Bessel van der Kolk

02/03/2022

Focus on the Needs of Children: Bessel van der Kolk

I have included a number of quotes in these Healing blog posts from Bessel van der Kolk’s seminal book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Here is another, this time about children: ‘I like to believe that once our society […]
05/10/2021

The Repair of Early Trauma: A Bottom Up Approach

‘Told to us through the voices of children, this unique animation teaches us that by putting together the seven-piece jigsaw puzzle of ‘Developmental Trauma’, we can understand how a child’s adverse childhood experiences have shaped their emotional world and outward behaviour. Once we understand this, we can then […]
18/06/2020

Key Elements Underlying the Healing of Trauma

In our forthcoming book Connection: Aboriginal Child Artists Captivate Europe, I have written two appendices, one reflecting on The Trauma and the other on The Healing. In my last blog, I provided a section of the first Appendix, The Trauma: Reflections. Here, I include the first part of […]
08/08/2019

The Healing Power of Healthy Relationships

I have previously emphasised the importance of healthy relationships for wellbeing, and for the healing of trauma and its consequences, in blogs focused on thoughts from Bessel van der Kolk and Bruce Perry. Here are further thoughts from the former of these world-leading experts, taken from his seminal book […]
28/06/2019

Psychiatry Must Stop Ignoring Trauma: Bessel van der Kolk

THIS PROFOUNDLY HUMANE BOOK offers a sweeping understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma, offering hope and clarity to everyone touched by its devastation. Trauma has emerged as one of the great public health challenges of our time, not only because of its well-documented effects on combat […]
23/05/2019

Healing Trauma: Overlooking Fundamental Truths

Over the past fifty years, psychiatric medications have become a mainstay in our culture, with dubious consequences.  The theory that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs has become accepted by psychiatrists, doctors, the media and the […]
26/03/2019

The importance of safety and reciprocity in mental health

In my last Healing Blog, I recommended highly a book by Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz entitled The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And other Stories From a Child Psychiatrists Notebook. Another seminal book about the healing of trauma is The Body Keep the Score: Brain, Mind, and […]
01/12/2018

Learn the Signs and Symptoms of PTSD – Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

Bessel van der Kolk is one of the world’s leading experts on trauma and the healing of trauma. His book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, is a classic in the field, one of the best non-fiction books I have […]
17/11/2018

Addiction and Psychological Pain

During the many years I spent working in the addiction and mental health field, first as a neuroscientist and later helping empower people to facilitate their recovery (healing), I rarely heard the word ‘trauma’ being used. I would often visit addiction treatment services in the UK and very […]
09/11/2018

The Impact of Colonisation

The impact of colonisation on Indigenous peoples has been similar in a number of countries, including Australia, Canada, America and New Zealand. In her book Trauma Trails: Recreating Songlines, Professor Judy Atkinson describes how the control of Indigenous peoples by the coloniser was facilitated by three main types of […]
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