The Body Keeps the Score

         I read “The Body Keeps the Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk because it has been on the New York Times best seller list for so long.  It is not the type of book that I would usually read but I decided to give it a try because I want to learn more bout myself.  Some of the passages hit me so hard that I wrote a blog entry about it.

        The key issue of the nature of the parent-child relationship is how parents felt about, and interacted with, their kids.  Did the parents fail to greet their kids when they had been away?  Did their parents’ faces never light up when they looked at them.  A mother who was too depressed to notice them.  A father who treated them like he wished they had never been born.

        The children of unpredictable parents often clamored for attention and became intensely frustrated in the face of small challenges.  These are the people who felt unwanted as children and don’t remember feeling safe with anyone while growing up.

        Some kids’ disturbing behavior started out as frustrated attempts to communicate distress. When they walk around projecting the message “Don’t mess with me,” they are not likely to be bothered.  Some people don’t remember anybody with whom they felt safe.  For them, engaging with dogs may be much safer than dealing with human beings.  Managing your terror all by yourself gives rise to another set of problems: dissociation, despair, addiction, disconnections and explosions.

        It is common for traumatized people to lose all memory of events in question only to regain access to them in bits and pieces at a later date.  Memories that you experience are not something with a beginning, a middle, and an end but rather in fragments of sensations, images, and emotions. Flashes of images that keep flooding into the mind and they can’t be stopped.  People who suffer flashbacks often organize their lives around trying to protect against them.  They may compulsively go to the gym to pump iron or they may numb themselves with alcohol.  

        Many mental health problems, from drug addiction to alcoholism, start as attempts to cope with the unbearable physical pain of of our emotions.  Alcoholism starts off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of human contact and support.

        Almost all mental suffering involves either trouble in creating workable and satisfying relationships or difficulties in regulating arousal, as in the case of habitually becoming enraged or overexcited.  Friends and family members can lose patience with people who get stuck in their grief or hurt.  No one is interested in the bad news that they have to report.  They often survive with resigned compliance.

        There are many split off parts in the human psyche that were created in order to survive so that your undamaged self can emerge.  Managers, for example, prevent humiliation and abandonment to keep the person organized and safe.  Managers who are obsessed with power are usually created as a bulwark against feeling helpless. They are not emotionally available. Firefighters will do anything to make the emotional pain go away and protect against self harm. Exiles are rejected, weak, unloved, and abandoned children.  Keeping exiles hidden prevents intimacy or joy.  The critic criticizes others; they want to hurt others first so that the other doesn’t dare to hurt them.  The critic is protecting the self from hurt and humiliation.  They are perfectly put together by a scathing inner critic.  

In conclusion, I recognize myself in a lot of these passages.  “The Body Keeps the Score” reminds me a lot of the psychology class that I took as an undergrad in that what it stated should be obvious. I just needed someone to point it out to me.