The Body Keeps the Score Full Chapter Book Summary

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The Body Keeps the Score Full Chapter Book Summary

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Have you ever suffered abuse, sexual assault, a serious car accident, or some other injuries? Life often leaves us with too many psychological traumas and nightmarish memories. We struggle to get rid of them and forget them, only to find we can’t. The brain and body never forget the psychological trauma caused by an event, and it is not “all in one’s head,” but rather has a physiological basis. This book will take us through the secret of the body that never forgets trauma.

Overview | Chapter 1

Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we’ll unlock the book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.

Let’s first hear a story. Marilyn was a tall, athletic-looking woman in her mid-thirties who worked as a nurse. She met a fireman named Michael while playing tennis at the sports club and the two began a relationship. They often talked about tennis and movies together. Marilyn said that she usually avoided men, but this relationship gradually made her feel comfortable.

As they got closer, one Saturday evening, Marilyn invited Michael to stay over at her apartment. She described feeling “uptight and unreal” as soon as they were alone together, having very little sense of what would happen next. After a few glasses of wine and several episodes of a TV show, they fell asleep together in bed.

At around two in the morning, when they were fast asleep, Michael turned over. When Marilyn felt his body touch hers, she exploded—pounding him with her fists, scratching and biting, screaming, “You bastard, you bastard!” Michael, startled awake, grabbed his belongings and fled.

After he left, Marilyn felt deeply humiliated and hated herself for what she had done. So she turned to the therapist Bessel Van der Kolk for help in dealing with her terror of men and her inexplicable rage attacks.

So why did Marilyn act like that? After several treatments，Van der Kolk found that Marilyn had never been able to let go of her childhood experience of sexual assault by her father.

In fact, on many occasions, even if things have changed and time has long passed, we may still go out of control due to some tiny danger signals that trigger our horrible memories. People often think that it’s “all in one’s head,” but the book The Body Keeps the Score suggests that psychological trauma actually has a physiological basis.

So what are the physical and psychological effects of trauma? What does the body have to do with trauma? How can it be treated? This book will give us the answers.

The author of this book is Bessel Van der Kolk, who is the world’s best-known master of trauma treatment. He is the founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline in the United States, a Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School and director of the National Complex Trauma Treatment Network. With more than 30 years of experience in cutting-edge research and clinical practice in the field of psychological trauma, he is an expert in both medication and psychotherapy, with a creative insight on trauma. He also frequently conducts in-depth exchanges and cooperation with all the founders of major trauma treatments in the United States. As one of the authorities in the field of psychological trauma treatment, his theory has greatly influenced the mainstream approaches to trauma treatment today.