The first half of the book is "here's all the ways people adapt to trauma, 99% of it negative" and the second half of the book is "here's all the great ways people can cope with that trauma if it just happened but you'd best get on it MFer because if you let it go unaddressed for more than a month or so there's absolutely fucking nothing you can do about it." Metabolism? - nothing you can do about it. Tendency to fly into rages? - nothing you can do about it. Lack of physical coordination? - nothing you can do about it. Fundamental distrust of the world? -nothing you can do about it. Flat affect? -nothing you can do about it. Inability to bond? -nothing you can do about it. Bessel van der Kolk is very explicit that if you do not start aiding people in their processing of trauma within a very short amount of time after it happens, they're fucked. He mentions a little bit about talk therapy and Freud and getting through stuff but he also spends a lot of time talking about the time horizon for dealing with such things. "In an Unspoken Voice" is worse because while van der Kolk dealt with a lot of veterans and a lot of recent trauma victims, Peter Levine dealt with people in the goddamn emergency room and he's even harsher about it. If you don't start healing mental wounds before your physical wounds scab over, they will never fucking heal. I get that these books are great for clinicians and people with recent trauma and people dealing with people with trauma in your past, but if you see yourself in that book, that book is telling you "you are broken and utterly beyond repair. Let's focus on people we can actually help." I was going to buy a copy and go through it with a highlighter so that my wife would get a sense of the kind of shit that's going on behind my forehead but even that was a bridge too far. Talk about it? Hell nah. Shit I can't even pick up a mutherfucking highlighter.
It's not entirely true to say there's nothing you can do. Bessel van der Kolk is big into yoga. He thinks everyone should do yoga. Yoga will solve all your fucking problems. I did yoga until COVID. Then we all did yoga on our own, over zoom. And COVID fucked me up so much I couldn't do fucking yoga. I'm almost to the point where I might consider going back to do yoga? But I mean, I used to run, I used to bike, and I used to do yoga. And I can't run anymore, and the bike path is closed, and everything around me is under construction, and COVID took away yoga. So you generally want self-help books to, like, you know, help? And that entire genre of books is one big happy ball of "if you have childhood trauma you are irrevocably fucked, isn't it fascinating."
Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine think that if you have trauma, you should have a pet. Pets help. I had a cat when I was five. Cougar. He lived about five months. Apparently he got hit by a car (he probably got hit by my mother), they took him into the vet without telling me, he got put to sleep (or he died being hit by my mother) and they didn't even let me see the body. Then a year later they got my sister a cat. She was two. So I had to feed it, but it was my sister's cat. Because I'd had my turn, it was my sister's turn. Fucking cat lived to be 22. We had dogs. They were my parents' dogs. When they died? My sister got a dog. And then when that dog got lonely, the dog got a dog. So technically my sister had two dogs, a cat and 42 gerbils. Pets help. Unless you are reminded every day that you don't get one. There's nothing quite like being surrounded by animals that are explicitly and completely not yours. Particularly when the only photo of you on display anywhere, in any relative's house, is the same fucking photo of you holding that goddamn cat during the brief, shining five months of his life. So yeah Body Keeps the Score is a deeply insightful book that makes you ruminate for months at a time on why, exactly, you've always wanted a pet but know down to your very bones why you're never going to have one.
self help books are checklists for things to get you out of the gutter: clean your room, don't drink so much, go outside, get your blood moving, have a conversation, spend time doing something you enjoy instead of staring at the walls self help books written by scientists are like reading studies on what causes cancer: don't smoke, don't eat bacon, and don't get old, otherwise you're in the control group my dad has hammertoes on both feet. i have bad flexibility in my toes. you know what i mean? there's always those diagrams and plans for the stages of grief or your hierarchy of needs or whatever but i have never found a checklist to make a difference in my happiness. either there is a proximate problem to be solved or there's nothing to be done and yoga is the solution to "i'm stressed out and i need to breathe deep a bit" tier problems and not "i am filled with pain and resentment" tier ones feelings follow facts. the facts can be very different and the feelings stay the same long after they aren't caused by anything current, and the last thing that's helpful is some egghead saying "um actually it's biologically imprinted on your crainular stem and will never leave you" because even if that is true that doesn't mean there's a point to be actively thinking about this shit all the time i dunno honestly i just get annoyed by this shit