The Body keeps the score – Bessel Van der Kolk
The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk.
Background:
This book was recommended on Brothersnbooks over a year ago from a close personal friend who suffered from PTSD after witnessing a horrendous murder.
Since reading that review I've been avoiding reading this book either consciously or unconsciously because I knew that it would bring back some painful memories from my past.
Eventually the memories from my past continued to replay in my head and I knew it was time to take a trip to the book store and pick this up.
The book:
It's not only rare that people live their lives without facing some sort of trauma, adversity. darkness or evil, it's impossible. Whether it's not feeling like we had the connections with our parents that we would like growing up, an unwanted medical procedure or heaven forbid an event or circumstance where we or others were physically harmed.
It doesn't matter what you think about resilience or what you think you are and aren't perceptible to, everyone has memories that resurface within them from time to time that bring about negative emotion, pain or confusion. Ahh to be a human.
The book is a comprehensive, hard hitting, well written, well referenced and painfully raw account of a number of survivors of trauma. More importantly however it explores a plethora of avenues for people struggling with their past to find help and or therapy to not overcome their past in some sort of triumphant defeat (they'd only be defeating a previous hurt version of themselves) but perhaps find acceptance within.
Endstate: Since reading this book I've gone through a range of emotions both positive and negative.
However, the end result is that I feel lighter, less alone and confident that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. As Jordan Peterson says if we feel thoughts or memories that bring us pain it behoves us to feel them, write them down and then let them go.
This will release the encumbrance of their load
