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).

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.

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

Although the structures involve dialogue, psychomotor therapy does not explain or interpret the past. Instead, it allows you to feel what you felt back then, to visualize what you saw, and to say what you could not say when it actually happened. It’s as if you could go back into the movie of your life and rewrite the crucial scenes.

Most mothers of avoidant infants seem to dislike touching their children. They have trouble snuggling and holding them, and they don’t use their facial expressions and voices to create pleasurable back-and-forth rhythms with their babies.

Frightened adults respond to the same comforts as terrified children: gentle holding and rocking and the assurance that somebody bigger and stronger is taking care of things, so you can safely go to sleep.