Changing the way we think about trauma

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I get so excited when new studies come out that change the way we think.

I’ve been working in the mental health sector in one way or another for more than 25 years. Add my years of training before that and it brings it up to around 30. Over that time the way we think about trauma has changed dramatically. We have come a long way from the traditional medical model I learnt about as an undergrad which was based on the experience of mostly male war veterans.

In 2014, Bessel Van Der Kolk published ‘The Body Keeps the Score’ which outlined physiological effects of trauma within the body. It acted as a catalyst for a changing conversation about trauma and the somatic practitioner movement. This book has dominated trauma discourse over the past decade. Although our clinical definitions of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and complex PTSD have lagged, the mental health community began to refer to a broad variety of adverse experiences as potentially traumatic incidents, particularly those experienced in childhood. To some extent this book also helped to ‘de-masculinise’ PTSD by describing how sexual abuse and domestic and family violence create disrupted attachment and trauma. Most importantly, the book helped to move perceptions of trauma away from “all in your head.”

However, Van Der Kolk’s theories have been heavily criticised for his reliance on theories considered questionable or pseudoscientific by the mental health and medical communities, and its lack of recognition of political and societal structures that systematically traumatise disadvantaged groups. It made broad, sweeping statements that were not backed up by evidence and have since been disputed. Van Der Kolk’s book was theoretical, but was adopted as factual by many practitioners who didn’t sufficiently understand the neurological, physiological and psychological factors at play in trauma.

Read the rest of this viral article at The Trauma-informed Leader on Substack.

The body does not keep the score in the way we were told