The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

If you struggle with anxiety, panic attacks, or find yourself constantly ruminating and self-sabotaging, this is the most important book you will read. For anyone who has navigated emotional neglect, a chaotic childhood, or trauma—and perhaps uses addiction to cope—this book offers a completely new perspective. The Body Keeps the Score connects your biology with your biography. It explains how your past experiences physically rewire your brain and nervous system, making sense of the confusing emotions and reactions that can keep you stuck. It validates that these struggles aren't character flaws; they are physiological responses. What truly surprised me was Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s empathy. It is rare to find a scientific text that feels so deeply human. You can tell he genuinely cares about his patients and understands the pain of trauma survivors. It bridges the gap between hard science and human compassion in a way that just clicks. I am incredibly grateful for this work. It provides clarity, hope, and a roadmap for understanding yourself. A masterpiece for anyone looking to heal. As for the physical book, the print is slightly on the smaller side and the paper quality is okay but I was too captured by the words to care about the physical quality and you shouldn't care either.

Informative one. Talks about how traumas are formed and how it affects you throughout your life. It talks about the science behind it and how it fundamentally alters the structure of your brain. As usual it all comes down to how well you were taken care of when you were a little kid and was there anyone to look after your needs and provide you the love and care you deserve.

Book's content is good and interesting But the pages are thin and fragile

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ The Body Keeps the Score is a very powerful and eye-opening book. It explains how our past experiences and emotional pain can affect both the mind and the body. While reading it, I learned how deeply our bodies can hold on to stress and difficult memories, even when we try to move forward. The book also talks about different ways people can begin to heal and reconnect with themselves. For me, it was a meaningful read that helped me understand my own emotions and reactions a little better. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about emotional healing and the connection between the mind and body.

Great buy. It thoroughly helped me to break away from the shackles of the past. I recommend it to others who had a traumatic experience and want to come out of it.

This book is a true gem. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk takes the complex topic of trauma and makes it easy to understand without losing depth or compassion. It’s beautifully written, insightful and full of hope. Van der Kolk weaves neuroscience, psychology and personal stories into a narrative that sheds light on how body, mind and soul get imprinted by trauma. It also shows how important trauma healing and trauma awareness are for us as society. Whether you're a health practitioner, yoga teacher, coach or just someone searching for truth and healing, this is a must-read – a modern classic.

Deep and inquisitive how human beings psyche works, how we respond to trauma

wow

Must read for anyone who has experienced trauma, which is all of us, really, to some degree. He tackles some big ideas in accessible language and gives people some tools to work on.

One of the rare books that remains in New York best sellers list for years. Still reading it but the book is crucial in psychology and contains heartbreaking stories with a real life hard experience stories some ending with successful relief and just surviving for others.

Libro interesante y muy completo. Trata el tema de los traumas con ejemplos reales y claros.

What fascinates me about trauma is what it does to you. It helps you survive whatever has tried to hurt you. It’s a survival instinct. When you experience trauma your brain protects you, it literally creates a new personality on top of the one you were born with and transforms you. It increases your senses, it makes you more intelligent, but it changes your brain chemistry and that's the big problem. If your chemistry changes then you're not going to benefit in normal everyday situations because your flight, fight and freeze part of your brain is now on over drive, your hypothalamus is now stuck in hyper drive and your prefrontal cortex becomes neglected and undeveloped and in a contradicting to making you more intelligent now makes you less able to learn by constantly injecting stress hormones into your blood stream. A lot is crammed into this book, over 30 years of research into trauma and I agree with the author, trauma is so important and so relevant in our society. Most people experience some form of trauma throughout their lives, but it seems the younger and more undeveloped you are the more profound the effect is later on in life. It literally passes down from generation to generation and we still don't discuss or treat trauma as a norm. If everyone was more knowledgeable about trauma and how it affects us then I think our medical advice and how we treat people would be far different from what it is today. I find it easy to notice when someone has experienced trauma. It affects their persona, but there are visual and acoustic clues as well. It helps to know if someone has trauma because you have to adapt to their reasoning and thinking which can often be off kilter. This book is brilliant for psychologists and people who want to learn more about themselves and trauma. It has a diverse knowledge or different applications which are proven to work. Obviously CBT is the most common, but two more I find very interesting and fascinating for trauma treatment is EMDR and Yoga. Both I think are brilliant and I was aware of before the book, but this book shows just what impact it has on masses. I genuinely feel like when it comes to psychology and nutritional sciences, the USA is years ahead of everyone else especially the UK. I really hope a lot of this work makes it over here sooner rather than later. Knowing more about trauma means we can help heal our society, prevent abuse and even enrich ourselves.

Super