The Body Keeps the Score
The book clients most often arrive holding. Contested in places and worth knowing well for that reason.
Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain's alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant.
Bessel van der Kolk sets out a treatment paradigm built on a single claim: that trauma lodges in the body and nervous system, not only in memory or narrative. Drawing on decades of clinical work at his Boston trauma clinic and on neuroscience, developmental research, and attachment theory, he argues that overwhelming experience reshapes how the brain regulates arousal, attention, and the sense of safety. Talking, in his account, reaches only part of what has been injured.
Much of the book surveys approaches meant to work on the body directly: EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback, theatre, and sensorimotor work sit alongside conventional therapy. Van der Kolk presents these through case histories rather than trial data, and several of his stronger claims about neurobiology and specific techniques remain debated in the wider field.
For the consulting room, it supplies a vocabulary for the somatic and dissociative material clients bring, and a reason to attend to the body as trauma speaks through it.
About the author
Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk is a Dutch-American psychiatrist, born in 1943, whose work since the 1970s has centered on the study and treatment of psychological trauma. In 1982 he founded the Trauma Center in Boston. He coined the term Developmental Trauma Disorder and has studied how trauma is held in the body, examining approaches such as yoga and neurofeedback alongside talking therapy. For psychodynamic clinicians, his account of the somatic register of early relational wounds bears directly on the consulting room.
Details
- 2014
- English
- Penguin
- Penguin, 2014
- 560
- 9780141978611