Dr Bessel van der Kolk — Dutch-born psychiatrist called maybe the most influential of the 21st century, with 40+ years of trauma research. Author of the bestseller 'The Body Keeps the Score' and a pioneer of EMDR, yoga, neurofeedback and psychedelic therapy for PTSD.
The gist
Van der Kolk argues that trauma is not a memory but a perception that rewires the brain and body, so talking alone rarely heals it. He walks through how trauma shuts down the brain's 'timekeeper' so survivors relive the past as the present, and demonstrates EMDR live on host Steven Bartlett. The conversation spans his own wartime childhood and frozen mother, the role of early childhood neglect in adult dysfunction, and body-based treatments like yoga, rolfing, martial arts, neurofeedback and psychodrama. He shares stunning results from MDMA and psilocybin trials, and laments that a profit-driven mental-health system ignores what actually works. The throughline: humans are collective creatures, and trauma is fundamentally a breakdown of connection that only connection can repair.
Big reveals
- Recounts asking his mother if she had been sexually abused; she fainted and fell off her chair.
- Describes the moment he nearly hit his three-year-old daughter and chose to break the cycle of his parents' abuse.
- Claims 78% of adult-trauma patients in his research were completely cured by EMDR.
- Performs EMDR live on Steven Bartlett, who reports he can no longer recall why he was bothered.
- Says he is 'very desperate' after the last US election and bluntly calls Trump a psychopath.
- Reveals his own MDMA session left him in eight hours of agony as the trauma stories he'd absorbed came flooding back.
- Admits much of his lifelong quest to understand trauma was really about his own childhood, something he only grasped after age 70.
Things worth remembering
- A CDC study of 25,000 people found ending child abuse could cut depression by half and suicide, drug use and domestic violence by three quarters.
- Roughly 90% of the patients in his practice can trace adult dysfunction to early childhood experience.
- Children from low-income families are 400% more likely than the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medications.
- In trauma the brain's 'timekeeper' (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) goes offline, so the past is felt as the present.
- The yoga 'happy baby' pose is especially triggering for sexual-abuse survivors.
- Rolfing, an intense fascia massage, was one of the most helpful things he ever did for his own body.
- An MDMA-assisted therapy trial found 67% of participants no longer met PTSD criteria, versus about 30% on placebo.
- A single dose of psilocybin reduced treatment-resistant depression with effects lasting up to six weeks.
- The average American now reports zero people to turn to in a crisis, down from about three two decades ago.
- An insurance executive told him plainly he wasn't interested in getting people better, only in maximising subscribers.
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The Body Keeps the Score
Bessel van der Kolk
“your book was very interesting because when I read the cover and then I watched a video you had made talking about the six treatments” — Steven Bartlett 00:34:08Find it on Amazon