“As long as the trauma is not resolved,” wrote Dr. Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, “the stress hormones that the body secretes to protect itself keep circulating.”38,39,40,41 The body must also devote excessive energy to “suppressing the inner chaos” of trauma, or the activated fight-or-flight response, which further pushes us into a state of dysregulation. It’s a vicious cycle, a physiological loop repeated over and over again.
