The Body Keeps the Score with Miranda Wise

The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk is a bestseller on the ways in which trauma affects the entire body and increases health risk. Certified trauma-informed life coach Miranda Wise shared about the book on the Book Insights podcast. Here are some of her insights:

"You gotta work with trauma because you can't erase it."

"Your triggers are your old programming, they're never going to go away...It's like if you pour water down grooves on a mountain, the old grooves are really deep, but that doesn't mean the water can never go in the new ones."

"The payoff of mindfulness work and EMDR is that things will happen and I will think 'this is annoying, I don't like this' but I'm not hijacked in the same way I used to be."

"As a child I would have these mysterious stomach aches for hours. They went away slowly as a teenager... I have way more tension than the average person. It never seems to go away. That's my body keeping the score."

"I love the IFS model the idea that we have all these parts and some of them swoop in and are protective so we don't have to feel the feelings."

"Trauma is where the pain gets trapped and isn't processed. It's the impact. It's not the thing that happened, it's what your left with. The score that the body kept will be less."

"If you take something like a car crash and the car rolls over. It's said that if you are able to bust out a window and crawl out - if you're able to do something about it, the traumatic impact will be less."

"Emotional connection is a need. There have been studies about babies dying just from not getting physical affection. So that means neglect was life threatening at one time. It's as much of a basic need as food."

"Talking, being heard, trusting somebody, feeling safe - that in and of itself can be reparative."