Interview with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk by Elissa Melaragno:
Elissa Melaragno: I read your entire book through the acknowledgments, and the very last acknowledgment was “to an affirmation of the life force which drives us human beings to create a meaningful life regardless of the obstacles we encounter.” What have you learned about this life force in the process of your work?
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk: It comes up over and over again. I just went to visit my childhood friends in the Netherlands, and I found that the more traumas they have had in their background, the more creative and successful they often become. It’s the people who have had to struggle who often see new possibilities and have no choice but to discover new options. Traumatized people and their ability to see new things accounts for some of the progress we make in our society. Oprah Winfrey is one good example. Isaac Newton had a horrendous history, but, at the same time, he was the great discoverer of calculus and many of the fundamental laws of physics. Traumatized people have to find creative solutions to existing reality. Surely, not every survivor has this amazing creative capacity, but some of them do.
Melaragno: In the chapter “Healing from Trauma, Owning Yourself,” you cover six important ways to connect with what is going on inside oneself: managing hyper-arousal, mindfulness, relationships, communal rhythms and synchrony, touch, and taking action.
van der Kolk: Well, let’s start with the fact that we are collective creatures. We don’t exist as individuals. Our brain is meant to be in synchrony with other brains. Interaction with other brains fundamentally shapes who we are. When we cry, we’re supposed to get a response, and when we laugh, somebody is supposed to laugh with us. Those are the rhythms of life by which we the brain develops. If kids are left by themselves, as occurs in orphanages and drug abusing households, their brains do not develop properly and are damaged. There’s very rich research now on how sounds, facial movements, and the synchrony and the rhythms between faces and voices are what gets the basic brain structures online. If you don’t get that synchrony, certain parts of your brain that are supposed to develop to be in sync with other people get damaged. So, you have a hard time with other people as you grow up, a hard time getting confident about other people, getting pleasure from other people, being in sync, and enjoying a sense of community with others. You feel lonely, isolated, and miserable. Our brains are meant to be in sync, and the big challenge often in traumatic stress is the question of how you create a brain that can be back in sync with other people. In order to do that, you need to first of all notice yourself. As long as you don’t notice yourself, you are like a chicken with his head cut off. You just run around like an automatic animal that responds and gets enraged. But when you know what’s going on with you, you start to get some choices like “Maybe I should not react to this” or “Maybe I should not touch her.” You need to have a quiet mind in order to get ownership of yourself, and therefore the cultivation of mindfulness and self-observance is absolutely critical. This is easier done if there is somebody out there who could help you with it. Someone who can see you, who can notice what goes on with you, who can help you to name things, who can help you say, “This is what’s happening to me.” You don’t need someone to name how screwed up you are, how you need to be fixed. You need to just notice yourself, just notice, just notice without judgment.
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