What I Learned from “The Body Keeps The Score” — autoimmunity and trauma

In trauma, our internal clock stops.

Hello my dear friends,

Today I’m going to share with you the lessons I took notes from The Body Keeps The Score, a book by Dr Bessel van der Kolk.

I finished reading it some weeks ago, but due to other topics that were more urgent, I postponed them to today.

The lessons are presented in bullet points without many filler paragraphs or edits to keep the raw feeling as if I just plucked them out of the book. Italic words are my commentary—I keep them short.

It’s alright if most of the summary sentences are unintelligible and short of proper grammar because I mainly wrote the list to remember and now happen to share them with you. So, here it goes between gibberish scribble and proper essay.

Enjoy!

Note: proceed with caution as some points contain triggering events/words.

• Noam’s (a 5-year-old schoolboy witnessing the plane crash on 11/09) story to incorporate the active role of seeking the safety of home. Hence, he evaded the traumatic pathway.

• You can’t fully recover if you don’t feel safe in your skin.

• When patients can physically experience what it would have felt like to fight back or run away, they relax, smile, and express a sense of completion.

• The best way to overcome ingrained patterns of submission is to restore a physical capacity to engage and defend.

• Brain and body are programmed to run for home.

• I was “held” back then. This is in the context of body immobilisation during a sexual assault.

• Three systems in the brain: brainstem - limbic - neocortex. Reptilian: in womb/infant brain. Mammalian: limbic, responds to experience.

• Bruce Perry: neuroplasticity, in his words, is use-dependent matter.

• The reptilian and limbic make up the emotional brain.

• Neocortex is the rational brain, our frontal lobe.

• Mirroring happens in the frontal lobe. Mirroring is a form of empathy.

• Body sensors send the information to the thalamus, which then decides whether it goes through the low road—amygdala, or the high road—the frontal lobe.

• Amygdala is about the panic mode, it’s in our hypothalamus.

• GBA (gut-brain axis) in Darwin’s writing is called the pneumogastric nerve, whereas modern neuroscience calls it the polyvagal.

• HRV (heart rate variability) is a good measure of flexibility between the good brake and accelerator of our nervous systems.

• Knowing we’re seen and heard makes us feel calm and safe, being ignored promotes mental collapse.

• “You’re safe with me”, mirroring neurons help us understand it from other people’s body language.

• Safe connection is the social support we need to heal from trauma.

• Neurocaption means the capacity to evaluate relative danger and safety in one’s environment.

• Three levels of safety: social engagement, fight/flight (mammalian), and freeze/collapse (reptilian).

• VVC (ventral vagal complex) effect: calm, relaxed.

• DVC (dorsal vagal complex) effect: reduces metabolism of the body to protect us from physical pain. Our body simply wants to keep us safe.

• Immobilisation is at the root of most traumas.

• Stephen Porges: To feel emotionally close to another human being, our defensive system must temporarily shut down. Isn’t it like the immune system?

• Regulating the vagal system can be achieved through rhythmic movement and social connections. Top-down activates social engagement, bottom-up calms the tension in the body.

• The body keeps the score. Memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, heartbreak, and gut-wrenching emotions. Skeletal/muscular, mind-brain-visceral is the royal road to emotion regulation.

• Trigger warning below:

• Abused or neglected girls likely being raped later in life and ending up in violent relationships.

• Methylation is about life events triggering biochemical messages that turn on/off by attaching methyl groups to the outside of the gene. Methylation patterns can be passed on to offspring (epigenetics).

• Moshe Szyf said that major changes to our bodies can be made not just by chemicals and toxins, but also in the way the social world talks to the hard-wired world.

• PTSD is characterised by vehement emotions and intense emotional arousal.

• After being traumatised, people keep repeating certain actions, emotions, and sensations to the trauma.

• Traumatic memory: not condensed, reenactment serving no purpose.

• Ordinary memory: social, serving purposes.

• In trauma, our internal clock stops. No new elements can change our personality.

• In the dual memory system, two major differences between traumatic and ordinary memories: how the memories were organised and the physical reactions.

• Traumatic memories are disorganised. From the stories we tell about the past, they are dissociated, e.g. in the story of a survivor of failed anaesthesia, who eventually asked Dr Bessel van der Kolk to accompany her during surgery. This is horrifying, but such a good example.

• Trauma robs our self-leadership.

• Step 1 to heal: Find a way to become calm, learn to maintain that calmness, be fully present, and don’t keep secrets from yourself.

• Interoception (Latin: looking inside) means we allow our body to feel what we’re feeling.

• Step 2 to heal: Mindfulness. It is important because our physical sensations are the enemy. Even after no longer with them, we turn hypochondriac. Emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make sufferers scared and helpless even after the actual physical events have passed. Like autoimmunity and chronic reactions.

• Step 3 to heal: Relationship. Rely on familiar people, physical contact, food, and sleep. When rejected by the people, the outlets of the emotions are sometimes unhealthy.

• Step 4 to heal: Communal rhythms, e.g. synchrony in choir, theatre, or dancing.

• Step 5 to heal: Getting in touch with your body.

• Taking action to the discomfort. It’s the key because immobilisation and resigned compliance don’t allow the energy to be in motion.

• Healing starts by reintegrating the trauma so that it can stay in the past.

• The body is the bridge: stories lessen the isolation of trauma.

• Rorschach: write to yourself by the stream of associations. Keep going from one word, one sentence, and so on.

• Trauma doesn’t simply act as a releasing agent for the symptoms. Rather, the memory of trauma acts like a foreign body still at work, like a splinter causing an infection. Ding ding ding autoimmunity.

• It’s the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem more than the object itself.

• Deep-seated memories emanate from the unconscious.

• Abnormal activation of the insula leads to the proprioceptive responses: governing muscles, joints, and balance. The insula can transmit signals to the amygdala, triggering fight/flight.

• No cognitive input required, just feeling on edge: it is how alexithymia leads to dissociation.

• OOBE (out of body experience) because of a pattern of thinking that does not become Self.

• Traumatised people are trapped in frozen associations.

• EMDR and sleeping REM brain work together to integrate trauma— merging the split phantom timeline of trauma in the past so that it is no longer experienced in the present.

• Inescapable shock causes a broken alarm system, to shoot with untrusted accuracy, bypassing the rational brain. This is about the amygdala as the smoke detector (danger alarm system).

• Numbing vs risk-seeking as the coping mechanism. Example: repressed emotion is a strategy for self-protection.

• Patients came to believe that they could survive only if being tough, invisible, or absent.

• IFS (Internal Family System) consists of: exiles, managers, and firefighters. We want a harmonious self to achieve.

• Neurofeedback: it’s the repetitive firing of these circuits that define trauma. Change the habitual brain patterns created by trauma and its aftermath.

• When the fear patterns relax, brain is less susceptible to the automatic stress reactions, better ability to focus on ordinary events

• Stress isn’t an inherent property of an event.

• From the 3 points above, it’s clear that we must forge a new neural pathway to stop trauma from overpowering us. Brain is neuroplastic, it can be trained. The new pathway will break this old repetitive firing in the status quo neurofeedback, introducing a gentler way to interpret the events.

• People can learn to control and change their behaviour but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions.

• Brain waves: Delta <4cps, Theta 4.8, Alpha 8.12, SMR 12-15, Beta 15-18, High Beta 19 (agitation, anxiety).

• ADHD and PTSD demonstrate slow waves in prefrontal cortex (PFC). Shallow/slow PFC causes focus disarray. Avoid screens.

• Watching the brain wave helps patients as they find it helpful to see the patterns of localised electrical activity in their brains. It helps with learning. And the benefit is it can put the events in the past.

• Communal rituals help.

• Traumatised people are afraid to feel deeply, afraid to experience their emotions for fear of loss of control.

• Traumatised people are afraid of conflict, trying to forget and hide.

• Theatre is about embodying emotions. Compare this with OOBE and alexithymia above, where the trauma warriors dissociate from their emotions.

• Competence is the best defence against the helplessness of trauma.

• Ubuntu: true healing is impossible without recognition of our common humanity and destiny. This emphasises that healing happens in our community, and that help from other people is indispensable. We can’t heal alone.

  Now, I pass this over to you, with a few journal prompts:

  • Which ones catch your eye?

  • Why do those statements resonate with you?

  • What actions can you take now or today to actively return to the present moment based on this learning?

  

A wee bit of an announcement

Come join me to wrap up 2024 with a retrospective session where I will guide you through your own hero’s journey.

By the end of the workshop, you will have a fresh outlook on the past year’s events and get recharged with a new hope for the coming year—all achieved through owning your story and transforming it into power.

Seat are limited, so . . .

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Until next time,