A Cautionary Word on Living With Trauma
I Read My First Book On PTSD, and was Struck by this Story
Bessel van der Kolk’s, The Body Keeps The Score is one of my favourite reads of the past year.
It’s the first book I’ve read which addresses PTSD and complex trauma in detail, and it was fascinating to understand the neurological implications of how developmental trauma experienced over years and years, as well as singular traumatic events, can alter brain function.
One of the many lessons learned from the book is how our brains adapt to trauma over time. Bessel frequently states that the aim of PTSD/CPTSD recovery isn’t so much addressing the trauma (which is an important step, of course) but readjusting the traumatised individual to reality. He stressed the presence of trauma, “…has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present”.
What he means by this is that significant trauma holds the power to permanently (if not addressed) alter our brain so that it becomes stuck in the past. It can alter the shape and function of particular brain structures, leave our stress hormones chronically high, alter memory, and critically alter our perception and attention (hypervigilance, hypovigilance ) towards reality.
