“A trauma psychiatrist's three-decade synthesis of how chronic psychological trauma is stored in the body and what the contemporary research evidence supports for effective treatment.”
What's in this book
- Bessel van der Kolk's 2014 popular medicine synthesis of three decades of trauma research
- The canonical contemporary popular-medicine book on the operational mechanics of psychological trauma
- 464 pages layering contemporary neuroscience, clinical practice, and patient case-history material
- Treatment chapters cover EMDR, somatic experiencing, yoga, IFS therapy, and psychedelic-assisted approaches
- Sean Pratt audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Atlas of the Heart, Outlive, The Anxious Generation, and contemporary trauma literature
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The Body Keeps the Score is Bessel van der Kolk's 2014 popular medicine book, the canonical contemporary popular-medicine work on the operational mechanics of complex psychological trauma. Van der Kolk, a Dutch-American psychiatrist who founded the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute in the 1980s and has spent four decades treating Vietnam veterans, abuse survivors, refugees, and complex-trauma patients of every category, synthesizes the contemporary neuroscience and clinical research evidence on what trauma actually does to the brain and body and what the contemporary research literature supports for effective treatment.
Van der Kolk's structural method is the patient layering of three threads across the book: the contemporary neuroscience research (the amygdala, the dorsal-vagal shutdown response, the polyvagal theory, the role of interoception in emotional regulation), the working clinical experience from his own thirty-year trauma practice, and the case-history material from individual patients across the entire arc of his career. The PTSD chapters in the front third are the most carefully written contemporary popular-medicine prose on the actual neurobiology of post-traumatic response. The treatment chapters in the back half cover the evidence for EMDR, somatic experiencing, yoga, internal-family-systems therapy, neurofeedback, and the contested role of psychedelic-assisted treatment. The book has become the most-cited contemporary work on trauma in the broader popular and clinical conversation and has had a measurable effect on how clinicians across multiple specialties practice.
Recommended for readers seeking a serious framework for understanding trauma, for clinicians and caregivers working with trauma survivors, and for trauma survivors themselves with the caveat that the case-history material can be activating and is better read in measured sessions than in one sitting. Compare to Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal and Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger on the broader contemporary trauma-literature shelf. The Sean Pratt audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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