alexisgarcia's review against another edition

Go to review page

informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

very good, well written and informative. i do wish the author focused less on veterans and more on those with different forms and reasons for ptsd and trauma. obviously nothing wrong with the information/research about veterans but i feel like there wasn’t enough diversity in its participants/examples

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

moonylovesstars's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

I can’t help but rate this 5 stars. It talks about the stories of others and is very informative. I have seen myself in parts of their stories and many other things. It made me feel seen, and feeling seen is the best feeling ever. I feel like everyone should read it. I feel like everyone should give it a try.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

annerbtw's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad slow-paced

3.75

 3.78/5 ⭐️ - because I want to be difficult with my rating.

I liked it, I found it insightful, but I think I went in with the wrong expectations. I assumed that by the end of the book, you'd have resources that could be "easily" applied to your own mental health journey. Kolk definitely teaches you about them, but they're not easily applied to anything specific you might have going on. It's a very educational read... but don't read it side-by-side with A Little Life, my GOD... do not.

Also, (sorry for long review, anyone reading) there are some negative reviews about Kolk sympathizing with horrible people - I don't necessarily think that's true. The same way that people find documentaries about serial killers interesting, I think the same applies here. I would never excuse the actions some mentally disturbed people do at the beginning of this book, but I think it's important for us to find the source (if there is one), and figure out how to keep it from happening again. There can be a lot of fascination in this topic because of just how complex humans are, how complex the brain is.... that's what the whole book is about. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

bethboo's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

This book has so much information. It's a lot longer and in depth than a quick personal growth read. This is a book I definitely wouldn't have gotten so much out of had I not been reading it in tandem with the information given to me by my therapist. It is so much more than a simple book on trauma and therapy techniques. It's the history of diagnoses, therapies, techniques, studies, training, patients, doctors, and experiences surrounding trauma. The author must be fucking immortal because he had first hand experience from ages ago and gave stories and examples and information for every single one he spoke of. I got a lot personally from the EMDR section and the structured Family Therapy or whatever and the beginning sections describing the brain and trauma and how it's all connected. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

evalunny's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

4.0


Expand filter menu Content Warnings

kadengrace's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

2.5

i’ve heard the phrase “the body keeps the score” so often that i wanted to read this book to hopefully learn more, but i think i could have learned more about this concept from better resources. this book was dense and heavy, which meant i needed to split up my reading sessions in order to finish it. i’m not fully sure how useful this book will be to me—i think it brought up interesting ideas that i’m looking forward to exploring in other resources, but i wonder how much detail was needed in descriptions of trauma. it felt overly triggering and written from a relatively narrow point of view. i think i will gain more elsewhere, and i’m not sure what i did gain from reading this book was worth the struggle to finish it.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

mitziatratum's review

Go to review page

dark emotional hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

3.75


Expand filter menu Content Warnings

amyalwaysbooked's review

Go to review page

challenging dark informative reflective slow-paced

2.0

This one was difficult to review. I found the start of the book to be quite strong. There was some information about the brain and how it functions and how it responds to trauma that I found genuinely interesting. However, the book is repetitive. Van der Kolk would repeat anecdotal stories in different points in the book as if he had not already brought it up before. I found that jarring. And the stories themselves...

I know this is a book about trauma, but I did not expect him to go into such details of the personal traumas of multiple people. It felt gratuitous to me how often he would delve into the nitty gritty of a person's experienced trauma. I was expecting a book on the science of the brain and body's response to trauma, and while that was part of what I read, it was not the whole. I imagine this book would be especially upsetting for people who have experienced any extensive trauma. I also didn't love the ways in which can der Kolk often wrote about the people whose stories he shared. Women were often described physically, and the men were given a lot of slack for some of the horrible things they did because of their trauma. Except for one exception it often felt like he saw women as only victims of spousal or sexual abuse while men were only victims of military PTSD.

There were some excellent points made about the way the medical system in the US works, or rather, how it doesn't work. I appreciated how the lack of universal health care and better care for veterans and mothers only enables a vicious cycle of trauma. Unfortunately this also meant that a lot of what he was saying was "well here are some great ideas of what we could try, but there's no strong study behind any of it so maybe someday???"

I found the personal stories and van der Kolk's treatment of them to be far too distracting for any of the positives I found to be worthwhile. 

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

bookthia's review

Go to review page

challenging slow-paced

2.0

This book was too much for me.  I am interested in how trauma affects people, both mentally and physically.  I am interested in approaches to treatment that are effective and cutting edge. I am particularly interested in how professionals (doctors, teachers, counsellors, clergy, and more) can perform their jobs through a trauma-informed lens. This book spent too much time detailing graphic details of trauma and insufficient time giving pragmatic information about how to aid people in our lives living through trauma.  Disappointing.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings

codyroberts541's review against another edition

Go to review page

challenging slow-paced

3.0


Expand filter menu Content Warnings