28/02/2026
📚 MONTHLY SELF DEVELOPMENT BOOK REVIEW: THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE – DR BESSEL VAN DER KOLK 📚
📕OVERVIEW 📕
This month I have chosen The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk who explores how trauma is not just something that lives in our memories — it lives in our bodies. Drawing on decades of research and clinical work, he explains how trauma reshapes the brain, impacts relationships, and influences how safe we feel in the world.
This isn’t just a clinical book about Trauma it is a compassionate exploration of how early attachment wounds, chronic stress, neglect, and overwhelming experiences shape our nervous system — and most importantly, how healing is possible. It’s both science-based and deeply human.
🔑 KEY LESSONS 🔑
✨ 1. Trauma lives in the body
Trauma isn’t simply about what happened — it’s about what your nervous system had to do to survive. When experiences overwhelm our capacity to cope, the body holds onto the stress response long after the event has passed.
✨ 2. You cannot think your way out of trauma
Insight alone isn’t enough. Healing requires working with the body, the nervous system, and felt experience — not just talking about what happened.
✨ 3. Safety is the foundation of healing
Whether through therapy, relationships, movement, or mindfulness — healing begins when the body experiences safety again.
✨ 4. Regulation before reflection
Before we can process painful experiences, we must first learn how to regulate. Breath, grounding, movement, rhythm, and connection are powerful tools.
✨ 5. Healing is possible
From EMDR to yoga, neurofeedback to theatre, this book offers hope. The brain can change. The nervous system can relearn safety.
⭐️ Why This Book Matters
Many high-functioning, capable adults carry invisible trauma responses — perfectionism, people-pleasing, emotional shutdown, hyper-independence.
This book helps us understand that these are not character flaws. They are adaptive survival strategies.
And once we understand that… we can begin to gently shift them.
For anyone navigating burnout, relationship breakdown, emotional overwhelm, or chronic stress — this book offers language for what your body may already know.
✍️ REFLECTION & JOURNAL PROMPTS ✍️
Use these prompts as a personal learning exercise:
1. When do I feel most activated in my body? What tends to trigger that response?
2. What does safety feel like physically for me?
3. Where in my life am I still operating from survival rather than choice?
4. What small practices help me feel grounded and present?
5. If my body could speak, what would it say it needs right now?
⭐️ MY COACHING PERSPECTIVE ⭐️
This is an enlightening read as I believe it shifts our perspective to fully appreciate that our body is the first stage in our communication system with the outside world not our mind. It provides understanding around the shame we feel about our outdated survival strategies moving us from self-blame to self-compassion, from surviving to reconnecting. If healing means learning to listen inward, this book is a reminder that the body has been speaking all along and we just need to learn to listen to it.
