The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Yes, you need to detect whether somebody is getting upset with you, but if your amygdala goes into overdrive, you may become chronically scared that people hate you, or you may feel like they are out to get you.

As he and his team started to inquire more closely, they were shocked to discover that most of their morbidly obese patients had been sexually abused as children. They also uncovered a host of other family problems.

In 1990 Felitti wen

I concluded that, if you carry a memory of having felt safe with somebody long ago, the traces of that earlier affection can be reactivated in attuned relationships when you are an adult, whether these occur in daily life or in good therapy. However, if you lack a deep memory of feeling loved and safe, the receptors in the brain that respond to human kindness may simply fail to develop.9 If that is the case, how can people learn to calm themselves down and feel grounded in their bodies? Again, this has important implications for therapy, and I’ll return to this question throughout part 5, on treatment.

THE POWER OF DIA

I gradually came to realize that the only thing that makes it possible to do the work of healing trauma is awe at the dedication to survival that enabled my patients to endure their abuse and then to endure the dark nights of the soul that inevitably occur on the road to recovery.

Learning to trust is a major challenge.

Children are also programmed to be fundamentally loyal to their caretakers, even if they are abused by them. Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror.

Children have no choice but to organize themselves to survive within the families they have.

HATING YOUR HOME

Children have no choice who their parents are, nor can they understand that parents may simply be too depressed, enraged, or spaced out to be there for them or that their parents’ behavior may have little to do with them.

began to teach Marilyn calming techniques, such as focusing on breathing deeply—in and out, in and out, at six breaths a minute—while following the sensations of the breath in her body. This was combined with tapping acupressure points, which helped her not to become overwhelmed. We also worked on mindfulness: Learning to keep her mind alive while allowing her body to feel the feelings that she had come to dread slowly enabled Marilyn to stand back and observe her experience, rather than being immediately hijacked by her feelings.

they were consoling Mary in a way that they must have wished somebody had comforted them when they first confronted their traumas.