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Minnesota ACEs Action: A Trauma-Informed Network (MN)

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The Science of How Our Minds and Our Bodies Converge in the Healing of Trauma [brain pickings]

 

“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity,”William James asserted in his revolutionary 1884 theory of how our bodies affect our feelings. Two generations later, Rilke wrote in a beautiful letter of advice to a young woman: “I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.” And yet in the century since, we’ve made little progress on making sense — much less making use — of the inextricable dialogue between the physical body and the psychoemotional interior landscape we shorthand as “soul.”

Nowhere is this relationship more essential yet more endangered than in our healing from trauma, and no one has provided a more illuminating, sympathetic, and constructive approach to such healing than Boston-based Dutch psychiatrist and pioneering PTSD researcher Bessel van der Kolk. In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (public library), he explores “the extreme disconnection from the body that so many people with histories of trauma and neglect experience” and the most fertile paths to recovery by drawing on his own work and a wealth of other research in three main areas of study: neuroscience, which deals with how mental processes function within the brain; developmental psychopathology, concerned with how painful experiences impact the development of mind and brain; and interpersonal neurobiology, which examines how our own behavior affects the psychoemotional and neurobiological states of those close to us.

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I liked his book, though I think Levine's were just a tad better in the neuroscience of it all, as well as the innate release mechanism. This really started a while back. Keleman in the 70s, Louwen before him even, Hanna and Berceli in the 80s, and then it turned into something. There has been good writing about trauma for a while, but too much has relied on the old paradigm of treatment, which even van der Kolk says has not been very successful. 

The reason the body keeps the score is because that's where trauma is. We are learning!

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