skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Bessel van der Kolk MD has spent his professional life studying how children and adults adapt to traumatic experiences.
Bessel van der Kolk MD has spent his professional
life studying how children and adults adapt to traumatic experiences.
He translates emerging findings from neuroscience and attachment
research to develop and study a range of effective treatments for
traumatic stress and developmental trauma in children and adults.
Integrating Therapy with Science
In the past 3 decades, we have learned an enormous amount about
brain functions and interpersonal attachment systems. This new knowledge
has not always been systematically applied to help traumatized children
and adults heal from trauma. Dr. van der Kolk’s work is focused on
integrating therapy with science.
Dr. van der Kolk has published over 150 peer reviewed articles,
diversely ranging from neuroimaging, self-injury, memory, neurofeedback,
developmental trauma, yoga, and theater to EMDR.
The Body Keeps the Score is the inspiring story of
how a group of therapists and scientists— together with their courageous
and memorable patients—has struggled to integrate recent advances in
brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments
that can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past. These new
paths to recovery activate the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to rewire
disturbed functioning and rebuild step by step the ability to “know
what you know and feel what you feel.” They also offer experiences that
directly counteract the helplessness and invisibility associated with
trauma, enabling both adults and children to reclaim ownership of their
bodies and their lives.
Drawing on more than thirty years at the forefront of research and
clinical practice, Bessel van der Kolk shows that the terror and
isolation at the core of trauma literally reshape both brain and body.
New insights into our survival instincts explain why traumatized people
experience incomprehensible anxiety and numbing and intolerable rage,
and how trauma affects their capacity to concentrate, to remember, to
form trusting relationships, and even to feel at home in their own
bodies. Having lost the sense of control of themselves and frustrated by
failed therapies, they often fear that they are damaged beyond repair.
What distinguishes THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE is that the author is
both a scientific researcher with a long history of measuring the effect
of trauma on brain function, memory, and treatment outcomes, and an
active therapist who keeps learning from his patients what benefits them
most. This makes for deeply personal, analytic, and highly readable
(not to mention incredibly moving) approach to the topic of trauma
recovery.
Bessel van der Kolk scientific publications
NICABM Experts
Bessel van der Kolk, MD
Bessel van der Kolk, MD, is arguably the world’s leading expert in
the treatment of trauma – especially when it comes to how trauma affects
the brain, body, and nervous system.
Throughout his career, Bessel has been at the forefront of research
on traumatic stress and the development of clinical therapies to treat
it. He has pioneered approaches that focus on calming the nervous
system, increasing self-regulation skills, and grounding patients in the
present. In his research, Bessel has worked with a variety of clinical
approaches, including neurofeedback, EMDR, psychodrama, and yoga.
“A traumatic memory is fundamentally a breakdown of the ordinary
memory system. An ordinary memory system can integrate things with
everything else that you already know in the context of your existing
reality. But trauma doesn’t fit in. Trauma cannot be integrated, and so
it lives on as an isolated piece of the past that keeps coming back.”
– Bessel van der Kolk, MD, Expert Strategies for Working with Traumatic Memory
https://www.nicabm.com/faculty/bessel-van-der-kolk/
Trauma, trust and triumph: psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk on how to recover from our deepest pain Zoe Williams
His 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, has become a huge pandemic
hit, topping bestseller lists this summer and becoming a meme on social
media. What does it tell us about the world we live in?….
His thesis centres on trauma: the urgent work of the brain after a
traumatic event is to suppress it, through forgetting or self-blame, to
avoid being ostracised. But the body does not forget; physiological
changes result, a “recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an
increase in stress hormones, an alteration in the system that filters
relevant information from irrelevant”, as he says in his book. The
stress is stored in the muscles and does not dissipate. This has
profound ramifications for talking therapies and their limits: the
rational mind cannot do the repair work on its own, since that part of
you is pretending it has already been repaired.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/20/trauma-trust-and-triumph-psychiatrist-bessel-van-der-kolk-on-how-to-recover-from-our-deepest-pain
Bessel van der Kolk on Trauma, Development and Healing by David Bullard
Internationally acclaimed
clinician, educator and researcher Bessel van der Kolk, shares some
observations from his 40-year passion for understanding and treating
people who have experienced trauma.
https://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/bessel-van-der-kolk-trauma
