The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

First of all, he mentions everyone and everything except he huge body of pioneering, ground breaking work by Dr. Alice Miller, a German doctor and author who produced her evidence in her 1980’s book "The Body Never Lies". She alone was the first to say we attempt to silence our childhood trauma's by addictions yet that they remain trapped in the body until shared with a credible, listening, compassionate witness. Toward the end of his book, Bessel states this exact sentence without credit to her. He also states "after three days of yoga so-n-so began to feel better" bc she moved her body around. I've been an athlete all my life and was unable to heal until Dr. Miller's book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, came into my life. Bessel has no new answers for experiencing trauma, mostly bc he himself has never gone through anything remotely traumatic. Dr. Miller, abused as a child, is the reason we now look to our childhoods for the causes of our adult problems today. She advocated for making parents responsible for the trauma they inflict on their children and while Bessel does mention girls' lives after they've been abused by fathers and brothers, never once does he wonder WHY and WHAT would make a father sexually abuse his daughter or WHY a brother would sexually use his sister. NO ONE has ever looked at THEIR mental states !! Bessel acts like that part is normal but the girls' attempts at a healthy life after childhood abuse in the dark by their family is interesting and worth study. Much rather someone study the depraved men and boys who sleep with their daughters and sisters! Society never mentions them though, ever. I'm glad I didn't go all the way to Boston to hear Bessel; I'm way ahead of the game having read every book by Dr. Alice Miller years ago.

Probably an excellent book but he talks about the research done on defenseless dogs trapped in a cage that are repeatedly shocked. I am a dog/animal lover and this is such an atrocity. When will this cruelty stop? 😢

OK - so this is really a 4 or 5 star book, but I need to make sure any future reader is ready for the level of discussion — this book is NOT for the faint at heart.As a retired veteran, I was intrigued on the topic; especially in light of so many teammates who are struggling, and a suicide rate that is off the charts. I was eager to learn more and hopefully be better armed to talk with friends. That said, so much of the life trauma discussed in this book was regarding children who had been abused. Some of the sections were really HEAVY.In the end, I felt like I had a better appreciation for a range of things:- A better understanding of how rampant Psychological Trauma is, and the wide range of events that can cause it.- A better understanding of the treatments available as well as the history and progress for treating psychological trauma.I recommend this book to anyone interested in helping people who struggle and are interested in a deeper understanding of the causes, the struggles and treatments.

Of all the non-fiction books I've read, this is by far the best one ever. I grew up in a tough way. Lots went wrong. My brother and I believed we were unwanted and we had plenty of evidence to back up our sentiment. We suffered shared abuse and individual abuses of every kind imaginable. When I became an adult, I subscribe to the concepts of people like Rush Limbaugh and drove around listening to his radio show proclaiming that there is no such thing as post-traumatic stress disorder. I believed I could gut it out, that the past was the past and that only weak people needed to talk through their problems. I believed only losers behaved badly as adults due to anything in their childhood or past and that claiming you were affected by any past problem was a crutch to allow you to embrace failure. Frankly, for a time, that approach worked for me. I got married, had some great children (still have them thankfully), built a company. But it didn't take too long until it all came crashing down. And, when it did, I spent nearly 1.5 decades down. The anxiety that was always in my throat and chest was, to put it mildly, a distraction. It's very hard to be kind to people, to focus on your work, to love others when all your power is spent trying to pretend you don't feel like s***. When you can't sleep because your heart is beating so forcefully that the entire bed is vibrating - at least it feels that way - you not only lose the joy of sleep, but you feel hopeless and miserable and even more so when you're not able to understand why you feel this way. When you see everything you have go away and can only occasionally find the strength to take care of yourself and your business and need others in your life to carry you from time to time (much to your embarrassment) and yet you think you're smart and capable and have no understanding of why you are where you are, life becomes a slog. You trudge through it wishing you were dead or that something would kill you even if, like me, you'd never kill yourself. Literally, when I was a believer, I went to bed every night and my prayers went something like this, "Dear Jesus, please have a bus run over me. I will never kill myself but I'm miserable. Please let me die so my family won't hate me for killing myself but so that I can stop hating the sun coming up. In Jesus name, Amen." If you're like I was (and it's hard to tell you how I was and hold the tears down even now), this book will help you change all that. It will describe in detail what you're going through and it captures so many of those subtleties as to make it absolutely amazing. For the first time, I don't have depression (and I don't take pills). I don't have anxiety (it still bubbles up on occasion but using mindfulness, it goes nearly as fast as it comes). My life is pointed in the right direction, my business future is hopeful, my love-life is stabilizing, I know I'll no longer lose friends. I'm finally on track to getting what I want in every area of my life from women to money to friends and deep connections with my family. While I can't attribute every part of my success to this book alone as it takes many things to get where you want to go (mostly you), I can absolutely attest to the power of this book. If you've suffered any sort of major and/or persistent trauma in your life, please buy (and read) this book. You will one day thank yourself for doing so.

This is the greatest book I have ever read.It is a lifetime of knowledge (and it is clear that it had taken a very long time to write) from a practising clinician who, as far as I can tell, is THE most well-informed person on the subject, all in one book.It can be applied to you. Therapy like this would cost thousands, and that is even if you have the good fortune to find a therapist who knows anything about it.It is perfectly written and laid out, starting with explanations about the problem and ending with explanations of how to recover.At first it was hard to read because I was only just coming to terms with having childhood trauma, and was still feeling very upset about it. However the great thing about a book is that you can take as long as you like to finish it. As I read more I understood more and more and began to feel more and more free, understood, and positive. There is SO MUCH information in here, and it is all extremely useful and interesting. I often read one sentence several times because it made such an impact on me, and after some pages (most of them!) I would think for ten minutes until I read more.This is the most helpful book I have read on the subject, and I have read a lot. It has taken me a long time to read, but recovery takes a long time. I think that if you have not been traumatised and are just reading it for interest that you would read it quickly, as it is such a great book. I feel like it has transformed me.

What fascinates me about trauma is what it does to you. It helps you survive whatever has tried to hurt you. It’s a survival instinct.When you experience trauma your brain protects you, it literally creates a new personality on top of the one you were born with and transforms you. It increases your senses, it makes you more intelligent, but it changes your brain chemistry and that's the big problem. If your chemistry changes then you're not going to benefit in normal everyday situations because your flight, fight and freeze part of your brain is now on over drive, your hypothalamus is now stuck in hyper drive and your prefrontal cortex becomes neglected and undeveloped and in a contradicting to making you more intelligent now makes you less able to learn by constantly injecting stress hormones into your blood stream.A lot is crammed into this book, over 30 years of research into trauma and I agree with the author, trauma is so important and so relevant in our society. Most people experience some form of trauma throughout their lives, but it seems the younger and more undeveloped you are the more profound the effect is later on in life. It literally passes down from generation to generation and we still don't discuss or treat trauma as a norm. If everyone was more knowledgeable about trauma and how it affects us then I think our medical advice and how we treat people would be far different from what it is today.I find it easy to notice when someone has experienced trauma. It affects their persona, but there are visual and acoustic clues as well. It helps to know if someone has trauma because you have to adapt to their reasoning and thinking which can often be off kilter.This book is brilliant for psychologists and people who want to learn more about themselves and trauma. It has a diverse knowledge or different applications which are proven to work. Obviously CBT is the most common, but two more I find very interesting and fascinating for trauma treatment is EMDR and Yoga. Both I think are brilliant and I was aware of before the book, but this book shows just what impact it has on masses.I genuinely feel like when it comes to psychology and nutritional sciences, the USA is years ahead of everyone else especially the UK. I really hope a lot of this work makes it over here sooner rather than later.Knowing more about trauma means we can help heal our society, prevent abuse and even enrich ourselves.

Steady explanation of the issue of trauma, whether childhood or adult, followed by many varied techniques to deal with it. It armed me with the information I needed to understand what I had repressed, allow it to be there, and then the tools to integrate the traumatised child back into my adult self in a way that helped me to live comfortably.

One of the best books I have ever read. I couldn’t put it down. The case histories, the neuroscience. ...everything is so eye opening in this book.I am training to be a play therapist and I would recommend this for any child development or neuroscience enthusiast. It has thrown light in my own personal journey and I felt like parts of this book were written for me... absolutely brilliant and proves that we all have the capacity to heal.

Part science, part history, this book spans vdK's experience searching for the reasons some people don't interact well or get sick, and ways to treat them. His career started with working with war veterans and drugs, but since then it has exploded into many areas and treatments. He approaches the field as a scientist who has been involved in many groundbreaking studies, trying to convert the field from studies on rats and theories to human-based data. His criteria for success is results, not money.vdK explains that there are different subtypes of trauma and various treatment techniques work better with some types of trauma than others. Instead of labelling and trying to treat symptoms, he attempts to diagnose and treat the underlying cause. He tells of his efforts to join the campaign to completely reorient the categories set out in the DSM (the reference manual of the psychatric industry in the USA) which just describes symptoms or manifestations rather than the real causes of people's dysfunction.At almost 400 pages of small print this is a long, but exciting, read which shows there are alternatives to the conventional pharmacological-first approach. I found this book to be a real page turner, reading it late into the night. vdK also provides many resources and references for further reading. Essential for everyone, even functioning humans, to understand why you or people around you may not behave as you want or expect.