(text clicks)
(pensive music) - Trauma is so ubiquitous that if you think you have never seen it, you have not looked. We meet people who fly off the handle. We meet people who shut down. We meet people who are very difficult. You know, it is a rare family that doesn't have a drug addict, alcoholic, disturbed person. You know, one thing I like
to say when I give a lecture, "Are there any normal people, who come from normal
families, in the audience?" And sometimes one or two
people raise their hands. I say, "Can I please come to
your family for Thanksgiving? Because I've never been
to a normal family." My name is Bessel van der Kolk. I'm a psychiatrist, neuroscientist. I have been studying trauma
for about 50 years now. I've treated a whole variety of different traumatized populations, see trauma in many different
countries around the world, and I am the author of the book
"The Body Keeps the Score." (pensive music) It's important for people to realize that not every mental
health professional knows what we're talking about here. The mainstream system
of psychiatry-psychology is that there is something wrong with you and I need to fix you. That's a very different attitude
than dealing with trauma. Around the time that I first
started to work for the VA, a group of us started
to define what trauma is and started to define
what happens to people. 1978 was the year, and the Vietnam War was over
by about six or seven years. The very first day that
I met Vietnam veterans, I was just blown away. They kept referring back
to their dead comrades. Their hearts seemed to be with the people who were no longer around. They had a hard time loving
their wives and girlfriends. They had a hard time being in
any way meaningfully involved in the present. These were guys who were my age, who were smart and competent, but they clearly were just a
shadow of their former self. And what was also really striking is they were sort of
passive much of the time. And then people told them
something that was disappointing, and they went from zero to 10 and blew up and became extremely angry. Something seemed to have happened to them that made it very hard for them to modulate their responses
to their environment. My colleagues and I started to think about how is what these guys
suffer from different from what other people who are in psychiatry
textbooks suffer from? So I dug up a book that
was written in 1941 by Abram Kardiner who had been working with World War soldiers. He wrote, "These guys suffer
from a physioneurosis. Their bodies continue to re-experience that very terrible, frightening situation, and that event keeps coming back in terms of images, behaviors,
and physical sensations." So that became the core
of our definition of PTSD. We write, "These people have been exposed to an extraordinary event that's outside of normal
human experience." And in retrospect, that
shows us how ignorant and narrow-minded we were because it turned out that this is not an
unusual experience at all. Trauma is actually - unlike
what we first thought - extremely common. One out of five women in America has a history of sexual molestation. Even a lot of men have
histories of sexual molestation. One out of four kids get beaten
very hard by their parents. One out of eight kids see physical fights between their parents. People usually think about the military when they talk about trauma, but when we started to
work with inner city kids, the amount of trauma that these kids experienced
was just unspeakable. The nature of trauma is
that an experience enters into your ears, into your
skin, into your eyes, and it goes down into a very
primitive part of your brain that automatically
interprets what's going on. Is this dangerous or is this safe? An event becomes traumatic when
there is nothing you can do to stave off the inevitable and your body starts
automatically going to the state of fight/flight or collapse. The lingering effect of
trauma is that you continue to react to mild stressors
as if your life is in danger. And so you tend to become hyperreactive. Somebody may irritate
you in the supermarket. You may develop road rage. You may have a difficult time putting up with misbehavior from
your spouse or your kids. And most people actually are barely aware or not aware at all that their reactions that they're having right
now are actually rooted in experiences that they've had before. That event itself is over, but you continue to react to
things as if you're in danger. So the big challenge of treating trauma is how do we help people to live in bodies that feel fundamentally safe? The tradition in mental health is to dismiss the reality
of people's lives. For example, it's only
in the past few years that people are beginning to talk about the impact of
poverty or the impact of racism or the impact of unemployment. And people have sort of
been labeling people, "Oh, there something wrong with you. Let me fix you." But if you go to a physician or a mental health practitioner
who doesn't understand that, they're going to try to fix you with drugs or cognitive behavioral treatment to not do these crazy things anymore. It usually doesn't work very well. What was very clear is that
being in a relationship where people can hear you, where you can talk about
how badly you feel, where you can talk about your guilt, and where you can start opening up where these feelings come from,
how old these feelings are, and how you develop these
feelings in response to particular things that happen to you, that was actually quite helpful because you need to really
develop a deep sense of, "This is what happened to me. This is what I'm dealing with, and I need to take care of the wounds that I'm carrying inside of myself." This issue of self-compassion and really knowing that your
reactions are understandable and are rooted in you
getting stuck in the past is a terribly important part of beginning to recover from trauma. Most of us are survivors
of one thing or another, some much worse than others. And so if people say what do
you wish your legacy were, I'd say, I want our society
to know about trauma and to really do all the
things that are necessary so that people who grow up
under extreme adverse conditions can develop a brain and
a mind that can help them to become full fledged members of society. That's our big issue, and that's the big challenge that we have. (pensive music)
