The Body Keeps the Score
Prior to the advent of the brain, there was no color and no sound in the universe, nor was there any flavor or aroma and probably little sense and no feeling or emotion. Before brains the universe was also free of pain and anxiety.
-Roger Sperry
This book is a great read for anyone interested in the development of trauma research and the search for available treatments. It emphasizes the importance of simple presence and how trauma muffles this ability. I was particularly impressed with some observations mentioned that can be critical to social workers and policy makers. One successful intervention mentioned was a home-visitation program implemented in the 1970s by psychologist David Olds, in which nurses cooperated with mothers to provide a safer environment for children. The results were seen twenty years later. The author notes, "Economists have calculated that every dollar invested in high-quality home visitation, day care, and preschool programs results in seven dollars of savings on welfare payments, health-care costs, substance-abuse treatment, and incarceration, plus higher tax-revenues due to better-paying jobs."
Words under my sticky-notes:
"I remember being surprised to hear this distinguished old Harvard professor confess how comforted he was to feel his wife's bum against him as he fell asleep at night. By disclosing such simple human needs in himself he helped us recognize how basic they were to our lives. Failure to attend to them results in a stunted existence, no matter how lofty our thoughts and worldly accomplishments."
"No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality."
"People process spatial relations with the right hemisphere of the brain, and our neuroimaging research had shown that the imprint of trauma is principally on the right hemisphere as well."
"Even more important, genes are not fixed; life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn them on or off by attaching methyl groups, a cluster of carbon and hydrogen atoms, to the outside of the gene (a process called methylation), making it more or less sensitive to messages from the body."
"As the great psychiatrist Milton Erickson said, once you kick the log, the river will start flowing."
