Healing Your Past & How Trauma Impacts Your Physical Health | Dr Bessel van der Kolk #564
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Professor of Psychiatry and author of 'The Body Keeps the Score,' discusses how trauma differs from stress, its lasting imprint on the body, and the vital role of body-oriented therapies like yoga in the healing process.
Deep Dive Analysis
10 Topic Outline
Trauma's Impact on Self-Control and Emotional Reactivity
Distinguishing Trauma from Stress
Prevalence and Factors Influencing Trauma Response
The Body's Role in Keeping the Score of Trauma
Understanding 'Feeling Safe in Your Body'
Yoga as a Body-Oriented Therapy for Trauma
Mechanisms of Yoga's Effectiveness in Trauma Healing
Four Essential Steps in Trauma Treatment
Research Findings on Yoga for PTSD
Empowering Individuals to Find Their Healing Path
5 Key Concepts
Trauma vs. Stress
Stress is a temporary reaction to adverse circumstances that dissipates once the event is over, allowing the body to reset. Trauma, however, is a severe stress response where these reactions persist indefinitely, changing an individual's nervous system and reactivity to the world.
Salience Network
This is a network in the brain that helps us select what is important and unimportant. After trauma, the salience network can become dysregulated, causing individuals to react to minor issues as if they are catastrophes.
The Body Keeps the Score
This concept refers to how traumatic experiences leave a physical imprint, affecting the immune system and stress responses, often leading to multiple medical problems. People get stuck in fear, fight, and flight, experiencing emotions as gut-wrenching or heartbreaking physical sensations that persist.
Feeling Safe in Your Body
For traumatized individuals, this means being able to tolerate and reconnect with their bodily sensations without shutting down or feeling overwhelmed. It involves opening up pathways of self-experience to feel alive and at home in one's own body, rather than experiencing it as an intolerable or unsafe place.
Heart Rate Variability (HRV)
HRV is a measure of how the heart and central nervous system relate to each other. When breathing more slowly and deeply, HRV changes, which can lead to a sense of relief and openness, helping to calm the stress response system.
7 Questions Answered
Trauma makes individuals feel they cannot cope with external events, leading to intense emotional reactions like fear, anger, panic, or shutdown over which they have no control, making them feel their lives are out of control.
The key difference is that stress is temporary and resolves once the stressful event is over, allowing the body to reset, whereas traumatic reactions do not stop, causing persistent changes in reactivity and the nervous system.
Trauma is extremely common, much more so than previously thought, partly due to the shame and secrecy often associated with traumatic situations.
Two major factors are individual temperament and the social environment; having supportive people who acknowledge the experience and help one feel safe again significantly contributes to resilience.
A supportive social environment, where loved ones acknowledge what you went through and provide deep comfort, helps protect individuals and makes a significant contribution to their ability to cope with terrible experiences.
Yoga helps traumatized individuals by allowing them to change their relationship to their bodily sensations, calm their stress response system through practices like slow, deep breathing, and open up new pathways of self-experience in the brain.
Studies indicate that practicing yoga for 8 or 12 weeks can reduce PTSD scores and lead to new brain linkages related to self-sensory experience, making individuals more open to others and less afraid of themselves.
13 Actionable Insights
1. Manage Personal Reactivity
Recognize that intense emotional reactions (fear, anger, panic, shutdown) after trauma are internal responses, not solely caused by external events. Focus on learning to manage your own arousal and reactivity rather than blaming others or shutting down, which can lead to distance from self and others.
2. Reconnect with Self & Feelings
If you’ve adapted to trauma by shutting down and cutting off feelings, actively seek gentle guidance to open up pathways of self-experience and reconnect with your inner self to facilitate recovery.
3. Cultivate Calm & Focus
Prioritize finding methods to become calm and focused, as this is the foundational first step in treating trauma and recovering from its effects.
4. Practice Presence in Life
Actively work on being present in your life and with the people around you, fostering engagement with the current moment rather than being stuck in past reactions.
5. Practice Self-Honesty
Avoid keeping secrets from yourself, as self-honesty is a critical component in the process of trauma recovery and self-experience.
6. Maintain Calm Amidst Triggers
Develop the ability to maintain a state of calm even when confronted with people, events, or situations that trigger past traumatic responses.
7. Seek Social Support
After a terrible experience, actively seek out and reconnect with loved ones (partner, spouse, parent, boss) who can offer comfort, acknowledge your reality, and help you feel safe, as a supportive social environment significantly aids in resilience and recovery.
8. Reconnect with Bodily Sensations
A key goal in healing trauma is to learn to feel safe in your body again, as trauma can lead to persistent physical sensations of distress (gut-wrenching, heartbreak) and a feeling of being intolerable to oneself.
9. Explore Diverse Healing Modalities
Maintain an open mind and actively explore various body-focused practices beyond yoga, such as Qigong, Tai Chi, musical practices, tango dancing, or acupuncture, to discover what specifically helps you feel alive, at home, safe, and experience pleasure and engagement in your body.
10. Practice Body-Focused Therapies
Engage in body-focused practices like yoga, Qigong, or Tai Chi to calm your body and mind, as these can help you reconnect with your bodily sensations, regulate your breath and heart rate, and open new pathways of self-experience, reducing fear and increasing openness.
11. Engage in Cultural Activities
Explore cultural activities in your environment, such as singing in a choir, practicing martial arts, or attending a yoga studio, to find practices that help your body feel at home, safe, and provide feelings of pleasure and engagement.
12. Reflect on Past Coping & Hope
When feeling stuck, reflect on past periods when you felt differently, recalling what worked, what relationships supported you, and what gave you a glimmer of hope, to revisit yourself as a survivor and identify personal strengths.
13. Support Gut Microbiome
Consider daily health drinks or supplements that support digestion and enrich the gut microbiome, as this can positively impact mood and overall physical and mental well-being, especially during winter.
4 Key Quotes
Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
The Body Keeps a Score is not just a cute title. It affects your immune system, it affects your stress responses, and people who have long trauma histories oftentimes have multiple medical problems, which have to do with their body.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Many people learn to not feel. So a very common adaptation to trauma is to just shut yourself down and becoming that uptight person that manages somehow to make it through your day.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Yoga was a paradigm that helped us to understand how engaging with your body in a particular way is helpful, but it's not the final word on the story.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
1 Protocols
Four Essential Steps in Trauma Treatment
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk- Find a way to become calm and focused.
- Be able to maintain that calm in response to things, events, and people that trigger you to the past.
- Find a way of being present in your life and with the people in your life.
- Do not keep secrets from yourself.