Erica’s Reviews > The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma > Status Update

Somehow the very event that caused them so much pain had also become their sole source of meaning. They felt fully alive only when they were revisiting their traumatic past.

The emotions and physical sensations that were imprinted during the trauma are experienced not as memories but as disruptive physical reactions in the present.

Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself, of what will all self-leadership in the chapters to come! The challenge of recovery is restablish ownership of your body and your mind— of your self. This mer feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becom overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed.

Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology. Being able to articulate a complex feeling and having that feeling recognized lights up our limbic brain and creates an ah-ha moment. In contrast, being met with silence and incomprehension kills the spirit.