Dr Bessel van der Kolk’s new book, “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma” is due to be released on the 25 September 2014.
Dr van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors of trauma. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain’s wiring—specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading trauma specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives and a way to reclaim lives.
“The Body Keeps the Score” is available to pre-order at Amazon.
Dr. van der Kolk’s masterpiece combines the boundless curiosity of the scientist, the erudition of the scholar, and the passion of the truth teller.— Judith L Herman, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School,
Author of Trauma and Recovery
Clear, fascinating, hard to put down, filled with powerful case histories, Van der Kolk, the eminent impresario of trauma treatment who has spent a career bringing together diverse trauma scientists and clinicians, and their ideas, while making his own pivotal contributions, describes what is arguably the most important series of breakthroughs in mental health in the last thirty years. We’ve known that psychological trauma fragments the mind. Here we see not only how psychological trauma also breaks connections within the brain, and between mind and body, and learn about the exciting new approaches that allow people with the severest forms of trauma to put all the parts back together again.— Norman Doidge, M.D., Author, The Brain That Changes Itself
This book is a tour de force. Its deeply empathic, insightful, and compassionate perspective promises to further humanize the treatment of trauma victims, dramatically expand their repertoire of self-regulatory healing practices and therapeutic options, and also stimulate greater creative thinking and research on trauma and its effective treatment. The body does keep the score, and Van der Kolk’s ability to demonstrate this through compelling descriptions of the work of others, his own pioneering trajectory and experience as the field evolved and him along with it, and above all, his discovery of ways to work skillfully with people by bringing mindfulness to the body (as well as to their thoughts and emotions) through yoga, movement, and theater are a wonderful and welcome breath of fresh air and possibility in the therapy world.— Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine emeritus, UMass Medical School,
Author of Full Catastrophe Living
