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

by Bessel van der Kolk

trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant.

That’s what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. . . . It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”

Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. After you have experienced something so unspeakable, how do you learn to trust yourself or anyone else again? Or, conversely, how can you surrender to an intimate relationship after you have been brutally violated?

“The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves,”

people can never get better without knowing what they know and feeling what they feel.

alexithymia—Greek for not having words for feelings.

Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense.