Pod Insights Modern Wisdom The Hidden Price Of Unprocessed Trauma - Bessel van der Kolk About this episode Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, researcher, and an author.
Trauma is often discussed as a mental and psychological issue. But what if it affects more than just the mind? What does it mean if your body is holding onto trauma, and how might these memories manifest outside of our brains?
Expect to learn what is meant by the body keeping the score, what is wrong with the traditional way we talk about trauma, how you can learn to be more self-compassionate, how trauma manifests and masks itself as illnesses, the best therapies and modalities for understanding and releasing trauma and much more...
-
00:00 Do We Think About Trauma Wrong?
03:56 Link Between Trauma & Chronic Stress
07:28 Why Trauma Causes Us to Shield Ourselves
12:41 How to Not Be at the Mercy of Your Feelings
21:34 Does Trauma Make Us More Vulnerable to Future Trauma?
26:48 Tips to Being More Self-Compassionate
33:58 How Trauma Manifests as Illness
38:32 Principles for Treating Trauma
50:49 Opening Up to Other People
1:01:40 What Bessel is Excited About
1:04:38 Bessel’s New Book
1:05:04 Where to Find Bessel
-
Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw
Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/
Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom
-
Get in touch in the comments below or head to...
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx
Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/
Transcript 10,237 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Chris Williamson? Let's say that someone has never been exposed to your ideas in The Body Keeps the Score. How do you introduce your thesis?
0:10 Speaker 01 How do I introduce my things? I usually show movies, actually Hollywood movies.
0:18 Speaker 01 Because, you know, when you make a movie, you have to show it correctly. When you see somebody getting stuck and somebody being traumatized, like scenes from The Hurt Locker or other movies about veterans coming home or about kids who have been molested. Usually, movies capture it pretty well. You can really see how the way that people move and people hold their bodies and how people's bodies react to the world around them is very visible, actually.
0:46 Chris Williamson? Right, so you're trying to demonstrate an outward exposure in terms of how the body looks of an internal emotional state?
0:58 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a be- how we can beat each other. We look at each other and hopefully you look pretty calm. And when I see you getting upset or something, I'll go, oh, I'm saying something is upsetting him. And so we give signals to each other. And of course, as a body-oriented therapist, you get pretty good in beating bodily signals.
1:21 Chris Williamson? So that, everybody understands. They see someone that stands in a particular way, has a facial expression in a particular way, is holding themselves. That doesn't sound that surprising. If that's the case, why is the traditional way that we try to think about trauma wrong? What does the traditional paradigm get wrong?
1:43 Speaker 01 It is, it is interesting indeed that it's so obvious. And I actually have gotten. You know, my bookstore sold five million copies. I've hardly had any blowback of people saying that I'm getting it wrong. I mean, it's really obvious. But, you know, we come from a world of medicine, where we try to define things very carefully. Medicine, of course, is a very disembodied profession. We deal with the body, but we really don't know about the body. And psychology is about the minds and how people think and about their behaviour. But psychology has also traditionally been a very disembodied profession.
2:25 Speaker 01 The people who, to my mind, really get it are theatre directors, teachers, yoga instructors, martial arts people, musicians. Because in the real world, you really get to see how bodies really move together through the world.
2:44 Chris Williamson? What is the difference between trauma and stress, then?
2:49 Speaker 01 Stress is what it's like to be human. We're wired for stress. We are wired to rise to the occasion. We are wired to have hard days and broken relationships. And, you know, life is waf for all of us in one form or another. But when that stress is over, you can look, wow, I'm feeling better now. And the issue is trauma is the trauma is an assault on one's being that really changes the way you feel, experience yourself, how you experience the world around you. And so trauma really changes the way you move through the world and who you are.
3:33 Speaker 01 And so stress is a temporary thing. You have great biology of stress and there's basically nothing wrong with stress. This is how we have come as far as we have as human beings. But trauma gets you stuck and frozen in that particular pulse of being enraged or fearful or terrified or something like that, yeah.
3:56 Chris Williamson? Is there a link between trauma and chronic stress? Is that just another word for the same thing?
4:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, it gets difficult. You know, like, chronic stress, if you work on a project, if you're in the military, can actually be quite enjoyable in a way because you feel that all your capacities are being used. You see this after disasters, that people who work on cleaning up disasters tend to feel very close to the people who they have gone through the experience with, gives them a sense of intimacy also. And so, but the big issue that is being left out in most psychology texts, most conceptualizations,
4:45 Speaker 01 is that we're basically, we are social creatures, and we don't exist by ourselves, we don't, we're always thinking about other people, we're defining ourselves through who we belong to, what ethnic group we belong to, our religions, our neighborhoods, et cetera, et cetera. So we are social species. And in trauma, usually, those connections with other people break down. The very first study I did on Vietnam veterans, what we found is that they actually were doing quite well during the war, but what if one of their best friends got killed? That really was what blew them up, disintegrated.
5:27 Speaker 01 It was really the loss of that social connection that really made something traumatic. We saw this again in studies after 9/11 in New York, and that, you know, it's a horrendous event, and all of us who are old enough to remember it, most of us still are, we remember very vividly what happened that time, but very few people got PTSD because of such an enormous amount of social support, and nobody blamed anybody. And then it turned out that PTSD were the people who were in domestic violent relationships, or who do not feel home, safe at home, actually.
6:06 Chris Williamson? That's interesting.
6:08 Speaker 01 So being able to go home at night and feel safe in your own home with the people you're with is a very powerful protection against getting messed up by outside events.
6:21 Chris Williamson? Yeah, the role of casting off the stress, you know, my favorite example of this is if anyone that's listening has an intense phone call, they're on the phone to somebody and they, it's a difficult work call or they're really trying to think things out, but it's audio only, they're not on Zoom, you'll find yourself like a puppet master has gotten a hold of you and made you stand up from your seat and you'll find yourself walking around the room.
6:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, but if you have somebody who you trust and care for, who is in the next room, you tell them, honey, listen to what just happened to me, what this asshole did to me. And when your honey says, boy, I don't know how you can stand that, and the person backs you up, you feel much better inside. But if your honey says, well, I'm not surprised he said that to you because I see the same stupid thing that you do all the time, he's absolutely right in the way he talks to you, then it really becomes a much more invasive issue. So the social reception makes a huge difference.
7:28 Chris Williamson? Why would it be the case? Can you think of an adaptive reason or an explanation for why individuals going through trauma would shield themselves from other people around them, given that people around them are exactly the thing they need to improve their relationship to that emotional state?
7:48 Speaker 01 That's because they have learned that the people around them at some points could not be trusted. That the people who were closest to them hurt them or push them away, or they must do with them or criticize them all the time. And so.
8:09 Speaker 01 You know, it is really, what you learn during your trauma is that uh I thought I could trust people, but I can't. I trust that people will be there for me, but I can't. And that becomes, so you get very suspicious about people reaching out to you because you have had experiences that people do terrible things to you. And so that may get, become part of your move and warp of your brain, actually, yeah.
8:37 Chris Williamson? Hmm. Is, it's, what's your definition of trauma? Is it an event which occurs outside the bounds of normal human experience?
8:44 Speaker 01 No, that, oh, you started off, and it was a crazy definition because uh you know, the majority of people have had trauma in their lives. Uh, you know, I keep looking for people who come from a perfectly normal family and I still have a hard time finding them, actually. We all have major challenges. And so, uh, see, you know, our organization, the Trauma Research Foundation, just is putting out a statement right now, and we're still really wrestling with that here. How do you define trauma? And the trauma is really that you get hurt by something and you get changed by it. But that something may be any variety
9:25 Speaker 01 of things. It may be a rape, yeah, very clear. It may be seeing your kid being run over, killed, that's very clear. But sometimes it's just being chronically ignored and dismissed. That eventually really gets into you and that becomes part of your framework of with who you see the world, yeah.
9:46 Chris Williamson? When it comes to the body keeping the score, what do you mean? How does the body actually register this? What is the mechanism? How does it manifest?
9:54 Speaker 01 The brain registers it, but your body experiences it and your body lives it out. So what happens is that uh you don't remember the trauma so much as you continue to react as if you're being traumatized. So let's say you have have been sexually assaulted and you go on with your life, you say, oh, that was just one incident, I'm really stupid for getting involved in it, it's not happening. And then you get excited about somebody who you want to be with, and then that person touches you and your body freezes. Or you start crying, or you become really angry. And...
10:34 Speaker 01 Your body reacts as if you're getting assaulted. You don't make that connection, say, oh, I really like this guy and I like to be involved in. But my memory of the trauma interferes now. It's an automatic mind process that gets in the way of your letting go in that part.
10:53 Chris Williamson? Yeah, you say that trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself. Such a harrowing, harrowing but accurate statement, I think.
11:03 Speaker 01 Yeah. And so, you know, people defend themselves against that and say, oh, it is because he did something wrong or because he talked to be the wrong way. Or, but at the end, uh, just writing our new book, finish last chapter for new book. Uh, and I started with a quote from Marcel Proust. In order to change, you need to see the world with new eyes. So at the end, uh, if you really want to recover from trauma, you need to, we need to help people to change their perceptions of the world. We're not going to change the world out there, but we're going to change what they see and how they experience themselves and the people around them.
11:46 Chris Williamson? Well, ultimately, we are not in control of what is going to happen to us in life. We really only have control over our reactions.
11:53 Speaker 01 Well, we don't even have control of our reactions. At some point, you need to go to the bathroom. At some point, you need to not hold your breath. At some point, you need to go to sleep. Uh, uh, some people will make you angry and other people will make you feel all warm inside. Uh, and you don't have much control over your reactions. You have some control over how you behave. And that's really the difference between little kids and adults. Little kids do whatever happens to them and they react to it. As adults, we get a prefrontal cortex and hopefully most of the time we can make decisions about how we react, even though our bodies tell us, don't trust this guy. You can still talk to that person as if you trust him.
12:38 Chris Williamson? Hmm.
12:39 Speaker 01 You know, you can't.
12:40 Chris Williamson? This is something I really want to dig into and I think a lot of people listening will resonate with this. They are thoughtful, inquisitive, reflective people. They like their cerebral horsepower and their cognitive ability.
12:55 Chris Williamson? They understand that something can occur and they can control their behaviour. And yet, at the same time, they have a degree of control over their behaviour, even if they don't have a degree of control over their reaction and the way it makes them feel. At the same time, we also need to be aware and give respect and integrate and be become noticing of the emotions that arise inside of us. And I can see a degree of tension between these two things. The person that wants to feel like they're in control of their life and has agency, the person who also wants to appreciate and integrate the signals that their body is giving them, but not be at the mercy of them. How do you, how do you think about the tension between these things?
13:38 Speaker 01 What therapists people often have discovered is how little control they have. And in some ways, the people who become my patients are among the most conscious people you ever hope to meet because they're willing to explore themselves. And most people are not so eager to do that. They want to, they want to stick with their habits in life and push away anybody who interferes with their usual habits. And the people who come to my office say, I cannot stand what's happening inside of me anymore. And I need to be actually become in charge more of my own reactions.
14:20 Speaker 01 That's a, therapy actually is a very courageous act of confronting your internal demons and confronting the pain and hurt of your life, actually.
14:34 Chris Williamson? So it seems to me that when we're talking about trauma, people have a reaction to an event which typically would not engender that reaction. They are trauma sensitive, they are overly reactive in a scenario that maybe doesn't warrant it because of something which they have learned in their past. Is that a correct framing?
14:56 Speaker 01 It's like, I learned, I wouldn't say learned, something has been installed in them from the past. And these are not higher level cognitive processes. Our elementary activities that have to do with the area of the brain involved in the housekeeping of the body, as Antonio Damasio calls it.
15:18 Chris Williamson? What is that from a neuroscientific sense?
15:21 Speaker 01 Oh, it is your ventral tegmental area, your amygdala, your parietal, acroto gray, the precuneus, it's a back part of your brain that we have in common with all animals that help us to perceive what's happening to us on an elementary level, the same way that your dog hears the thunderstorm and crawls underneath the couch.
15:49 Speaker 01 We have the same brain as the dogs have, and on top of that, we have a big frontal lobe that hopefully makes us slightly more capable of managing our emotions than dogs do, but many people don't.
16:02 Chris Williamson? Yes, I've met many people who don't have any more emotional control than dogs do, and I think that tension between wanting to feel like the architects of our own life and understanding that we have a limbic system which very much is the elephant that we sit on top of, and it's not the elephant that's got blinders on, it's us, the rider, but we have this belief that we're the one that's in control. I think that tension is where some people are probably resistant to ideas like this because it feels disempowering, it feels like there is an architect pulling their strings.
16:37 Speaker 01 Well, yes and no, you know, with any sort of self-reflection, we all know that.
16:46 Speaker 01 We all are aware of that in a way.
16:53 Speaker 01 No, there may be some people who don't want to go there, but there will be.
16:57 Chris Williamson? I think, I mean, I understand that may not be the truth, but I think that it explains, at least to me, you know, I don't like the idea that I'm not in charge. I don't, and I will find ways to resist that belief, even if I know that it's true, I try and sort of finagle and find ways to go through things. So I guess one of the, you mentioned it earlier on, different people reacting to the same event will react in different ways. Some people will. Be traumatized and others won't be.
17:31 Speaker 01 People make a big deal out of that, you know, having the practice that I do, I'm running the center that I have for fifty years. I never meet somebody who has been traumatized where I go like, boy, that's a pretty silly thing to get traumatized by. You know, usually if you dig deeper to what people have been exposed to, you go like, my God, and you're still here. You're still able to tell the story. It is not like, oh, something happens and everybody else is fine and you got traumatized by it. Usually if you really look at the details what happens. You see that it really was a very painful experience and my reaction almost invariably.
18:14 Speaker 01 Hearing the story about the people I work with, what they have done through is like, oh my God. How the hell did you survive? And I never have the feeling that, oh, I would have done much better than they did.
18:29 Chris Williamson? This is something else I really wanted to dig into, which is the minimization and the shame that people feel. Around them not having anything worthy of being labeled as tra- oh, no, you know, that was when I was a child. Oh, you know, it was just one time. Oh, it was whatever. Talk to me about that. Talk to me how that can hide in the dark some of the things we've experienced.
18:51 Speaker 01 You know, we all want to be normal. You know, one thing came up in the last few days is how almost everybody wants to tell other people. I came from a very happy family. And you don't really want to know that your father was a drunk and your mom spent half her time in bed and stuff like that. And so, so we want to be normal, we want to be acceptable. And so we make a construct of ourselves of people who are in charge of ourselves. And who have always been loved by the people we're close to. But that is how we like to experience ourselves. It's not very true, but you know, we like to look good to the world.
19:36 Chris Williamson? Yeah, no one, no one wants to admit just how insane they are, I think. And there's two layers, there's two layers to this that I was thinking about when looking at your work. The first one being the minimization and the shame that we have around situations that have happened to us in the past. And the second one being the shame around being triggered by seemingly small events in the present.
19:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. And you say to yourself, don't be stupid. You become very judgmental about yourself and very ashamed about your own reactions. You're ashamed you don't want anybody to see you for who you are.
20:15 Chris Williamson? It's the story that we tell ourselves about our reactions that seems to be the really unnecessary degree of suffering that we've laid on top of all of this.
20:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, you know, it's a way of coping. And so this missing things is a very good initial reaction. Like, I want to go on with my life and push it behind me.
20:37 Chris Williamson? I don't want this to define me.
20:39 Speaker 01 It's a healthy thing to do. And for a while, it often helps many people until you have a kid or you are in a relationship or something that really comes closer to what happened to you. And then you start feeling the old feelings and having the old reactions again. And you go like, what the hell is wrong with me? You usually start with what the hell is wrong with this person who I'm hooked up with?
21:05 Speaker 01 Usually blame it on the other person. After a while, if you have seen that one relationship after another ends up the same way, you go like, eh, maybe it's something to do with me. But it's not, that's not the automatic reaction. An automatic reaction is, oh, it's because you are papa.
21:23 Chris Williamson? Well, yeah, there's a quote, if all of your exes are assholes, it might not be them that's the asshole. You are the common denominator between all of your exes.
21:31 Speaker 01 That's a good summary of it.
21:33 Chris Williamson? One of the things I've been thinking is whether experiencing traumatic events and having trauma sensitivity predisposes us to being more sensitive to future traumas. Does this become a recursive loop in that way?
21:47 Speaker 01 Oh, absolutely. That, well, generally, you know, it's also true that some people who are being traumatized become very good at stuff.
22:01 Speaker 01 So let's look at the positive thing first.
22:04 Speaker 01 I have met a number of nurses or kindergarten teachers who are spectacular nurses, spectacular kindergarten teachers, because they were traumatized as kids and they know what they would have needed back then. And so they give to people what they felt they didn't get themselves as kids. That is one adaptation that happens sometimes. But more often, people are out of touch and repeat a trauma early on. But I meet quite a lot of people where deep down I think to myself, I don't say it because most people don't have enough sense of humor about it, say, go back and thank your abusive
22:46 Speaker 01 parents for having been abusive because it makes you very good how to take care of dysfunctional people around you.
22:52 Chris Williamson? Hmm. Well, I suppose if, if every trauma made you more susceptible to future traumas, you would just have a linear graph over time of people getting more and more traumatized as they get into older age. They would just continue to accumulate and continue to get sensitive and continue to be accumulate and continue to get sensitive.
23:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's of course not how it goes. Because people also have lives and some people are able to arrange to have lives that are more or less predictable and where they can play a useful role and where they shield themselves against unpleasant surprises, more or less. Easier to do when you're somewhat privileged person, hardest to do when you're poor and brown, let's say.
23:41 Chris Williamson? Is there anything that we can do during difficult events to minimize the way that they imprint on us?
23:51 Speaker 01 You know, my agenda, I like to say as often as I can, is that in every school from K through 12, we should have weekly classes and laboratories on understanding ourselves, to learn about how our brain functions, how our body functions, what happens to us when somebody touches us, what happens when we throw a ball, what happens when you make music together, what happens when you interact with people. And that, to my mind, the very important part of the solution is teaching every kid from the beginning of classes, the four arts, reading, writing, arithmetic, and self-regulation,
24:34 Speaker 01 and make yourself an important part of the study that we do. And I think our society would change if all of us would learn that systematically, that we learn about brains and neuroscience, and how brains interact with each other, and experience what it's like to play ball with other people, to be involved in physical activities, what does music do for me, what does things like these crazy chong movements do for me, what is it like for me to sing with other people, how do I affect other people? All this stuff should be part of our basic training, as it oftentimes, okay, of course,
25:14 Speaker 01 is for many privileged people who actually go to schools where, and live in households where people learn stuff like that.
25:23 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I understand that self-regulation is a great tool for dealing with and making yourself feel better.
25:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, but also understanding yourself, really knowing, oh, when I get upset, listening to that piece of music makes me feel better, or I found that when I sit in front of a piano and play some music, that I calm myself down. If somebody, if I can play volleyball with somebody. And to really, that in your course of your education and your growing up, you really learn what makes you feel good, and what can you do for yourself when somebody upsets you.
26:01 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah, I'm I'm really trying to work out how much of that I really want you to dig into. Is that an ability to simply cope with the emotions that come up? Or is it something which will reduce down the echo that it continues in the future? Or is that one and the same?
26:22 Speaker 01 What I'm talking about really is that we raise conscious human beings who who are really aware of themselves, aware of their own reactions, who are aware of the people around them and what effect they have on other people. And that this really becomes a serious area of study to live in a more conscious society.
26:48 Chris Williamson? How can people learn to be more self compassionate? We live in a meritocracy. People want to achieve things. They want to grow and improve. And yet, a lot of this seems to rely on self compassion. What's your advice?
27:04 Speaker 01 You know, self compassion really comes from having been met and having been seen. And that becomes your framework of yourself. So if you come from indeed a loving, kind and responsive family, it's likely that you do feel self compassion. And that when you learn that when I fall down, somebody will be there to pick me up. People don't yell at me and scream at me for falling down, but they're really there for me in a way. That's that's how you learn to be there for yourself also.
27:38 Speaker 01 And a huge thing that we see in our work is having a history of abuse and neglect early on in your life, really more or less guarantees that you see yourself as defective and wrong and not a good person and disgusting and sort of stuff. An extremely difficult thing to treat. The first thing that I've actually seen work for that was the research of which I was the PI on psychedelics, MDMA, where we saw that psychedelics really dramatically increased people's capacity for self-compassion, where they really were able, in the psychedelic
28:21 Speaker 01 state, to go to whatever happened to them and to really feel very deeply what happened back then, and to go, "Yeah, that's what happened to this kid. This kid was only three years old and did the best he could." Or, "He's only eight." Or, "He didn't know how to deal with the bullies in high school, and he felt so weak and stupid, but that's all he could do." So, on psychedelics, you really, MDMA particularly, we see this emergence of this capacity to really accept yourself for what has happened to you and not blame yourself for things. And I've never seen it to the same degree with any other form of treatment I've studied.
29:05 Chris Williamson? That's really beautiful, to think about the person that you were when that thing happened to you, and to say something like, "You did your best." You know, you want to pick that person up and give them a hug.
29:18 Speaker 01 But it's not cognitive, it's not like your frontal lobe, it's really, in psychedelics, you really deeply experience yourself on a very deep level, and it's not an outside person telling you, "It wasn't your fault," or you're just, "Oh, gosh, that's..." You never believe that, really. But it's yourself really feeling what happened to you and getting an internal sense of time, so you don't no longer identify with that kid who was being bullied, or he was being put down, or whatever. You say, "Oh, I'm so sorry that you, I, back then, had to go through that."
29:55 Chris Williamson? You say that we shouldn't keep secrets from ourselves. And it seems to me that what we're doing with psychedelics, also breathwork practices, in some ways, anything that allows you to to sort of both dysregulate and regulate a little bit under control and make yourself feel safe to tap into these things. It breaks down the secret wall that we are able to construct around those things. Ah, this doesn't feel safe. I can't think about that thing. I don't want to go back to that place. And it helps you to sink into that more.
30:29 Speaker 01 Yeah. And to my mind, this is becoming a very urgent social issue. I don't know whether you have heard or seen the new book by Jonathan Haidt.
30:40 Chris Williamson? He was on the show a couple of weeks ago.
30:42 Speaker 01 Very important book that that we are raising our kids behind screens and not to explore and not to feel sick. And we give kids a false reward system by screens where they don't have to do anything. And I think screens will have a major negative effect on self knowledge and self experience, actually. And I think we really need to listen very carefully what Jonathan has to say about that.
31:12 Chris Williamson? Digital anesthetic is one of the ways that I think about it. People who are going through something emotionally uncomfortable can distract themselves with their screens.
31:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:24 Chris Williamson? That results in you basically not connecting with your life, the emotions.
31:29 Speaker 01 You know, it's not black or white, of course. It's okay to distract yourself. It's okay to not confront all the misery of the world all the time. So I totally understand that and actually encourage it that when something bad happens to people, they could do something else to not dwell on it. And that's actually another very important research, piece of research that's just beginning to. Make it into our consciousness by Farb and Zindel Segal about how your sensory experiences, your feeling things, your senses and doing things that make you alive, your senses,
32:11 Speaker 01 help you to get out of habitual ways of doing things. For example, I did the first study on yoga for trauma and we had amazingly positive results. And now with the evolution of neuroscience, I'm beginning to understand more and more why yoga can be so effective, because in yoga you really pay attention to the internal sensory world. And that seems to be a very important avenue for you to feel that you can meet yourself and be in control of yourself.
32:47 Chris Williamson? Say more about that. Why is that so important? What is it about the attention being deployed?
32:52 Speaker 01 Because we all get into habits. Our brain creates habitual system. Basically, the brain is a predictive organ. The brain tells us, when I talk to you in Austin, Texas, I can expect certain things. And if you do something that is very different from what I expect, I have to sort of change my take on you. But ordinarily, I go into a habit of doing the same thing and talking the same thing. But if your habits no longer work for you, you always blow up at your kids or you always freeze in front of your boss, you need to get a new habit. And the new habits get formed by activating the sensory system in your brain.
33:40 Speaker 01 It's also the opposite of what you do with screens. You dull the sensory system in your brain with screens by doing action, meditation, yoga, probably martial arts, stuff like that, you really activate new habits.
33:58 Chris Williamson? Talk to me, there'll be a lot of people listening who go, okay, Bessel, that sounds spot on, that makes sense to me. I understand how our emotions and our reactivity can become hypersensitized. But this goes quite a few steps further. How does trauma manifest as an illness, an illness that people would typically recognize? What are the ways that can happen?
34:19 Speaker 01 Well, you know, of course, I'm an MD and a professor in medical school. So I know the medical model. But in our work, I don't have a medical model, not your disease and your aren't, you know, a lot of people who have never been to a psychiatrist are crazy as loons and people who are beat psychiatrists are the most sensible people I know. So pathology is where you could miss the boat, where you keep doing things that mess up your life and the life of people around you. That's the pathology. So you wouldn't necessarily give that a psychiatric label, but all somebody's friends will say, they're doing it again.
35:03 Chris Williamson? Yeah. Talk to me about some of the more typical illnesses that people would not think stress and trauma in this way contribute to, and yet can, stuff like fibromyalgia.
35:19 Speaker 01 You know, these are, you know, these are questions that should be asked more often, in part because we have so few answers at this point, is that it's very clear that fibromyalgia, chronic pain, autoimmune diseases, I'm not saying that autoimmune diseases are caused by trauma, but they certainly are made much worse by trauma. It makes you much more vulnerable to develop them. All these somatic responses.
35:50 Speaker 01 Have been identified but barely studied and barely really systematically looked at how, what can you do and how can you best take care of it. But they're clearly trauma related and they're clearly body related. And but because there is so little attention in the research world on how we process bodily experiences, that this is very largely still an unknown territory. And my, my foundations, I started, the Trauma Research Foundation, actually is particularly interested in promoting studies on these sort of things that have not been studied or funded before.
36:36 Chris Williamson? It seems interesting to me, or totally unsurprising, that
36:41 Chris Williamson? chronic elevated concern and worry and inflammation in the mind and the body would not make, how, how could it make anything better? I don't understand why that wouldn't be something which is a contributing factor.
36:58 Speaker 01 It clearly is, but I think our academic work is not there to really systematically explore body sensations and how to change people's relationship to their bodily experience.
37:17 Chris Williamson? Well, I suppose that testing that is very difficult. You know, here is a dose of a drug. We gave this many people in this cohort that dose for this long. These are the results, these are the self reports. For you to say, Chris, how does your body describe to me the sensation? What's the inner texture of your mind like today?
37:35 Speaker 01 But, you know, you can study it if you put your mind to studying it. You know, like, at the beginning, you don't have vocabulary for it, you don't know how to do it, but you learn how to do it. For example, the very first study that we funded from our foundation is a study on the impact of touch and various forms of touch on a group of people who have no trauma and a group of people who have been traumatized. You know, to me, it's just fascinating that people have studied eyesight, people have won Nobel Prizes studying vision, people have won Nobel Prizes in audition, but touch has barely been studied.
38:19 Speaker 01 That's very interesting.
38:20 Chris Williamson? What did you find?
38:22 Speaker 01 Oh, we're not, we're still in the middle of the study. Actually, we're funding it. And next week, I hope the first, the year of first report on what they're finding.
38:31 Chris Williamson? Oh, yeah. Okay. So when it comes to modalities and getting better, both dealing with in the moment and unwinding the broader patterns, what are the principles? Is there a framework? What is it that people need to focus on when it comes to treating trauma?
38:49 Speaker 01 Well, the, the main focus is when you're traumatized, you lose your core sense of safety and internal integrity. And so the greatest challenge is how you induce a sense of total safety in the organism that a person lives in. And certainly, judging by my own experience and many other people since that time, having, having body work done in you, working with yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, everything you had that activates your, your own body is, is sort of step number one.
39:31 Speaker 01 Sitting in a hot tub, being able to be touched, being able to, to just sort of let go is the first step to, to, to shut down the alarm system that's always active. Yeah.
39:45 Chris Williamson? Presumably if that isn't shut down, no further work can be done.
39:49 Speaker 01 That is my sense, yeah. But also very striking actually is that up to now, basically all of our treatments didn't work all that well with very shut down people. And one of the surprising findings of our MDMA study was that very shut down people actually came to life on MDMA.
40:12 Speaker 01 Just like wow.
40:14 Chris Williamson? Why would you think, what could you hypothesize would be the reason for that?
40:20 Speaker 01 What we hypothesize is that uh I the MDMA changes people's awareness of themselves, you know, we can talk to somebody called BioBabel. We can talk about the serotonin receptors in the brain, you'll say, oh, he must be very smart. He knows about serotonin receptors, but doesn't really explain anything. Now I have some words to use to explain it. The brain is an incredibly complex organ. Um, but we're beginning to get some little understanding about what might be going on to make that happen.
40:52 Chris Williamson? Okay, so that's step one.
40:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:54 Chris Williamson? What does step two look like?
40:56 Speaker 01 Step two is to be able to uh to feel what you feel. And to really be, uh, you know, that's what, for example, mindfulness practice would be good for. Uh, for it's not as hot a topic as it was a few years ago, but mindfulness is very big. And uh, what is also true is that doing mindfulness exercise, doing medita- meditation can be very stressful. Because as you shut down all external input, you feel yourself. And feeling yourself can be a very scary and unpleasant experience, actually. Uh, which a lot of people don't want to do. So they turn on the TV and they have a lot of input in order not to feel themselves.
41:41 Speaker 01 But if you cannot live in silence with yourself, you're not okay. And that's what you see with soldiers who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan. First thing they do, they turn up the volume, they make a lot of noise. They don't want to feel what's inside of them. They just want to go, all this stuff out there. Uh, and that's because they're scared of themselves. And so, uh, learning how to, uh, and most of us need guides for that. Somebody who encourages us to do it and has with us and say, well, I know it's difficult, but I'll help you to meet yourself and that's a really important thing, yeah.
42:24 Chris Williamson? It's a common realization of mine that on the days when I haven't allowed my mind to talk to me during the day, it usually comes back and gets its revenge when I'm trying to go to sleep on a night time.
42:37 Speaker 01 Yep.
42:41 Speaker 01 It's interesting how this is going to evolve. I see things sort of going up and down and it's been very much on the environment you live in. When I go to Bay area, I see a lot of people doing the sort of things I'm talking about. There seems to be some consciousness about it, maybe Austin, Texas, maybe another place. It's very sort of geographically happening in different places at different times.
43:06 Chris Williamson? Yeah, you've got an odd sort of domain centric trickle trickle down effect and the UK as is tradition will be last to do it.
43:14 Speaker 01 Well, but I know some very, very mindful UK or.
43:18 Chris Williamson? I know some mindful people too. It's a slow adoption state though. Apparently the Atlantic is a little bit bigger to get health and wellness things to go across it.
43:26 Speaker 01 Oh, it's interesting how in many ways, I just came back from two months in Australia. I think Australia is, I met some Australians who said, I said, no, Australia is so much like America, we're just slightly more screwed up in the US. Slightly. And you know, it's interesting, a friend of mine just wrote to me, he said, can you help this friend of mine who is writing about all the trauma in America? And I said, well, I'll talk to him, but he also should talk about the enormous creativity and the innovation that continues to come out of our culture. And maybe the two of them are two sides of the same coin. And it's interesting, I go to Europe quite a bit also.
44:07 Speaker 01 And standard of living is great in Europe. I think standard of life is great, but they're not quite as sharp and innovative as America. I think our world being is unpredictable and of times scary does keep us on edge a little bit here in the US. Again, the same theme as we talked about before. If you're privileged, it's a great place to be creative, but if you. If you're downtrodden.
44:37 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I mean, I I love Italy. Rome is my favorite city on the planet. And I I'll never forget the first time that I went from Leonardo da Vinci Airport to the center of Rome on the metro. And it was two, two P M. Something like that. There was an Icelandic girl that I was going on holiday with. And I, she was, and I'm gonna be an hour's time. And I was like, I'm in Rome, I'm getting an espresso and I'm gonna sit outside and eat a croissant. So sure enough, I find a local cafe and this dude comes in in a business suit, no tie. And it's two o'clock and I presume that this must be his lunch break. And I saw him spend probably thirty five to forty minutes of what I'm gonna guess is
45:19 Chris Williamson? maybe a fifty or hour long lunch break, just with a glass, large glass of red wine. Sat outside, just sipping it. Some people were coming in and out. Maybe he was a local. He sort of had a little chat to them. And, uh, yeah, that culture does not engender the permanent ambient anxiety and vigilance of spurning creativity that you would have in, you know, the caffeine fueled Americas.
45:43 Speaker 01 Yep, yep. But as you sort of imply, his life is slightly better.
45:49 Chris Williamson? Pretty enjoyable, pretty, pretty enjoyable lunch break. Okay, so we've allowed ourselves to feel safe.
45:57 Speaker 01 Well, no, learning how to be, I mean, for many people, that's a major enterprise, actually, to discover what makes them feel safe, actually.
46:06 Chris Williamson? These are the situations that make me feel safe. These are the modalities that work for me.
46:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, the experiences. I I always call it a journey. It's always a pilgrimage to find out what works for you. For example, I really, I'm very fond of body workers and people are very good massage people, very good to learn that it's safe to be touched, they get comfort out of touch. But sometimes for some people, music does it. For some people do, being part of volleyball game or being part of a dojo with martial arts makes them feel, that's it. You need to really discover, it's an, it's an enterprise for yourself. It's important to know that about yourself. Yeah.
46:51 Chris Williamson? And after we've started to feel into those emotions, step two, we've sat with that, what comes after that?
46:59 Speaker 01 Comes after that, so what comes up? That keeps getting in the way. And then you need to really explore what is in the way. And begin to talk. And have language for yourself and say, no, whenever I meet a person like that, I get really upset. Or whenever Christmas comes along, I get really depressed and I really don't want to go home. Or I go home, but I feel always depressed afterwards. I wonder what that's about. You need to ask questions of yourself. And what has informed your personality to be the way it has become?
47:35 Chris Williamson? Does having the understanding reduce the power of that response? I'm just thinking, when Christmas comes around, I feel uncomfortable to go home. That's because throughout my childhood, I didn't feel that safe at Christmas. And there was always this competition between me and my brother or whatever, whatever. I'm wondering what the final step to close this loop is.
48:00 Speaker 01 It's not the final step. I think knowing why you're screwed up does not necessarily make you less screwed up. But it does give you choices. Like if you really remember what Christmas were like and you allow yourself to remember it. Because we prefer to think, oh, we all come from very happy families. And let me show you pretty pictures of Christmas bunnies or whatever. And you go like, no, it doesn't so great. You can go, maybe this year I should not go home for Christmas. Maybe this year I'll go to Mexico for Christmas. So you start being able to make choices. But it doesn't abolish it.
48:40 Speaker 01 And I think what abolishes it is certain techniques that allow you to go deep down there. The technique used to be hypnosis for 100 years. Hypnosis has sort of been wiped off the map. Uh, nobody's doing it anymore. I'm sure it will come back because being in a trance uh is very important because you need to get out of your ordinary consciousness to be able to observe things in a somewhat dispassionate way. Uh, something like EMDR can get you there. Uh, a variety of other techniques. And again, on psychedelics also, you can really alter your perspective
49:21 Speaker 01 on things and and uh you need to, yeah, you you need to have experiences. So once you have a language, you can can create experiences for yourself that are different. So you can say, uh, may maybe this year I will not be spent Christmas with my older brother until he and I have a conversation about what what really happens between each other.
49:46 Chris Williamson? Hmm. One of my favorite quotes is from Ken P. Rinpoche, and he says, ultimately in life, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of our mental afflictions and the discomfort of becoming ruled by them.
50:02 Speaker 01 I went to an office in Harvard Square. It's my first office after I finished my training. And the bathroom wall, a patient had written, "Live with the sadness of your limitations or the pain of your transgressions."
50:17 Chris Williamson? Oh, wow.
50:19 Speaker 01 Wow.
50:19 Chris Williamson? Live with the sadness of your limitations or the pain of your transgressions.
50:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:25 Chris Williamson? Just because we're throwing quotes at each other, one other one from last year that stopped me in my tracks from Neil Strauss, the guy that wrote The Game, who's a pickup artist dude, and he's kind of now transcended that. He's actually coming on the show in in a couple of weeks. He said, "Unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments."
50:44 Speaker 01 Interesting.
50:45 Chris Williamson? And I think that that's absolutely true. So what you've said, you mentioned about giving yourself language, giving yourself the the language to be able to understand and and make sense of why might this be the case? Everything that we've spoken about so far, except for, you know, bodywork, and you can do things in classes, but the unpacking and the unpicking of these stories hasn't yet, you haven't yet talked about it being in relation to somebody else, about opening up and explaining this story to somebody else. What's the role of of sort of communion and and conversation and other people here?
51:22 Speaker 01 It's a tricky issue. You know, therapists always talk about relation. And then my reaction is it's not really a relationship. A relationship is if I look out for you and you look out for me. But in therapy, it's some way, not entirely, it's a one way street. Hey, as a therapist, I look after you and you don't have to look after me. I use my reactions to understand you better, but I don't expect you to uh to take care of me or to be considerate of me all that much. And so, yes, I think the interpersonal aspect is terribly important. You need to feel that somebody is on your side, that somebody has your back.
52:08 Speaker 01 Um, and I think relationships become important and when you're traumatized, oftentimes your relationship becomes very impoverished. But the relationships you have with real people and not so much with your therapist. Your therapist becomes a ball model to some degree maybe. But most of all, it becomes a deeply accepting sense who helps you to be curious and open about yourself and who gives you the courage to meet yourself, actually. That's what I would say.
52:39 Chris Williamson? There's a lot of criticism and skepticism at the moment about therapy and therapy culture. Abigail Schreier recently wrote a book called Bad Therapy. She went on Joe's show, she came on the show. Um, what?
52:52 Chris Williamson? What do you think therapy looks like when it's at its best?
52:56 Speaker 01 Oh, well, you know, I'm also, I see a lot of terrible therapy going also. And, you know, I do a lot of supervision in various countries and places. And I meet therapists all the time who says, how do I manage these patients? And I go, you don't manage other people. I can barely manage myself. I cannot manage other people at the same time, but I can help you to feel yourself, to understand yourself and to uh to to really go deep inside. And I have some tricks in my book of a variety of different techniques that will help you to go deeper into yourself. But in order to do so, you have to become subject of that yourself.
53:40 Speaker 01 So you have to go through it yourself and really have explored, deeply explored your own mind, your own history, your own psyche. I can proudly say in my book, I experienced every technique I write about and I know what it did for me. Some of them were more more helpful than others, but it's very important for a therapist to become the subject of therapy themselves. And that's no longer a requirement.
54:09 Chris Williamson? It's alright.
54:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, in psychiatry, people are not at all expected to do their own therapy.
54:16 Chris Williamson? How interesting.
54:17 Speaker 01 The drugs that they give to people. Now, I almost got fired from my medical school because I used to tell my residents, you know, when you give these drugs to people, you should take yourself to see what it does to your mind. And Dean said, one more comment like that, the usual faculty portrait.
54:36 Chris Williamson? Francis Galton, who was the man that invented eugenics back in the nineteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds, such a fascinating, absolutely fascinating guy. He submitted a patent for how to cut a birthday cake so that you don't ever get it to go hard. So rather than cutting it in slices, you cut a bit down the middle and then you push the two outer parts together. His sister was born with a spinal condition, so she laid on a table while he spoke to her and he educated her through speaking to her. He was a very quirky guy. It's very worth looking into his history. But one of the things that he
55:15 Chris Williamson? did was he went through, he went through the list of pharmacology treatments and medicines alphabetically. And I think he got to C. And then when he got to C, he took something, I can't remember the name of it. It's like catswood or something. He took something that caused caused him to shit himself so badly that five decades later, when he wrote his autobiography, he still had memory of like this violent diarrhea.
55:49 Speaker 01 I'm doing a thing on William James right now, the fellow of American psychology. And he tried it all himself also. And and he did some weird things.
56:01 Chris Williamson? The things, the things that we do for science.
56:04 Speaker 01 No, but but we should. You know, you, I don't think you can be a deep set scientist. You still make selections of what's important, what's unimportant. And still your emotional brain labels what's important, what's unimportant.
56:19 Chris Williamson? Okay, so we're talking about therapy being one of those things which, when done well, can be fantastic. When done badly and and and sometimes is done badly, doesn't necessarily help. I think one of the questions I had coming in was how much of the modalities that you're suggesting are
56:41 Chris Williamson? dealing with symptoms or able to unpick deeper responses? And it seems to me like they, most of the effective ones do both, that they create a state in which you can then move a little step deeper and I can feel, I can still feel safe and this is okay. And let's have a look at this story. What's the emotion that's coming up? And then that's okay. So we move one step deeper. Okay, what's the story? Why might this be the case? I can use a little bit of executive functioning without ripping myself out of the emotion. But I can still use, bring a little bit of the front brain in and start to see this for what it is. Okay, what might be a good way for me to continue? How can I stress test this? How is this true? And that, that seems like a, a good model to me.
57:24 Chris Williamson? It seems like a nice balance of, of control and of ease. That, that makes a lot of sense.
57:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, I said, you know, it is not the culture we live in. The culture we live in is that people adhere to a particular treatment. Let's say you're Freudian psychiatrist and that becomes your answer to everything. And you see that oftentimes in therapy, I see many of my colleagues who are about my age, who have studied the same treatment their entire lives.
57:58 Speaker 01 They found their data thirty years ago, but they're still doing the same stuff. Instead of saying, now let's see what else works and what worked for the people who didn't work for it. They keep doing the same thing. And a lot of therapists tend to be like that. They find one little thing and they continue with the same thing. And what my program has always been very much about is we learn a lot of different things. And so therapists tend not to evaluate on a regular basis something. I'm very much promoting these days, still on the regular basis, see, so how far have we come? What has been accomplished and what hasn't been accomplished? And what do we know can help with that?
58:41 Speaker 01 Let's say if you are chronically anxious and frazzled, despite the fact you have done most of. How do we deal with that? Does a yoga practice help for that? Let's see, maybe a neurofeedback practice helps to calm the brain down by changing the wiring of your brain. So it's very important, and that's not happening right now in any program that I know of, where people learn about multiple options and learn about what options are best under what particular circumstances.
59:15 Chris Williamson? You mentioned that you tried every modality that you put in The Body Keeps the Score. Which is the one that you have found to be either most impactful or the one that you keep coming back to most regularly?
59:27 Speaker 01 I come back to basically all of them.
59:32 Speaker 01 My favorite clinical activity is psychodrama, where you can have a virtual three dimensional experience of how things could have been different back then. So that's my clinical practice. What was most helpful for me, I think, of all things I've done, was Rolfing. I was born in nineteen forty-three under conditions pretty similar what the kids in Ukraine are experiencing right now. And that became a Imprinted on me. I was a very sickly child, like many people of my generation had entered
1:00:13 Speaker 01 the war. A lot of kids died and I was a sickly kid and I was sort of living in a semi-sickly body. And what was extraordinarily helpful for me was getting rolled. Rolling is a very intense form of body work where my body was rearranged to be more flexible and not be stuck in that frightened little kid part of me. Nothing to do with cognition. It is just my body was freed up to respond differently to the world. So it's very different from how I was trained for the psychoanalysis, basically.
1:00:52 Chris Williamson? Yes, I think Freud might have been surprised if he got turned into a pretzel at some point and was made to be more limber than when he walked in.
1:01:02 Speaker 01 Well, but so for me, the body piece was very important. But, you know, I did the first studies on Prozac. I started off being a very promising young psychiatrist because I identified Prozac as being useful. I did the first study on it. And these days, I'm not much of a psychopharmacologist anymore. Like, I started off believing, like my profession did at the time, that maybe chemicals will be the answer. And as our work progressed, it was very clear that chemicals may play a minor role, but not a definitive role in helping people to heal.
1:01:39 Chris Williamson? Looking to the future, I know that you have a lot of studies that you're either involved in or funding at the moment. You've got this new book coming out. What, from a modality and research perspective, what are you most excited about?
1:01:53 Speaker 01 Well,
1:01:56 Speaker 01 It all depends on the culture we live in. At the end, everything is political. What gets funded is political. What gets paid attention to is political. And so, what I'm, in terms of what I'm working on this exciting, is psychedelics. Because I think psychedelics bring the mind back into psychiatry. It allows you to look at mental processes that change. And it allows people to discover things about themselves that nothing else that I've seen does so. But at the same time, as psychedelics become legal, I worry that it will get totally screwed up.
1:02:40 Chris Williamson? How so?
1:02:41 Speaker 01 All kind of pharmaceutical companies trying to create new concoctions so they can make an optimal amount of money. People getting psychedelic drugs without any contextual input. They're just giving a drug without helping people to process them. And I'm very, very concerned that this is very likely to get screwed up. In the same way that, you know, I'm old enough to be part of this first LSD revolution. And it was very exciting then also. But totally, people blame the Nixon administration for a good reason. But the people who are doing psychedelics were not the most responsible people either.
1:03:22 Chris Williamson? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, look at the original introduction of MDMA, you know, over a hundred years ago.
1:03:28 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:03:28 Chris Williamson? We've come full horseshoe back around to exactly where we started, except for the fact that it was regulated for a century and no one actually got to do any research with it.
1:03:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, some people did actually. It was a little bit of research before it did. But here's a good example of what happens in politics. So I'm a senior medical student at the University of Chicago. And my last rotation was a drug addiction rotation. And we more or less invented methadone treatment for heroin addiction. My boss, Chuck Schuster, was a very lovely guy, interesting to work with. And he used to smoke dope from time to time. That's normal for those days. He became Nixon's health czar. And he goes on television and he says, "These drugs watch your brain." I go, "Huh?"
1:04:25 Speaker 01 You know better than that, but because it is so politically wise thing to say, he was the lead person saying that he's very, but watch your brain. He knew better than that.
1:04:36 Chris Williamson? Perverse incentives everywhere. What can you tell us about this new book?
1:04:41 Speaker 01 The new book is very much about, it's called Come to Your Senses. And it's about really the critical issue of introspective and body self-awareness. That how do we become aware of ourselves and how we change our relationship to ourselves? And that's really what the book is about.
1:05:02 Chris Williamson? Very cool. Bessel van der Kolk, ladies and gentlemen. Bessel, you're fantastic. I love your energy. I love the fact that you're so dedicated to this. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff you're doing. Where should people go?
1:05:13 Speaker 01 My research foundation is our, Tom, research.org is our website. And there's always a lot of stuff happening.
1:05:22 Chris Williamson? Hell yeah. Bessel, I appreciate you. Thank you.
1:05:24 Speaker 01 Thank you, Chris. Bye.
Previous Why Are Differences Between Men & Women Being Denied? - Steve Stewart-Williams - #786 Next How To Save Your Brain From The Dangers Of Stress & Anxiety - Mo Gawdat - #788 Page updated October 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
