The Body Keeps The Score

 So often we refer to parts of the body when we discuss emotions. You may speak of a shiver running down your spine, butterflies in your stomach, or cold feet. Researchers wanted to understand whether we feel emotions in our bodies and, if so, where?

“The Body Keeps the Score” is the beautiful and suggestive title of a book published in 2014, by a Dutch professor of Psychiatry at Boston University called Bessel Van Der Kolk. The book has proved immensely significant because it emphasizes and idea; that has for too long escaped many. 

Van Der Kolk stresses that people who are suffering emotionally crucially their symptoms almost always show up in their bodies, in the way they sit or breathe, the way they hold their shoulders, in the sleep patterns, and in their attitude to exercise.

Taking the body more seriously opens up new avenues for both the diagnosis and treatment of emotional unwellness. To take one example, many people who have grown up having to deal with the overwhelming rage of a parent, will have learnt to suppress their own anger and their desire to hit back at those who hurt them. 

In their minds they will have become meek and precisely attuned to fulfilling the wishes of others, however, unreasonably these might be; but as importantly in their bodies they will have learnt to be very still almost frozen because a part of them associates the expression of anything exuberant or powerful with the risk of bringing about retaliation from others.

In trying to treat such people, Van Der Kolk goes beyond advising traditional talk therapy; he would also recommend that they try under the supervision and therapeutic teachers, energy releasing exercises – like kickboxing, competitive running or swimming. Sports these people might have long resisted because of a cowed relationship to their strength. They might also try out rhythmically chanting or drumming thereby unleashing additionally releasing pent-up longings to assert one’s right to be.

Traumatized people tend to have bodies that are either too alert, responding to every breathe and touch; flinching and bristling at contact or else too numb, shut down heavily and immobile. Van Der Kolk's book, helps to think anew of how to deal with people, and understand some of the underlying emotions/feelings in your own body.

Those who were once neglected by emotionally stunted parents have often almost literally withdrawn from their bodies; they own them but they do not properly live in them. They might be rendered deeply uncomfortable if anyone touches their shoulders or strokes their back. They might intuitively think that their body was disgusting because that is how it once seemed in the eyes of those who were meant to look after them.

It is no doubt and deeply unfortunate that a difficult past appears to give us physical and as well as mental symptoms. 

For Dr. Chitemwa K, <3