Astral Codex Ten

Dr. van der Kolk

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Dr. van der Kolk

Article

Dr. van der Kolk is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 13, 2021 and July 21, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Second, it justifies some of Dr. van der Kolk’s writing on somatic therapies”; “(Dr. Van Der Kolk): “In my new job I was confronted…"". It most often appears alongside The Body Keeps The Score, 5-HT2A receptors, 9/11.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • 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
Second, it justifies some of Dr. van der Kolk's writing on somatic therapies. Bodily sensation seems to be an unusually important form of sensory evidence. Anything that gets you more "in your body", convinces you to pay attention to your body, trains you to expect bodily sensation to be pleasant rather than aversive, or helps you interact with your body more precisely should increase the precision of sensory evidence in general. So massage, yoga, tai chi, etc.
Inline links: somatic therapies
Highlights From The Comments On "Crazy Like Us"
July 21, 2021 · Original source
(Dr. Van Der Kolk): "In my new job I was confronted on an almost daily basis with issues I thought I had left behind at the VA. My experience with combat veterans had so sensitized me to the impact of trauma that I now listened with a very different ear when depressed and anxious patients told me stories of molestation and family violence. I was particularly struck by how many female patients spoke of being sexually abused as children. This was puzzling, as the standard textbook of psychiatry at the time stated that incest was extremely rare in the United States, occurring about once in every million women. Given that there were then only about one hundred million women living in the United States, I wondered how forty seven, almost half of them, had found their way to my office in the basement of the hospital.