It was very striking in our yoga study because we see yoga as one important thing that helps people who've been traumatized because they get back into their bodies. How hard it was for people to even during the most blissful part of the yoga practice called Shavasana, what a hard time traumatized people had at that moment to just feel relaxed and safe and feel totally enveloped with goodness, how the sense of goodness and safety disappears out of your body basically      VAn der kolk  interview

Antonio Damasio in his books, the feeling of what happens in books like this, really talks about a core experience of ourselves is a somatic experience and that the function of the brain is to take care of the body. But it's a minority voice. It's a small voice.

DR. VAN DER KOLK: What we see is that the parts of the brain that tell people to see clearly and to observe things clearly really get interfered with by trauma and the imprint of trauma is in areas to the brain that really have no access to cognition. So it's in an area called the periaqueductal gray, which has something to do with the sort of total safety of the body. The amygdala, of course, which is sort of a smoke detector, alarm bell system of the brain that's where the trauma lands, and trauma makes that part of the brain hypersensitive or renders it totally insensitive.

MS. TIPPETT: And the Broca's area?

DR. VAN DER KOLK: Well, in our study and some others, I mean, for me it was really the great finding early on, is that when people are into their trauma, Broca's area shuts down. That is something that almost everybody has experienced. You get really upset with your partner or your kid, suddenly you take leave of your senses and you say horrible things to that person. And afterwards, you say, oh, I didn't mean to say that.

The reason why you said it is because Broca's area, which is sort of the part of your brain that helps you to say reasonable things and to understand things and articulate them, shuts down. So when people really become very upset, that whole capacity to put things into words in an articulate way disappears. And for me, that is a very important finding because it helped me to realize that, if people need to overcome the trauma, we need to also find methods to bypass what they call the tyranny of language.

DR. VAN DER KOLK: The trauma is not about being reasonable or to be verbal or to be articulate.

How did you get interested — how did you discover yoga and then make that part of this kind of work?

DR. VAN DER KOLK: We actually got into yoga in a very strange way. We learned that there is a way of measuring the integrity of your reptilian brain, i.e., how the very most primitive part of your brain deals with arousal. How you measure that is with something called heart rate variability. It tells you something about how your breath and your heart are in sync with each other.

It turns out that the calmer people are and the more mindful people are, the higher their heart rate variability is. And then we were doing that on some traumatized people and we noticed that they had lousy heart rate variability. Then I thought, so how can we change peoples' heart rate variability?

MS. TIPPETT: I wonder if you have ever heard of somebody named Matthew Sanford, whom I've had on my program? He's actually …

DR. VAN DER KOLK: No.

MS. TIPPETT: He's a very renowned yoga teacher. He's been paraplegic since he was 13 and he had no memory of the accident in which he was disabled, and his body remembered it, right? He talks about body memory. It's the same thing you say, this imprint that trauma has not just on your mind. The other thing that he's doing recently is actually working with veterans and also working with young women suffering from anorexia and understanding also that, although that seems to be so much an obsession with the body, they are really in a traumatic relationship with their own bodies.

DR. VAN DER KOLK: Huh? It sounds very sympathetic and very right. The sense of the experiences, of feeling weight and feeling your substance …

MS. TIPPETT: Yes, feeling your substance which is bigger than just feeling a weight on your muscles, isn't it?

DR. VAN DER KOLK: Yeah. Really feeling your body move and the life inside of yourself is critical. Personally, for example, when people ask me so what sort of treatments have you explored, I've always explored every treatment that I explore for other people. What's been most helpful for me has been rolfing.

MS. TIPPETT: Has been what?

DR. VAN DER KOLK: Rolfing. Rolfing is called after Ida Rolf. It's a very deep tissue work where people who tear your muscles from your fascia with the idea that, at a certain moment, your body comes to be contracted in a way that you habitually hold yourself. So your body sort of takes on a certain posture. And the idea of rolfing is to really open up all these connections and make the body flexible again in a very deep way.

I had asthma as a kid. I was very sickly as a kid, because I was part of this group in the Netherlands — finally after the war in the Netherlands during which I was born, about 100,000 kids died from starvation, and I was a very sickly kid. I think I carried it in my body for a long time and rolfing helped me to overcome that actually. So now I became flexible and multipotential again.

And for my patients, I always recommend that they see somebody who helps them to really feel their body, experience their body, open up to their bodies. And I refer people always to craniosacral work or Feldenkrais. I think those are all very important components about becoming a healthy person.

MS. TIPPETT: You know, but they're not that easy to find. They're still kind of around the edges, Feldenkrais and craniosacral. Isn't it strange how, in Western culture in a field like psychotherapy or even I see this a lot in religion, in Western culture we turn these things into these chin-up experiences. We separated ourselves, we divided ourselves. I see this — I mean, yoga is everywhere now, right? And people are discovering all kinds of ways, as you say. There are all kinds of other ways to reunite ourselves, but …

DR. VAN DER KOLK: But it's true. Western culture is astoundingly disembodied and uniquely so. Because of my work, I've been to South Africa quite a few times and China and Japan and India. You see that we are much more disembodied. And the way I like to say is that we basically come from a post-alcoholic culture. People whose origins are in Northern Europe had only one way of treating distress: that's namely with a bottle of alcohol.

North American culture continues to continue that notion. If you feel bad, just take a swig or take a pill. And the notion that you can do things to change the harmony inside of yourself is just not something that we teach in schools and in our culture, in our churches, in our religious practices. And, of course, if you look at religions around the world, they always start with dancing, moving, singing …

MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. Crying, laughing, yeah.

DR. VAN DER KOLK: Physical experiences. And then the more respectable people become, the more stiff they become somehow.