DR. Bessel van der Kolk spent 30 years discovering why people behave so strangely. His specialty is treating those who have suffered traumas so horrible – war, carnage, incredible pain they couldn’t stop – that their brains weren’t able to fully process it, and their bodies reacted to the precarious state of their brains in ways they couldn’t. explain or control. But many human behaviors still confuse van der Kolk, 82. He doesn’t understand why the medical community doesn’t take childhood trauma more seriously. He doesn’t understand why leaders still send citizens to war without considering how it will deplete their ability to live normally for decades. And he’s not sure why a woman recently approached him on the street and kissed her feet.
“I asked, ‘What are you doing?’” van der Kolk says via video call from her home in the Berkshires. Van der Kolk is a specific kind of fame. Most people have never heard of him, but for those who have begun to understand why they – or someone they loved – behaved the way they did through his 2014 book, The body keeps score, he is a miracle worker. Hence the kiss on the feet.
In the book, the psychiatrist, son of Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands, argues that trauma is more present and more powerful than people imagine. He argues that although trauma harms the brain, its effects are much deeper. “Victims of trauma cannot recover,” he writes, “until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies.” The body keeps score it is not a self-help book; is a summary of scientific advances in understanding and treating trauma over the past century and why van der Kolk believes medicine is still not dealing with it effectively. But for many readers, it was an epiphany. As the book has remained at the top of bestseller lists over the past five years, trauma has gone from a topic discussed primarily in the medical and military communities to a feature of the national debate.
In fact, many people—including the book’s author—have begun to warn that trauma is being redefined in unhelpful ways. “People are inflating the whole notion of trauma and now applying it to everything,” says van der Kolk. “When someone ends a romantic relationship with you, it is part of life, but it is not a trauma. What is happening in Gaza is a trauma.” He also rejects the idea that his book became popular five years after it was published due to the trauma of the pandemic. “My take on this is that I owe a lot to President Trump,” he says. “When we saw brutality enter our political arena, many people were triggered and [felt] like, ‘Oh, that’s what my education was about; someone treated me very badly and hurt me.’”
As the book climbed the charts, van der Kolk—who has also run the Trauma Research Foundation in Massachusetts since 2018—noticed that he gets invited to more lectures, but fewer hospitals or universities. “Institutions, in general, have not adopted the book,” he says. Doctors, however, do. Colorado therapist Laurie Marcellin says it’s one of the top four books she recommends as a supervisor for new therapists. “It’s incredible, considering the number of years since it was released, that the book is still considered fundamental,” says Marcelino. She is more cautious about recommending it to clients because it can be triggering in its specificity. “I once heard someone say, ‘It’s like someone opened my mail,’” she says.
Van der Kolk leaves the company established medical tradition on several key issues. Some of the treatments he recommends are unconventional. He is an advocate of using MDMA – also known as ecstasy or Molly – to help people weakened by trauma. (He currently uses ketamine, because unlike MDMA, it is legal to prescribe.) “When you are traumatized, you live in a very limited reality, and your fear and your anger really determine your reaction to everything,” he says. . “Psychedelics have the ability to open people’s minds to live in a much greater reality.”
In his most recent study, published in January, van der Kolk treated 46 traumatized people with psychotherapy and MDMA and 44 with psychotherapy and placebo. He says he was shocked by the results. “After MDMA, people were much more able to articulate their own point of view and understand the point of view of others, and not get into fights, but find the ability to come to an agreement,” he says. However, the bestseller’s influence can only take you so far. Although Australia and the Netherlands have announced MDMA programs, experts at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration advise against recommending them.
Other unorthodox treatments he recommends include activities that can help people feel in tune with others, including dance, drumming and choir, as well as in tune with themselves, such as yoga and breathing. The current system, he says, “where you talk about how bad you feel or use drugs, needs to be greatly expanded [to be like] the way we raise young children, which is to have experiences of discovery and pleasure and connection, without talking about your trauma, just to be in sync with other people.” He’s a big fan of drama therapy. “It’s great for people to inhabit creatures that are different from what they normally are,” he says.
For some doctors, the book’s innovative thinking is what makes it appealing. “I think we’re too stuck in psychiatry for a few things,” says Dr. Chuck Weber, co-founder and medical director of the Family Care Center, a national network of mental health providers that treats many former military personnel. Sufferers of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). One of the techniques he uses in the book is massage therapy for people whose trauma means they can’t stand being touched. The hope is that this can retrain the brain to associate touch with different memories.
While the healthcare industry has not yet fully adopted many of these treatments, van der Kolk sees progress on the front lines, including in schools and prisons; San Quentin has a program loosely based on practices encouraged by The body keeps score. “It’s surprising to see the criminal justice system actually have a trauma model,” says van der Kolk. “That made me very optimistic.”
It is entirely plausible that van der Kolk’s views on healthcare institutions were influenced by events in his own history. In 2018, he was fired from the first trauma center he founded, amid allegations of bullying, which he vehemently denied. He also bristles at the mention of the highly influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM describes and codifies all known psychiatric disorders. It is often essential to get health insurers to pay for a treatment. Despite what van der Kolk believes is overwhelming evidence that children who suffer from persistent trauma due to an absent, abusive, or unwell parent need special help, the only trauma in the DSM is PTSD. “I spent too much time in my life trying to change the DSM,” he says sadly. “Countless research articles – I’m not doing that anymore.” Instead, he is writing a workbook based on his theories.
He also hopes his work will have an impact on an institution close to children: schools. His recommendations on how to make up for pandemic losses are, unsurprisingly, slightly heretical. Most school systems are turning to extra instructional time and testing to bring kids up to speed in reading and math. Van der Kolk says it’s all wrong. “The main thing you learn at school is to be part of a group, collaborate, have fun and create things together,” he says. “So I would focus on theater groups, I would focus on athletics, because the pandemic has really left people physically very isolated and alienated from each other.”
It is difficult to imagine a world in which such activities could be prescribed and paid for by health insurers or educational systems. There are no double-blind, peer-reviewed studies that establish that they make people feel better. Van der Kolk is not at all put off by this. People surprise you all the time.
This story originally appeared on Time.com read the full story
