“There are traumatized people who are not aware of it”

Bessel van der Kolk is the founder of the Brookline (Massachusetts) Trauma Center. He has spent much of his career researching how children and adults adapt to traumatic situations and evaluating which treatments and techniques may be most effective in reversing the effects of post-traumatic stress.

And it is that the trauma, beyond the event itself, leaves a mark that conditions the life of the person. As a defense mechanism, people who have experienced trauma dissociate from the body and its sensations. And if the effects of that trauma don’t heal, they can’t trust life or others. This is what van Der Kolk, who has also been a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University and is a professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine, has been able to verify.

—Why did you start to take an interest in and investigate trauma and its effects?
—For a long time I have been fascinated by how people who have experienced trauma tend to get trapped in their response schemes and this is so dramatic that it led me to become interested in the effect that social problems such as abuse and mistreatment have on the brain. From the beginning, it has been clear to me that trauma shapes the brain in some way, and I have therefore devoted myself to investigating this relationship.

What is your definition of trauma?
—Trauma is an experience that exceeds the survival mechanisms of the person as well as their faculties to react to what happens to them. For that person, life will never be the same after that experience. And in the face of trauma the brain changes at different levels to readjust so that the nervous system is put on alert to face danger and adapt to deal with the unpredictability of a part of life. It is a complex process in which the brain realizes that the world it knew has changed.

“In the face of trauma, the brain changes at different levels to readjust.”

—Is this what happens to a person who has suffered abuse?
-Yeah. But when the people who hurt you are the people with whom you have a bond, on whom your safety and stability depend, then the trauma and its impact has a profound effect on multiple levels, both in the way they can deal with intimacy as well as in the relationship that they end up developing with the people who have power and their way of assuming life. Although each person may have an answer, in all of them the abuse takes its toll and has a profound effect, affecting their stability and the way in which they face dangerous situations.

How does trauma affect everyday life?
—The person with a trauma sees his daily life affected in the sense of how he feels. She may feel scared or feel the need to dominate the people around her. She needs to feel like they are in control because she can’t handle feeling helpless in front of others. And this affects and determines their relationships.

“Being abused as a child can affect relationships throughout life.”

How does this impact relationships?
—These are very anxious people who tend to get angry and scared easily because the trauma makes them feel hurt or damaged frequently by those around them and by what happens. They live in a state of hypervigilance and this constant state of alert confines them to a state of isolation.

Why is this effect produced?
—It is their defense mechanism to ward off feelings of terror, but by not connecting with their bodily sensations they feel dead inside. It is the way they have found to keep their emotions under control and to feel safe in the face of a world that frightens them. We have all been associated with people who are under the effects of trauma or who have experienced trauma.

—Can I have a trauma without knowing it?
—Many traumatized people are not aware of it. The original trauma blocks a part of them. This is why many traumatized people say: “It didn’t matter, this didn’t have any impact on me…” They try to deny how it has affected them, but those effects emerge in relationships and in the way they relate to others. .

“Many traumatized people are not aware of it.”

“How can we suspect that we are traumatized without knowing it?”
—They are people who tend to explode easily because they harbor a lot of fear and anger inside, emotions that they express with their exaggerated reactions, creating relational conflicts. Issues that are not important to others are beyond them. That is why the most problematic of trauma are its long-term effects and how it is directly related to depressive states.

—Does the body have a fundamental role in trauma?
—We are our body and our body is what we are. Our body tells us what is safe and what is dangerous, what is good and what is bad for us, what causes pain and what is a source of pleasure. Trauma is experienced through physical sensations.

—How does it tell us that we are marked by a trauma?
—When you have suffered a trauma, your body has sensations of terror, of overwhelming anguish… You live all this in your body and in order to deal with these sensations, people with trauma disconnect from it to try not to feel anything on a physical level. But when you do this you also block any feeling of pleasure. Therefore, you tend to feel depressed, because you have learned to repress any sensation that comes from your body, whether it is painful or pleasant.

“When you have suffered a trauma, you block sensations and are unable to feel pleasure.”

How can this situation be reversed?
—People with trauma have dulled senses and are therefore no longer fully alive. When our senses are dulled, we stop feeling fully alive. Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and accept the sensations in their body.

—And yoga can be a way to deal with trauma and unlock this defense mechanism?
-Yeah. Yoga is a technique that helps heal trauma. Our western culture is not very helpful to heal trauma, instead China has developed Chi Kung and Tai Chi which are also a good way to treat trauma while in India there is yoga and in Africa drumming.

—What other techniques help people with post-traumatic stress?
—Cultures have developed different techniques. For example, singing in a group – like in a choir – is also very healing. But both in Europe and in the United States we are more oriented to drink. We are an alcoholic culture. If you feel bad, you get a beer. And it is quite dangerous because there is a high correlation between the trauma and the excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs in order to block the sensations that emerge from the trauma.

“There is a high correlation between trauma and excessive alcohol and drug use.”

—Can meditation help heal trauma?
-Yeah. Meditation is very useful but its practice can be very turbulent for a traumatized person since the feelings of fear are present in them all the time and precisely they try to do everything possible to get away from them and their sensations. So to ask a traumatized person to be silent and still is to ask a very difficult thing. However, meditation activates some brain circuits that are ultimately very necessary to re-establish control over yourself.

“Meditation activates brain circuits that help regain control.”

“Why are you talking about taking back control?”
“The traumatic reaction is always an involuntary response. These are responses that can lead you to feel ashamed of yourself, which is why traumatized people often feel self-hatred and can’t stand themselves because they can’t predict how they will react. So, to treat trauma it is necessary to guide the work in such a way that people feel that they regain control of their body and its reactions. In a safe environment, your body has to experience new sensations and experiences that deeply and instinctively contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that results from the trauma.

—Would you say that current psychiatry is making good approaches when it comes to treating trauma?
—I think that current psychiatry has lost its way. It has ceased to be a means to help heal people who have suffered trauma from the moment that it has decided to resort to a pill to make it go away. As a psychopharmacologist I have carried out many studies on the effect of medications on trauma and what I have found is that they repress the symptoms that trauma triggers, so they can help to some extent, but they do not resolve the trauma.

“Medication is not capable of resolving the trauma.”

—There are psychologists who do not understand this…
—Because they are currently trained in what I call the post-alcoholic message: “You don’t have to do anything for yourself.” The worst thing from my point of view is that most psychologists and psychiatrists don’t even know what really helps people. In the United States, a lot of money is spent on research, but if you worked with everything that already exists and we know, the world could be a better place.

—Currently what research are you doing?
—Now my research focuses on how neurofeedback, psychodrama techniques or the use of psychedelics (ecstasy and psilocybin, among others) can help people build new mental structures.

Bessel van der Kolk is the author of “The body keeps score” (Eleftheria Publishing House). He collects revolutionary research on how trauma produces a series of changes in the nervous system and in the brain that can accompany people throughout their lives, even without being aware of it.

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