01/06/2025
In my 25-year career becoming a specialist in healing trauma, I was trained by some of the most brilliant trauma theorists in the world alive today, including Bessel van der Kolk.
I am a founding member of the Trauma Healing Project, a small nonprofit in Eugene, Oregon, started by some friends and colleagues around 2003, the year I went back to school to get my Masters in Social Work.
I wanted to become a psychotherapist, and I chose social work because as a woman and a person of color, I have always been aware of the tremendous impact our social context has on our lives.
The trauma field was younger then. One of the professors in my school-- Joy De Gruy Leary at Portland State University--was in the process of writing the first ever book on Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, speaking to the intergenerational experiences of African-Americans that stem from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and reach into the present, but my school was largely unprepared to have the hard conversations about racism and oppression that I wanted to have.
In most of my classes I was the only brown person in a sea of white, and my professors failed miserably at facilitating conversations about the role of privilege and oppression--in social work school. It was very disappointing.
At the same time, I became a member of the Steering Committee of the Trauma Healing Project and we obtained a huge grant that would allow us to bring trauma specialists from around the world to train us.
I received training from people who had been working with trauma survivors for decades and had specialized in psychiatric populations, women who survive domestic violence, children who survive abuse, men who want to become better fathers after perpetrating violence on their families, war survivors and people working to strengthen relationships between Arabs and Jews in Israel. Our training was informed by a profound understanding of how sexism, racism and all the oppressions work and perpetuate violence. We did not suffer from the disconnect that Eli NIetfeld points out about the book, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk.
Shortly after I graduated with my MSW, the Trauma Healing Project sent me and some of my colleagues to the Kripalu Yoga Center in the Berkshires to take a course with Bessel van der Kolk about healing trauma with yoga, theater and play.
At the time I didn´t know that van der Kolk was, together with Judith Herman, the author of the foundational book Trauma and Recovery, involved in the birth of trauma theory.
I don´t think Eli Nietfeld, the author of this eviscerating article about The Body Keeps the Score knows that either.
Judith Herman, in her latest book, Truth and Repair, tells the story: in the 1980s van der Kolk and others were working with Vietnam war veterans. She and her colleagues were working with survivors of sexual and domestic violence. Together they realized their patients were suffering from the same symptoms.
For the first time psychologists were understanding that surviving a war with bombs and tanks has a very similar effect in the body as surviving the war at home of physical, sexual and psychological abuse. That was the birth of trauma theory as we now know it.
This created a revolution in the field of mental health. As Dr. Sandra Bloom puts it, we went from asking "What's wrong with you?" to asking "What happened to you?" From looking for symptoms of "mental illness" to listening to people´s trauma history and understanding their emotional injuries.
I don´t know van der Kolk on a personal level, and to be clear, I was disappointed when I met him at that course that he had a girlfriend who seemed to have been his student and looked about 30 years younger than him, who was present at the course as well. I can see why some of the blatant sexism Eli Nietfeld points out seeped into his book.
At the time when I studied with him, van der Kolk said he was looking for a ghostwriter to help him write a book about trauma that would become a best-seller for the masses. He wanted to write for the layperson, and he knew he didn't have the writing chops to make it happen, so he was going to find someone else to write his book. It looks like he fulfilled his goal.
Some of the points made in this eviscerating critique stand, but there is much more that this author is not aware of, some of which I would like to clarify.
One reason I have great respect for van der Kolk (despite his many failings) aside from his many contributions to the trauma healing field, he has used all his privilege to advocate to expand the understanding of trauma in mainstream psychiatry and psychology. He told us the story of how he sat on the board of the DSM-V, the diagnostic manual by which all mental health professions diagnose patients, and tried to expand the definition of PTSD to no avail. "The DSM board is completely sold out to Big Pharma and they just want disorders they can pair with drugs," he said. He knew that it is possible to heal trauma and the way to do it is not with drugs. He was engaging with many of the brand new somatic and relational practitioners whose methods were highly effecticve and who threatened Big Pharma's hegemony.
I think it´s tragic that The Body Keeps the Score can have such a narrow reading as this author reports.
It is true that van der Kolk places too much emphasis on the individual, rather than in the social dynamics of violence and oppression that produce trauma, this is a critique that Judith Herman also makes--although much more gently--in her new book.
But in his defense, I want to clarify that van der Kolk understands a lot about the relational nature of trauma. Maybe his ghostwriter did him a great disservice and he didn´t have the awareness to correct those biases in the book.
I received a lot of validation for the effectiveness of my work during that training with van der Kolk because I was already using yoga, theater and play techniques in my work with trauma survivors. I was a yoga teacher and was using breath work, meditation and movement with my clients. I was using role-plays and storytelling, and providing play therapy to child survivors of abuse.
Van der Kolk was collaborating with lots of practitioners of color and people who work in community-based spaces and he also gave us an amazing understanding of attachment trauma. He is not ignorant about the relational nature of trauma. In that, I disagree with some of the accusations of this author.
Van der Kolk was very interested in the burgeoning field of neuroscience and things like functional MRIs for understanding brian function and brain injuries. He had access to that field, which many therapists don´t.
I am not surprised that his ghostwritten book which had the popular success he sought is biased toward understanding trauma in the individual rather than in the societal forces that produce it.
I also think that Eli Nietfleld misunderstands some of the critique of talk therapy, in The Body Keeps the Score. What I deeply know is true is that trauma cannot be healed with talk therapy alone, while ignoring the body. We now have highly effective therapies that allow us to work with the nervous system of a trauma survivor to defuse traumatic memories and produce healing instead of retraumatization.
People kept telling me to read "The Body Keeps the Score." I was shocked at what it actually says.
