We need to take note of these powerful words from a world-leading trauma expert from the US, Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. The words are taken from his brilliant book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (pp. 348-349 in my hardback edition). They are so important for any initiative that aims to tackle the development of trauma and its consequences. [NB. I have broken up some of the Bessel’s paragraphs to facilitate reading and understanding online.]
When I give presentations on trauma and trauma treatment, participants sometimes ask me to leave out the politics and confine myself to talking about neuroscience and therapy. I wish I could separate trauma from politics, but as long as we continue to live in denial and treat only trauma while ignoring its origins, we are bound to fail. In today’s world, your ZIP code, even more than your genetic code, determines whether you will lead a safe and healthy life.
People’s income, family structure, housing, employment, and educational opportunities affect not only their risk of developing traumatic stress but also their access to effective help to address it. Poverty, unemployment, inferior schools, social isolation, widespread availability of guns, and substandard housing, all are breeding grounds for trauma. Trauma breeds further trauma. Hurt people hurt other people.
My most profound experience of healing from collective trauma was witnessing the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was based on the central guiding principle of Ubuntu, a Xhosa word that denotes sharing what you have, as in, “My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.” Ubuntu recognizes that true healing is impossible without recognition of our common humanity and our common destiny.
We are fundamentally social creatures—our brains are wired to foster working and playing together. Trauma devastates the social-engagement system and interferes with cooperation, nurturing, and the ability to function as a productive member of the clan. In this book we have seen how many mental health problems, from addiction to self-injurious behavior, start off as attempts to cope with emotions that became unbearable because of a lack of adequate human contact and support.
Yet institutions that deal with traumatized children and adults all too often bypass the emotional-engagement system that is the foundation of who we are and instead focus narrowly on correcting “faulty thinking” and on suppressing unpleasant emotions and troublesome behaviors.
People can learn to control and change their behavior, but only if they feel safe enough to experiment with new solutions. The body keeps the score. If trauma is encoded in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations, then our first priority is to help people move out of the fight-or-flight states, reorganize their perception of danger and manage relationships.
Where traumatized children are concerned, the last things we should be cutting from school schedules are the activities that can do precisely that: chorus, physical education, recess, and anything else that involves movement, play, and other forms of joyful engagement.
As we’ve seen, my own profession often compounds, rather than alleviates the problem. Many psychiatrists today work in assembly-line offices where they see patients they hardly know for 15 minutes and then dole out pills to relieve pain, anxiety, or depression. Their message seems to be “Leave it to us to fix you; just be compliant and take these drugs and come back in three months—but be sure not to use alcohol or (illegal) drugs to relieve your problems.”
Such shortcuts in treatment make it impossible to develop self-care and self-leadership. One tragic example of this orientation is the rampant prescription of painkillers, which now kill more people each year in the United States than guns or car accidents.