The Body Keeps the Score

Text in black are quotes; text in green are my notes. I sometimes write in Spanish.

• Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. #

• Trauma, whether it is the result of something done to you or something you yourself have done, almost always makes it difficult to engage in intimate relationships. #

• This experience, and others like it, helped me formulate this rule for my students: If you do something to a patient that you would not do to your friends or children, consider whether you are unwittingly replicating a trauma from the patient’s past. #

• traumatized people keep secreting large amounts of stress hormones long after the actual danger has passed, #

• Many traumatized people seem to seek out experiences that would repel most of us,14 and patients often complain about a vague sense of emptiness and boredom when they are not angry, under duress, or involved in some dangerous activity. #

• At this point, just as with drug addiction, we start to crave the activity and experience withdrawal when it’s not available. In the long run people become more preoccupied with the pain of withdrawal than the activity itself. This theory could explain why some people hire someone to beat them, or burn themselves with cigarettes. or why they are only attracted to people who hurt them. Fear and aversion, in some perverse way, can be transformed into pleasure. #

• The theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs has become broadly accepted, by the media and the public as well as by the medical profession. #