The Body Trauma Expert: This Eye Movement Trick Can Fix Your Trauma! The Body Keeps The Score!
Bessel van der Kolk (guest), Steven Bartlett (host), Narrator
In this episode of The Diary of a CEO, featuring Bessel van der Kolk and Steven Bartlett, The Body Trauma Expert: This Eye Movement Trick Can Fix Your Trauma! The Body Keeps The Score! explores eye Movements, Somatic Healing, Psychedelics: Rethinking How Trauma Recovers Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, renowned psychiatrist and author of *The Body Keeps the Score*, explains how trauma rewires the brain and body, and why traditional, talk‑only or purely cognitive approaches often miss the mark. He distinguishes trauma as a visceral, speechless reliving—where the body and perceptual systems behave as if the past is happening now—rather than a mere story or memory.
Eye Movements, Somatic Healing, Psychedelics: Rethinking How Trauma Recovers
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, renowned psychiatrist and author of *The Body Keeps the Score*, explains how trauma rewires the brain and body, and why traditional, talk‑only or purely cognitive approaches often miss the mark. He distinguishes trauma as a visceral, speechless reliving—where the body and perceptual systems behave as if the past is happening now—rather than a mere story or memory.
He illustrates how EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback, theater/psychodrama, bodywork, and carefully guided psychedelic therapy can restore a sense of safety, agency, and connection by changing both brain activity and bodily experience. A live EMDR demonstration shows how simple eye movements can rapidly reduce the emotional sting of a distressing memory.
Throughout, he emphasizes that most of the people he sees carry early relational wounds—being unseen, invalidated, or abused—and that healing is possible but under‑supported by profit‑driven, medication‑heavy mental health systems. Real recovery, he argues, is rooted in safe relationships, community, movement, and experiences that contradict helplessness.
The conversation also explores his war‑time childhood, how his own trauma shaped his life’s work, the pitfalls of over‑diagnosis (like ADHD), and practical implications for parenting, community, and how individuals can find genuinely effective help.
Key Takeaways
Trauma is a visceral reliving in the body, not just a memory or story.
Neuroimaging of people reliving trauma shows heightened activation in emotional/perceptual regions on the right side of the brain and shutdown in key left‑hemisphere cognitive areas, especially the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the brain’s “timekeeper. ...
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EMDR can rapidly reclassify traumatic experiences as past rather than present.
In EMDR, clients recall a traumatic experience while moving their eyes side to side (or following a therapist’s fingers). ...
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Somatic therapies restore connection to the body and interrupt trauma‑driven habits.
Trauma often leads people to either feel too much (hyperarousal) or too little (numbing) in their bodies. ...
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Most adult psychological problems he sees trace back to relational childhood trauma and neglect.
Around 90% of his patients, by his estimate, have early experiences of being unseen, invalidated, or abused (“Nobody saw me. ...
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Psychedelic‑assisted therapy can catalyze self‑compassion and reframe trauma at a deep level.
In phase III trials of MDMA‑assisted therapy that he helped run, ~67% of participants no longer met PTSD criteria versus ~30% with therapy plus placebo. ...
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Labels like PTSD and ADHD are crude surface descriptions, not explanations.
He argues that current diagnostic systems (like the DSM) are largely artifacts of committees, not grounded in robust neuroscience. ...
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Healing and prevention depend heavily on safe relationships, community, and synchrony.
Trauma is fundamentally a breakdown of connection and synchrony with others. ...
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Notable Quotes
“Trauma is not a memory, it’s a reliving.”
— Bessel van der Kolk
“You become how people see you.”
— Bessel van der Kolk
“I cannot talk you into being a reasonable person. People are not reasonable people.”
— Bessel van der Kolk
“Our focus these days is on productivity and behavioral change, not on how do we find out how to help you.”
— Bessel van der Kolk
“Much of life is automatic, but we can make a choice to do things differently. You start owning yourself.”
— Bessel van der Kolk
Questions Answered in This Episode
You showed that EMDR can make an upsetting memory feel distant in minutes—how do you decide which memories are safe to target first, especially in someone with a long history of complex childhood trauma?
Dr. ...
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When someone begins yoga or other somatic work and finds that certain poses or body sensations are intensely triggering, what specific steps should they and their instructors take to keep the process therapeutic rather than re‑traumatizing?
He illustrates how EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback, theater/psychodrama, bodywork, and carefully guided psychedelic therapy can restore a sense of safety, agency, and connection by changing both brain activity and bodily experience. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Given your concern that profit motives distort mental healthcare, what would a realistically implementable, trauma‑informed public system look like if we actually prioritized outcomes over throughput and billing?
Throughout, he emphasizes that most of the people he sees carry early relational wounds—being unseen, invalidated, or abused—and that healing is possible but under‑supported by profit‑driven, medication‑heavy mental health systems. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Your own MDMA sessions revealed the cost of vicarious trauma and made you a “sadder but wiser” man—if you could redesign psychiatric training, how would you protect clinicians from that accumulation of unprocessed pain?
The conversation also explores his war‑time childhood, how his own trauma shaped his life’s work, the pitfalls of over‑diagnosis (like ADHD), and practical implications for parenting, community, and how individuals can find genuinely effective help.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
You argue that diagnoses like ADHD and PTSD are crude surface labels; in practical terms, how should an individual use or ignore those labels when deciding whether to take medication, pursue neurofeedback, or focus on body‑based and community‑based approaches?
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Transcript Preview
I've proven how helpful EMDR can be for PTSD and depression.
Why and how?
Well, trauma is reliving, and whatever you're feeling is real, as opposed to feeling like a memory. But in our research, we discovered that if you move your eyes back and forth as you recall a traumatic experience, your brain is able to say, "This is what happened to me in the past." And 78% of the people we studied who had adult onset trauma were completely cured.
Can you do it on me?
I could.
Ssh. (camera shutter clicks)
What do you see?
Bessel van der Kolk has been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrists of the 21st century. And for over 40 years, his clinical research has revolutionized how we understand trauma and its impact on our brain and body.
Your early childhood experiences create who you are.
How many of the people that you treated in your practice have childhood trauma?
About 90%, and it's very difficult to change.
Are they changeable?
Yes. That is the great news. But the problem is the focus is not on helping people. The focus is on running successful finished organizations. And even though I was the first person who studied yoga for PTSD, it was very effective, and then there's psychodrama and neurofeedback where our results were stunning. People are so conformist. We already know the answers. Let's not explore anything new. But let's do the science and see how well it works and for whom.
And what about psychedelic therapy?
It's very effective.
Have you ever done a psychedelic drug?
Yeah. Of course.
What did you learn?
That my quest for understanding trauma had to do with my own childhood trauma, all the pain, the suffering.
Earlier when I asked if people could heal from their trauma, have you healed from yours? This has always blown my mind a little bit, 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to this show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like this show and you like what we do here and you wanna support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to. And we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. (upbeat music) Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, you've been described as maybe the most influential psychiatrist of the 21st century by the Financial Times. What is the mission you've spent your life pursuing?
I have been interested in how people survive extreme situations, how people can, uh, overcome the history of people doing terrible things to each other, and how we can create a better world in that regard actually. So it... so the, the mission has been about social, but the investigation has been very much based on what we're learning about brain science, what we're learning about psychological functioning, et cetera, et cetera.
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