Archives for : Bessel van der Kolk

Peter Levine goes further than Bessel van der Kolk on the importance of body memory

Posted by :calford@umd.edu On : August 18, 2023
0

Category: Reviews of trauma books

Tags:, , , , , , ,

Peter LevinePeter Levine goes further than Bessel van der Kolk on the importance of body memory.

Peter Levine’s work on body memory of trauma has a devoted following.  His is a more practical, methodical, and focused version of Bessel van der Kolk’s speculations about trauma’s embeddedness in the body.  Van der Kolk wrote the forward to Levine’s Trauma and Memory: Brain and Body in a Search for the Living Past.  It reads,

For well over a century we have understood that the imprints of trauma are stored not as narratives about bad things that happened sometime in the past, but as physical sensations that are experienced as immediate life threats — right now. (loc 90)

Or as Levine puts it,

It is crucial to appreciate that emotional memories are experienced in the body as physical sensations. (p 22)

The practice

Levine works by observing the position and attitude of the body, seeing where the tension lies, and working on that body part almost like a physical therapist, helping it to relax.   “Expand” is his term. The difference is that Levine does this body work while talking with his patient about the trauma he or she experienced.  It’s a good idea: talk about your trauma while your therapist works on your body to help it relax.  In this way, psyche and soma and integrated.  In practice, it doesn’t work so well, primarily because Levine focuses entirely on trauma confined to a single event manifested in a particular bodily contraction, as he calls it. 

Continue Reading >>

Share

A surprisingly good article on the social function of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: We’re all victims now

Posted by :calford@umd.edu On : August 12, 2023
0

Category: Thoughts on trauma

Tags:, , , , , ,

“Tell Me Why It Hurts: How Bessel van der Kolk’s Once-Controversial Theory of Trauma Became the Dominant Way We Make Sense of Our Lives,” is a strikingly good article on the appeal of The Body Keeps the Score (New York Magazine, July 31, 2023).    It’s not long, and you can read it for yourself (the web address is given in the references).  The article, and my comments, are not about whether van der Kolk (vdK) is right or wrong, but why his book has become so extraordinarily popular, spending 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and still counting. It’s sold 3 million copies and has been translated into 37 languages.  It’s made vdK the world’s best-known psychiatrist. 

The book’s thesis is that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is not just something that happens on the battlefield.  It happens in childhood, and for many of us throughout our lives.  PTSD is the intrusion of experiences that cannot be emotionally or cognitively assimilated, in many cases because we are too young or overwhelmed to make sense of them.  Instead, these experiences are stored in a special type of memory he calls somatic memory that is based in the body, not the mind.  Because these memories are stored in the body, they can’t be reached by talk therapy or reflection.  Body work is necessary, by which vdK means virtually any therapy that involves the body and its movements.  Yoga and massage are exemplary, but dance, play therapy, and psychodrama, in which people replay traumatic experiences with others, also count.  Indeed, almost any therapy counts that isn’t just talk, but involves the body (I’m not quite sure why vdK includes psychodrama; it’s almost all talk). 

But why did the book become so popular?

The book has been so influential because it says that you are emotionally ill not because of something in you, or about you.  You are in a state of anxiety, depression, and despair because of what was done to you by others, frequently parents who paid insufficient attention to your needs, or responded inappropriately. 

Continue Reading >>

Share

Kandel, The disordered mind. Or was Descartes wrong?

Posted by :calford@umd.edu On : May 28, 2023
0

Category: Reviews of trauma books

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,

Kandel, The disordered mind.  Or was Descartes wrong? 

It’s become almost commonplace today, at least among those impressed by the latest results of neuroscience, to say that Descartes got it backward.  Not “I think therefore I am,” but “I am therefore I think.” The mind is composed of body.  The brain makes mind possible.

This is the argument of Eric R. Kandel, author of The Disordered Mind and Nobel Prize winner for his research on memory storage in neurons.  The reader need not be intimidated.  Kandel clearly explains recent developments in neuroscience for the non-specialist.  He tries, but fails, to put together the neuroscience of the injured brain with the experience of emotional distress.  He knows one is incomplete without the other, he calls for a “new scientific humanism,” but all he ever says is that both brain and experience need to be taken into account.  Sometimes that’s enough, but about some experiences, such as PTSD, he cannot get out of the brain.    

I feel therefore I am

It’s absolutely true that brain makes mind, and yet this is not how we experience ourselves.  “I feel therefore I am” is probably the first and fundamental experience of self, and it would not be wrong to say that feeling is at least as body-based as it is mind-based.  The fundamental experience, or at least the experience that makes life worth living, is the feeling of being alive, filled with the vitality of existence.* 

Neuroscience doesn’t capture the feeling of being human.  It’s about neurochemical events responsible for this feeling, but it doesn’t capture the experience of being alive, sad, happy, depressed, in love, etc.  The question is how much this matters, and how the neurological explanation can be made useful without diminishing the experience of life.

Thus, we now know that psychiatric illnesses, like neurological disorders, arise from abnormalities in the brain. (p 41)

It’s not true, at least not when stated like this.  These “abnormalities,” which exist, may be the brain’s normal reaction to an abnormal environment. What goes on in the brain is caused by the environment we live in, not just autonomous neurochemical events in the brain itself.  Everything I experience changes my brain.  But that doesn’t mean that all, or even most, psychiatric diseases arise from abnormalities in the brain.  Some do, some don’t, and many are a mix.  Besides, the term “arise” is too vague. 

Kandel talks about PTSD at some length, and I’ll get to that shortly.  His treatment of the topic is disturbing, but the scope of the book is broader and worth considering. 

A “new scientific humanism”?

As research into the brain and mind advances, it appears increasingly likely that there are actually no profound differences between neurological and psychiatric illnesses and that as we understand them better more and more similarities will emerge. (p 43)

This convergence will contribute to the new, scientific humanism. (p 43)

I have only a scant idea of what Kandel means by “the new scientific humanism.”  It would have helped had he defined “humanism” to begin with.  I think he means that experience still matters, particularly one’s own experience of events such as depression.

Continue Reading >>

Share

PTSD is Torture

Posted by :calford@umd.edu On : January 6, 2018
7

Category: Thoughts on trauma

Tags:, , , ,

PTSD is torture.  

The most obvious thing to say about the relationship between torture and severe psychic trauma is that psychic trauma is often the result of being tortured.  That’s true, but the relationship is closer than that.  Severe psychic trauma is torture.   PTSD has many of the same features as the pain intentionally inflicted by torture.  (PTSD is a narrower category than severe trauma.  I use PTSD only for convenience, not as a diagnostic category.)   In other words, the relationship between torture and PTSD is not simply sequential.  In many respects, PTSD is torture. 

My authority for the pain of torture is the well known work by Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of a World.  All page references are to this work unless otherwise noted.  Others have written thoughtful works on torture, including Jean Améry, who was himself tortured.  I have written about Améry elsewhere (Trauma and Forgiveness), but Scarry’s description of the experience of torture seems more relevant.

Continue Reading >>

Share

What if Bessel van der Kolk is right about trauma?

Posted by :calford@umd.edu On : February 17, 2016
20

Category: PTSD, Reviews of trauma books, Thoughts on trauma

Tags:, , , , , ,

B0000757Bessel van der Kolk (vdK) is probably the world’s most well known trauma theorist. I reviewed his recent book, The Body Keeps the Score, in an earlier post. Since then I’ve read more of his work and listened to him speak for hours (he is all over youtube). The best way I’ve figured out to think seriously about his work is to ask what difference it would make if he were right.

What he says

Asked about how he treats the victims of acute trauma, vdK says

Holding them, rocking them, giving them massages, calming their bodies down is a critical issue. I am probably the minority among my colleagues in that I am much more focused on bodily state than on articulating what’s going on. I think that words are not really the core issue here. It is the state of being, of tenseness, of arousal, and of numbing, and that people need to learn again to be safely in their bodies. (http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/408691)

Think about this for a minute. One might expect a trauma therapist to say something like “I try to create a safe environment in which my patients can put words to unspeakable experiences. I try to help them remember an experience so they don’t have to constantly relive it.” This makes sense, for trauma is a disorder of time, in which the past is never past but is constantly intruding upon the present.

VdK would have no difficulty with the last sentence, and yet his treatment program (or rather programs) has little to do with the past, and everything to do with the present. Trauma is when the past colonizes the present. Its treatment depends on reappropriating the present, and one does that not through understanding the past, but coming to live in the present, and the best way to do this is to bring the body into the present.

Behind vdK’s approach is his view that PTSD and related traumatic disorders, particularly developmental trauma (childhood abuse and neglect), are disorders of the limbic system, one of the oldest parts of the brain, the one we share with all mammals. In the limbic system, threat is experienced as sensation, and the impulse to fight or flee. Threat turns into trauma when we can neither fight nor flee, when we are trapped, and the stress is turned against the self. Trauma is embedded in the body-mind, a single entity.

Continue Reading >>

Share