Healing Trauma - How To Start Feeling Safe In Your Own Body with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

In this episode we discuss trauma and how it is stored in the body. What causes trauma and what does it do to your body? We explore whether the rational, thinking mind can deal with trauma and look at some of the ways you can deal with traumatic experiences in your life. What are the best strategies for feeling safe, feeling calm, and feeling in control of your own body? How do you release trauma from your body and feel safe? We discuss all of this and much more with our guest Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk.Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk is a Boston-based psychiatrist and The New York Times best-selling author of The Body Keeps the Score. He was previously the President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and Medical Director of the Trauma Center. He has taught at universities around the world and his work has been featured in TIME, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and more!What is Trauma? How do we define and understand trauma in today’s society?It makes you want to forget, it makes you want to push it away, it makes you want to erase it. Trauma is something that is so horrendous that you can’t cope with it, it’s too much to deal with Trauma renders you helpless and makes you feel like there is no way out Helplessness is an absolute precondition for a traumatic experience Our society continuously ignores how trauma is formed and created - pushing it under the rug and hiding from itTrauma is not a story - trauma is not a memory about the past. Trauma changes the brain. Trauma sits within you and within your body. People experiencing trauma keep behaving and reacting as if they were stuck in that experience When we are traumatized - the brain often cannot process it and the body “stores it” - the body gets stuck in a state of hyper alertness, the mind gets stuck in a state of hyper-alertness The perceptual situation in the brain becomes rewired to be on “high alert"Your body, your mind, your entire system gets frozen or stuck in “f