The first read of this year and a very thought-provoking one. The trauma, the lingering effects of the trauma on people’s lives, even after it ended up being a long time ago.
This book was written around 10 years ago. It comprises Bessel Van Der Kolk’s years of research and things he learnt through networking with people working on the same side of things.
What’s it about?
The book starts with Bessel’s encounter with Vietnam War US soldiers. Their dreams reminding them of the horrors in the war field, picture-perfect. The harsh environments and dreary circumstances of losing close friends in front of their eyes, and their helpless anger destroying Vietnamese children and women during the war – all these make living a normal life difficult.
Studies on trauma and the underlying effects it leaves in the brain, the shutting down of the rational part of the brain during such incidents. Losing language, senses, and the conscious feeling of thinking things through at the time of the trauma have been found to be a common scenario.
Bessel goes on to paint a clear picture of the trauma that children in unfortunate circumstances and households have had to endure and how the effects of it still affect them in leading an adult life. While war soldiers clearly showed signs of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), sexually abused children have dissociation to deal with in all walks of their life.
Bessel stresses the difficulty and the time it takes to find the exact underlying phenomenon beyond the common symptoms that people mention. The test of time to name the phenomenon and establish its credibility amidst clinical professionals and society, especially in the courtroom, has been really challenging, and it takes a lot of consistent perseverance from the research community.
It is surprising to understand how much the body and brain act out to protect and react to a certain situation or long exposure to something the mind is not ready for. There are instances where abused children completely forget the incidents where they have been abused unless they are reminded of the very circumstances and the senses their brain associates with them. The character they develop to mask it out of their life, memory, and body helps them only for a while, when they eventually have to bring the disturbing fact underneath them all and handle it without re-living it. Bessel found that resurfacing memories associated with trauma sometimes makes the person re-live them – the pain, the smell, the senses – that are all associated together. This may retrigger their defense mechanism and might send them back to their old undesirable ways.
The quest to make them live a normal life has been a several-decades-long effort by several researchers. Some of the treatments, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Neurofeedback, EMDR, and also yoga, improv, and meditation, have helped victims stay in touch with their body and mind and recover without reliving the trauma.
The whole book was eye-opening, and it was brutal to see the victims, mostly children, and their struggles to lead a normal life, in spite of no fault of theirs.
Drill down
There was this particular story of a director of nurses in a hospital (Nancy) that affected me a lot. Unlike any other victims mentioned, Nancy’s circumstances do not start with an explicit war or abuse scenario. She was getting her laparoscopic tubal ligation surgery after giving birth to her third child. The anesthesia started wearing off in the middle of her surgery, and she was able to feel every pain, but she felt paralyzed to move or voice it out, and the sense of blood gushing from her body and the tubes being cut were etched in her mind. She was having flashbacks of it, couldn’t explain what she felt or did not feel even days and months after the surgery. She took on a completely different character, where she got annoyed by little things and couldn’t find joy in living life even in glorious moments.
This story was particularly too scary because it can happen to anyone. You need not enlist to go to war, be brought up in a struggling household, meet with an accident, be in foster care, or be left behind for church classes. I am sure I can’t compare the circumstances or weigh them, but when I was reading, this particular story affected me a lot. How someone can identify such a scenario and its impacts needs attention at all levels.
What do I make of the book
Bessel makes sure to clearly account for the years of research, circumstances, and the failures to arrive at something helpful for the victims. It definitely leaves hope behind in the last few chapters of the book, reading some of the successful stories of people who did come out of their trauma and started leading a normal life.
Though it does show that not any or all treatments are guaranteed to work for certain patients, and it sometimes comes down to trial and error for some who have had to endure with nothing but hope in their hands.
The book felt too focused on children and the effects of trauma on their adult life. It could have had a lot more clarity on how to handle things when it comes to adults, to prevent trauma. I understand a few circumstances are non-preventable – accidents and mishaps in surgery – and the brain does lose its function for a while, yet I would have loved to know about research in that direction. (Breathwork does help, I guess, but will it in all scenarios?)
The book does emphasize treating trauma as a whole entity that affects body, brain, and mind, and not just dealing with the mind, which was the most essential and missed-out part in treating it. The book does give hope of getting all good, even after life puts you down a long set of stairs.
Overall, the book was a good read to me, but I am not sure why I came across people on the internet saying their therapist recommended reading this book before beginning their recovery. This book condenses too much trauma in its pages for them not to get triggered. This book gives a good brief to people without a clinical or research background to better understand the accounts and eventually make better decisions when it comes to dealing with people who require help.
Lit Loom 