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

Simply noticing what you feel fosters emotional regulation, and it helps you to stop trying to ignore what is going on inside you.

Their stoic parts clearly helped them cope, but these managers also kept them in a state of denial. Some shut out their bodily sensations and emotions to the extent that they could not collaborate effectively with their doctors.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of the judgment, character, and will. —William James

posttraumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation, (or seeing someone else being annihilated), which reorganizes self experience (as helpless) and the interpretation of reality (the entire world is a dangerous place).

Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain.

How well we get along with ourselves depends largely on our internal leadership skills—how well we listen to our different parts, make sure they feel taken care of, and keep them from sabotaging one another.

The second branch of the ANS is the parasympathetic (“against emotions”) nervous system (PNS), which promotes self-preservative functions like digestion and wound healing.

I may then say to a patient: “Focus on that sensation and see how it changes when you take a deep breath out, or when you tap your chest just below your collarbone, or when you allow yourself to cry.”

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness, i.e. by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we’re feeling.5 (The technical term for this is “inte

For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present.