A review by mi7sma
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

It took me over 5 months to get over this book and now that I've read it, I have to say that it was profound and impactful to say the least. The main gist of it was how traumatic events alter the biology of our brains leading to behavioral and emotional dysregulation. It also discussed alot of instances where people responded well to IFS and EMDR therapy just to get back in touch with their bodies that they've dissociated from. I read that people who can't talk about their trauma tend to act it out and by associating a memory with an impactful event, trauma survivors lose their individual hysterical symptoms and obtain the ability to react to past events and stimuli organically. With these psychology books, the one thing that sticks is that letting your emotions flow and pass is a sure fire way of getting back to normalcy and be mindful, even Rumi agrees!, speaking of which, meditation teaches us to be mindful of ourselves so we can stay calm when in stressful situations or even things that don't need a response since PTSD causes a person to overreact to a small stimulus to protect the mind and body from harm. All this is a part of dialectical behavioral therapy(DBT). Personally for me, IFS(internal family systems therapy) is a therapy technique designed to unpolarize different facets of your personality and prevents them from fighting with eachother(like how your emotions get jumbled up/get mixed feelings, like for example your urge to protect someone collides with your rage due to unresolved past events that you didn't pay attention to fixing). The goal of IFS is to promote self-leadership(you're incharge of you, it helps harmonize the different sub- personalities in your subconsciousness). Also, there was some chapter(it talked about how acting can help you become more stable) which discussed about something called "structures". Lemme break it down, structures in acting therapy are when you recreate paste altercations/traumatic events and get someone to play those parts but the script is changed in the 2nd act to give the poor guy some closure(like how you have an emotionally unavailable pompous mom, with structures, you can pick someone from a crowd of actors and get them to act out the real shitty event and then the better event where she was good and listened etc). In a chapter called Neurofeedback, I learned how the brain responds to EEG and frequency therapies as alpha, beta and delta waves foreshadow how we're feeling(our brains are biophysical). Also, a term called "muscular bonding" was introduced where people from groups who had communal rituals(singing, marching or chanting) were intertwined with eachother(i don't believe in that shit tho lmao). Overall, pretty great book if you have the time. I wrote the review this way for you     </3
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