I’m pretty interested in the impact of trauma on health, as so many of us are in this field. So when I saw that Krista Tippit (Do you tune in to the On Being podcast? You should.) had interviewed Dr. Bessel van der Kolk about the issue of trauma and its effects on the body, I bookmarked it to listen to during my travel. I haven’t finished listening to the whole program, but I thought what I had heard was interesting enough to post it here. It’s a bit woo-woo, and yet, the longer I do this work, the more comfortable I get with the whole idea of woo-woo, so…
Dr. van der Kolk is Medical Director of the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Massachusetts. He’s also a professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School. His books include Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on the Mind, Body and Society and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.