The Hidden Price Of Unprocessed Trauma - Bessel van der Kolk

Let's say that someone has never been exposed to your ideas in The Body Keeps the Score. How do you introduce your thesis?

How do I introduce my things? I usually show movies, uh, ho- actually, Hollywood movies, uh, that, because, you know, when you make a movie, you have to show it correctly. Um, when you see somebody getting stuck and somebody being traumatized, like, scenes from The Hurt Locker or other movies about veterans coming home, or about, uh, kids who have been molested. Uh, usually movies capture it pretty well. You can really see how the way that people move and people hold their bodies and how people's bodies react to the world around them is very visible, actually. Yeah.

Right. So you're trying to demonstrate an outward, uh, exposure in terms of how the body looks of an internal, uh, emotional state?

Yeah. It's a bit how we can read each other, how they, how you, we look at each other and hopefully, you look pretty calm, and I might see you getting upset or something, I'll go, "Oh, I'm seeing something is upsetting him." That's how we give signals to each other. Uh, and of course, as a body-oriented therapist, uh, you get pretty good in reading bodily signals. Yeah.

So that, uh, eh- everybody understands. They see someone that stands in a particular way, has a facial expression in a particular way, is holding themself. That doesn't sound, uh, that surprising. If that's the case, why is the traditional way that we try to think about trauma wrong? What does the traditional paradigm get wrong?

It is, it is interesting indeed that it's so obvious, and I actually have gotten, you know, my books have sold five million copies. I've hardly had any blowback of people who say that I'm getting it wrong. I mean, it's really obvious. But, you know, we come from a world of medicine where we try to define things very carefully. Uh, medicine, of course, is a very disembodied profession. Uh, we deal with the body, but w- we really don't know about the body. And psychology is about minds and how people think and about their behavior. Uh, but psychology is a very, has also traditionally been a very disembodied profession. Uh, the people who, to my mind, really get it are, uh, theater directors, teachers, uh, yoga instructors, martial arts people, musicians, uh, because in the real world, you really get to see how bodies really move together through the world. Yeah.

What is the difference between trauma and stress then?

Stress is what it's like to be human. Um, we're, we're wired for stress. We're wired to rise to the occasion. We are wired to have hard days and broken relationships, and you know, life is rough for actually all of us in one form or another. But when that stress is over, you can look, "Wow, I'm feeling better now." Huh? And the issue with trauma is that trauma is an assault on one's being that really changes the way you feel, experience yourself, how you s- experience the world about you. And so trauma really changes the way you move through the world and who you are. And so stress is a temporary thing. Uh, we have great biology of stress, and there's basically nothing wrong with stress. Uh, this is how, how we have come as far as we have as human beings. But trauma gets you stuck and frozen in that particular spot of being enraged or fearful or terrified or something like that. Yeah.