Astral Codex Ten

The Body Keeps The Score

4 min read

The Body Keeps The Score

Article

The Body Keeps The Score is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 13, 2021 and July 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “In The Body Keeps The Score , Bessel van der Kolk writes about the deep link between trauma and poor bodily awareness”; “It gives me the understanding of the trauma-somatization link that The Body Keeps The Score never quite managed”; “I enjoyed The Body Keeps The Score partly because it told the other side of this history”. It most often appears alongside America, Crazy Like Us, Dr. van der Kolk.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 13, 2021
  • Last seen: July 21, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

The Precision Of Sensory Evidence
February 13, 2021 · Original source
- In The Body Keeps The Score, Bessel van der Kolk writes about the deep link between trauma and poor bodily awareness. For example, trauma patients do much worse than normal on tests of stereoagnosia, where you have to identify an object (eg a key) by touch alone. He gives the example of a trauma patient undergoing massage therapy who was so out-of-touch with his body that he didn't even notice the massage had started. Trauma patients tend to say they "can't feel their bodies" or "they're living in a fog"; on successful treatment, they say they "feel alive again" or "I'm back in my body".
Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score
So this model, where inappropriately narrow sensory evidence channels create a bottleneck that makes it impossible to process sufficiently traumatic memories, ties a lot of things together. It gives me the understanding of the trauma-somatization link that The Body Keeps The Score never quite managed. It helps tie together the mechanisms of action for psychedelics, meditation, and therapy. And it resolves the apparent dichotomy between depression as low confidence and depression as negative prior that's been bothering me for so long. This is the most exciting paper I've read so far this year and an important addition to my understanding of predictive processing and psychiatry in general.
Book Review: Crazy Like Us
July 15, 2021 · Original source
In fact, at the very beginning of the emergence of modern PTSD - around the Vietnam War - the original researchers of the condition called it “post-Vietnam syndrome” and tried to define it as a distinctly Vietnamese experience. The idea was that soldiers in past “good” wars had been fighting for something they believed in , had the support of the population back home, and didn’t have psychological problems. Since soldiers in Vietnam were developing all these new symptoms, that was yet more evidence that it was a “bad” war which had to be stopped. Over the course of decades (plus lots of marketing by enthusiastic therapists), PTSD expanded from a Vietnam-only problem, to all wars, to all natural disasters, to abuse and sexual violence, to the modern understanding where people say they got PTSD from a bad boss, a bad roommate, or an insufficiently woke college reading assignment. I enjoyed The Body Keeps The Score partly because it told the other side of this history, from one of the researchers involved in the popularization, who faced roadblocks like “the VA refused to fund studies because they couldn’t see what relevance PTSD might have for veterans”.
Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
And yet, in 1960s there was total, absolute denial in American society that childhood sexual abuse even existed. From The Body Keeps the score:
This is a great point and a great example; see my review of The Body Keeps The Score for more.
Inline links: The Body Keeps The Score