 In this video, I will be sharing the top reviews of the book called, The Body Keeps the Score, written by Bessel Van Der Koch. This book is on the New York bestseller list for the last 49 weeks which is pretty amazing. But before I get to the review part let's see a little bit of what this book is about. Trauma as a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat. One in five Americans has been molested, one in four grew up with alcoholics, one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children. Renowned trauma expert Bessel Van Der Koch has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain's wiring. The area's dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, mindfulness techniques, play, yoga, and other therapies. Based on Dr. Van Der Koch's own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy, and a way to reclaim lives. Now let's get to the reviews. Morgan from Los Angeles says The Body Keeps Score is my jam. It's better than that. It's like my slam jam. This is my fave book of the year so far, by a bunch. It's a rich treasure trove of information from the frontiers of trauma research, etiology, diagnosis and treatment. It's changing the way I do therapy and it's changing the way I interpret human behavior. And to think. I almost didn't read it. When I entered the mental health field I had intended to specialize in somatic experiencing SE trauma therapy. But I quickly rejected the model when I realized it was way outside the mainstream and lacked randomized control trials, RCT, that demonstrated its effectiveness compared to other first line treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, and prolonged exposure therapy. I saw the author Dr. Bessel Van Der Koch lecture at the Evolution of Psychotherapy conference in 2013. He was awesome, and he really reinvigorated my interest in doing somatically oriented trauma work. But something about the experience as a whole left me feeling woozy. Charlene from Philadelphia says This book represents everything that is groundbreakingly wonderful and pseudo-scientifically horrendous about trauma research. Individuals who suffer trauma are in need of actual help. This book contains some of the best, latest, and most effective cures for trauma sufferers, which can steer patients toward the help they need. However, Van Der Koch seems wholly unable to engage in critical thinking when it comes to various treatments. When attending courses in cognitive neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, my favorite professors were those who ripped apart each treatment to examine it for efficacy. The profs held out hope that cures were attainable but put them under the microscope to make damn sure the cure would not actually retraumatize an individual or make matters worse. In order to trust a mental health care provider, that provider should demonstrate not only a knowledge of the literature, as Van Der Koch does as he repeatedly throws around his MD and Harvard alma mater to assure his reader of his credentials, but also an ability to sort out fact from fiction. Van Der Koch seems entirely enamored with outdated findings that have since been shown to be incorrect, and therapies that have failed to be backed up by empirical support. Most concerning, he seems completely in denial about how easily false memories form and the damage they can do. Alec from the States says as someone who suffers from chronic pain I've found it difficult to find resources about the connection between trauma plus physical pain. This is because the mind-body connection is, I think intentionally, underdeveloped in Western medicine, which so often rehearses the body outside of context. Van Der Koch shows how trauma can shape every aspect of our psychology plus physiology. Making us attracted to dangerous, painful situations, affecting our perception of time and space, dispossessing us of the ability to describe our discomfort, causing chronic muscle pain, headaches, autoimmune disorders. We live in a world that constantly under-emphasizes emotional trauma even though the same parts of the brain are impacted by emotional pain as by physical violence. Heartbreak, betrayal, neglect, depression physically hurt. This continual undervaluation of emotional stress means that it accumulates, depletes significant energy plus attacks our most vulnerable organs. Van Der Koch describes chronic pain as when your brain gets trapped in a pre-programmed escape route, stuck in perpetual fear. For him, the goal is about how to develop coping strategies for the trauma that don't re-traumatize us. Reintegration, not repression. Healing is possible when we commit to this reintegration. Talk therapy isn't enough. We can't just describe the problem, we have to experience, immobilization without fear. Kai from the United States says I'm not a psychologist, psychiatrist, doctor, social worker or otherwise involved in treatment or research of mental conditions or disorders. What I am is a guy in his mid-20s who experienced multiple instances of severe medical trauma as a child, in my case open heart surgeries at the ages of 3 months, 6 years and 11 years. I've spent the majority of my life, read. All of it. Doing my best to repress and resist the terror, anger and sadness I felt as a result of having gone through these procedures. And I was able to get by, mostly, though my life always seemed to be a highly fragile construct, where I worked tirelessly to maintain control. I lost control this year, or maybe part of myself decided it was time to let go of my controlling behaviors and coping mechanisms, which no longer serve to help me, but instead negatively affect the quality of my life. This was a very tough realization, and my default response was to beat up myself for behaving, wrong, or otherwise being, a failure, for the way I had been just trying to get by. Trevor from Victoria says this is a remarkable book. There are a lot of people I would recommend this book to, but it is about trauma and so the author discusses trauma and describes traumatic events, and the more I thought about who I might recommend it to, the less I felt able to. I'm not sure I really can, recommend, you read this, but then, I might be more squeamish than other people are with books on these topics. And dear god, there are people out there who do the most awful things to one another. In one of Stephen Pinker's books I read years ago, either the blank slate or how the mind works, he says that father-daughter incest is incredibly rare, in fact, virtually unheard of, like most things he says, he said this with utter conviction in, like most things he seems to say outside of linguistics, he was completely and even dangerously wrong. All the sources of this review are given in the description, please feel free to visit.