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