05/25/2026
Massage helps to heal in so many ways.
There was a period in my life when I managed to smile through everything. Whether I entered a room or had a conversation, I appeared fine, completely fine.
Yet, underneath that facade of being fine, my body was screaming in a language I did not yet have words for. Tight chest. Constant Sighs. Sleepless nights. A heaviness I kept blaming on tiredness, on work, on anything that wasn't the real thing.
Then I read The Body Keeps the Score. And it didn't just teach me something. It named me. It named the thing I had been carrying without a name for years. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk's book rewrites everything we think we know about trauma. Not just what it is, but where it lives. And it does not live only in the mind. It lives in the body.
You can forget details. You can avoid conversations. You can tell yourself you’ve moved on. But the body has its own memory. It remembers fear. It remembers helplessness. It remembers what survival cost you. And it keeps the receipts. It keeps the score in the way you flinch at a certain tone of voice, or go cold in a room that should feel safe.
Van der Kolk calls this the body's memory, and it is older and more stubborn than anything your mind can reason away.
1. Trauma changes the brain's physical architecture
When you experience something overwhelming, your rational brain (the prefrontal cortex) goes offline, and your emotional survival brain (the amygdala) takes over. For trauma survivors, that survival brain never quite switches back off. Dr. van der Kolk explains that trauma leaves people chronically hyper-vigilant, constantly scanning the environment for danger.
They aren't "being dramatic" or living in the past; their brain just never got the memo that the danger had passed and is literally still trapped in the loop, treating a random Friday afternoon like it's the worst day of their life all over again. Van der Kolk explains this so gently, so precisely, that you stop feeling broken and start feeling finally understood.
2. Numbing the pain also numbs the joy
To survive unbearable sensations, many people learn to shut down their physical awareness entirely. They disconnect from their bodies. But Dr. van der Kolk notes a devastating tax on this survival strategy: you cannot selectively numb emotion. When you close yourself off from feeling your terror or anger, you also destroy your capacity to feel deep joy, intimacy, and pleasure. Healing requires the terrifying, courageous work of learning how to safely inhabit your own skin again.
3. You cannot talk a terrified nervous system into feeling safe
We were told that talk therapy fixes everything. Van der Kolk, a psychiatrist, lovingly yet firmly disagrees. Real healing, he shows us, happens in the body, through movement, breath, rhythm, touch, safety felt in the bones, not just understood in the head. Yoga. EMDR. Theatre. Neurofeedback. The path back to yourself has to be one that communicates directly with the nervous system, teaching the physical body that the threat is finally over.
When I closed the final page, I cried. I cried because I suddenly realized that my body hadn't been failing me all these years; it had been fiercely, relentlessly trying to protect me.
If you have ever felt trapped by your own anxiety, haunted by things you can't put into words, or disconnected from the person in the mirror, this book was written for you.
Read it. Slowly. And be patient with what it stirs.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/4dtLixf
