The body keeps the score

[droqen]

Regarding Bessel van der Kolk's
"The body keeps the score"

From https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1652548739876409344

[droqen]

P. 11

. . . my great teacher, Elvin Semrad, had taught us to be skeptical about textbooks. We had only one real textbook, he said: our patients. We should trust only what we could learn from them--and from our own experience. This sounds so simple, but even as Semrad pushed us to rely upon self-knowledge, he also warned us how difficult that process really is, since human beings are experts in wishful thinking and obscuring the truth. I remember him saying: "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves."

This advice takes what I already believe and meaningfully deepens it. This is great, and I look forward to more from this book.

[droqen]

In the chapter "Revolutions in Mind and Brain" van der Kolk describes old practices that seem terribly archaic, ways of handling psychological trauma that show how far understanding has come. That's not to say current methods are uniformly better now... but... it's surprising the rate at which change occurs. Great cultural machineries changed within a lifetime.