I have mentioned The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk in multiple blog posts and in countless conversations with family, friends, and colleagues—but this piece is devoted entirely to this profound, paradigm-shifting, deeply compassionate, science-meets-soul, body-led work that has held a sacred place in my library of life for over 11 years.
This is not a book I have only read once; it is a book I return to again and again, across different seasons of my life. Each time, it meets me there—offering a new layer of understanding, a refined lens for my work, and a deeper softness toward the human experience. Because this book is not static… it evolves as you do.
Last weekend, I had the honour of being in the room with Bessel van der Kolk—to listen, to feel, to witness his work come alive in a way that moved far beyond words. There is something profoundly powerful about sitting in the presence of someone whose teachings have shaped your understanding for over a decade. It felt grounding, expansive, and deeply affirming—not just intellectually, but somatically. You can read more about this experience in A Day of Remembering, Feeling & Reclaiming with Bessel Van Der Kolk.
This work was never meant to live solely in the mind… it is meant to be felt in the body.
Throughout my copy, you will find many ⭐️’s scattered beside lines, quotes, questions, and words that made me pause—words that stayed, lingered, and quietly reshaped the way I think, feel, and practice. There are also highlighted passages, which may feel like sacrilege to some (and to the avid book lover I once was, I thought so too), but this is a book that invites such markings. They become visible traces of relationship, reflection, and reverence—small anchors that hold not only the author’s words, but my own evolving connection to them.
These words have supported not only my own journey, but also the journeys of the many clients and patients I have the privilege of working with through intuitive guidance and vision therapy.
The book unfolds across five beautifully woven parts—each one building gently upon the last, guiding the reader deeper into understanding: Part One: The Rediscovery of Trauma, Part Two: This Is Your Brain on Trauma, Part Three: The Minds of Children, Part Four: The Imprint of Trauma, and Part Five: Paths to Recovery.
Each section offers a powerful integration of scientific insight and deeply human storytelling, bridging brain, body, and lived experience in a way that feels both illuminating and profoundly compassionate.
Prologue
The prologue opens with a powerful remembering: trauma is not rare, not isolated—it is human.
⭐️ Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbours…As human beings we belong to an extremely resilient species but traumatic experiences leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems.
When I first read this, something in me softened—a quiet recognition that trauma is not a personal failing, but part of the shared human experience. It dissolves the illusion that trauma belongs to “others,” and instead invites a deeper sense of shared humanity—one that calls for compassion over judgement, both for ourselves and for each other.
⭐️ Would it be possible one day to know as much as we do about brains, minds and love as we do about the other systems that make up our organism?
This question still feels alive within me, like an open doorway that holds both curiosity and humility in equal measure, reminding me that while we know so much, the landscape of human connection, love, and healing is still unfolding.
⭐️ We know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive.
This lands deeply in my work. When someone cannot feel alive in their body, they cannot fully engage with life. The disconnection is not a choice—it is an adaptation. It is not resistance—it is protection, and within that understanding, there is both compassion and a pathway back: not through forcing change, but through gently restoring the capacity to feel, to sense, and to come home to the body again through restoration, rather than correction.
Part One: The Rediscovery of Trauma
This part explores how trauma was once misunderstood…and how our understanding has slowly, powerfully evolved. It invites a shift from seeing trauma as something to “fix,” to something to understand, integrate, and gently unwind.
⭐️ How can people gain control over the residues of past trauma and return to being masters of their own ship?
This question feels like the heartbeat of the entire book. An invitation back to agency, not through force, but through gentle reconnection with self. How do we come back to ourselves? Not by overriding the past, but by reclaiming presence, agency, and choice in the here and now.
⭐️ Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach
Imagination becomes the bridge toward possibility. Imagination here is not simply creativity—it is the capacity to envision safety, possibility, and a future beyond what has been. It is what allows the nervous system to begin orienting toward something different.
Healing, as explored in The Body Keeps the Score, is not one-dimensional—it integrates approaches that support the mind, brain, and body.
Top-down approaches involve talking, connecting with others, and making sense of traumatic experiences and their present-day impact.
Medication can support by calming an overactive internal alarm system or stabilising brain chemistry, creating the conditions for healing to occur.
Bottom-up approaches engage the body directly—through movement, sensation, and physical experience—helping to restore connection and counteract the helplessness, rage, and emotional shutdown that trauma can create.
⭐️ For real change to take place, the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and go live in the reality of the present
This speaks to the essence of bottom-up healing. Safety is not cognitive; it is embodied, sensed and lived. The body must feel safe not just be told it is safe—a powerful reminder that healing is not cognitive alone.
⭐️ Mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain
This idea helped reduce stigma by framing mental illness biologically, but it is overly simplistic—it can obscure the deeper roles of trauma, environment, relationships, and the body in shaping mental health.
⭐️ Brocas area is one of the speech centres of the brain. Without a functioning brocas area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. All trauma is preverbal.
This offers insight into why so many people struggle to “talk about” trauma—because much of it lives beyond language. It exists in sensations, impulses, and fragments that words alone cannot fully capture. This helps me meet silence differently. Sometimes the absence of words is not avoidance—it is neurobiology.
⭐️ During flashbacks, brains lit up on the right side for patients. Left brainers (rational, logical people) and right brainers (the intuitive, artistic ones). The right is intuitive, emotional, visual, spatial and tactual, while the left does all the talking. The emotional, intuitive brain takes over, pulling the person out of present time and into a felt sense of the past.
This reminds me that what looks like “overreaction” is often a nervous system reliving, not misbehaving. As a vision therapist, I find this deeply compelling—because the visual cortex continues to register and replay imagery long after the event itself has passed. The body does not simply remember—it re-experiences.
The body remembers in images, sensations, and patterns.
Part Two: This Is Your Brain on Trauma
This section explores how trauma reshapes the nervous system—how it rewires perception, response, and our felt sense of the world.
⭐️ After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivors energy now becomes focused on suppressing in chaos. This explains why it is critical for trauma treatment to engage the entire organism, body, mind and brain.
This line alone explains so much of human behaviour. It is not the world that changes, but the internal experience of it—the same environment, the same moment, can feel entirely different depending on the state of the nervous system perceiving it. This shifts everything: it is not the world that changes, but the lens through which it is experienced.
⭐️ The frontal lobes are the seat of empathy– our ability to “feel into” someone else
Here lies our capacity for connection, understanding, and perspective-taking, yet these functions can go offline when survival systems take over. Connection lives here, and yet it can go offline in survival, inviting compassion for disconnection.
⭐️ The more intense, the visceral, sensory input from the emotional brain, the less capacity the irrational brain has to put a damper on it.
In heightened states, the thinking brain steps aside, and the body leads. This is not dysfunction—it is protection.
⭐️ Yelling at someone who is already out of control can only lead to further regulation. Many programs continue to ignore the need to engage the safety system of the brain before trying to promote new ways of thinking.
This reinforces something I live by in practice: safety before strategy—because without safety, there is no access to regulation, reflection, or change. This has become a quiet principle in my work; without safety, nothing sustainable can land.
You can’t do what you want till you know what you’re doing. Moshe Feldenkrais
These words are from the great 20th-century body therapist Moshe Feldenkrais. The implications are clear: to feel present, you have to know where you are and be aware of what is going on within you. This speaks to awareness as the foundation for transformation. Approaches such as the Feldenkrais Method—which you may have heard of—embody this beautifully, teaching gentle, embodied awareness through movement and offering a pathway back to connection with the self. Awareness precedes change; we cannot shift what we cannot yet feel or see, and without safety, there is no access to regulation, reflection, or transformation.
⭐️ Agency is the technical term for the feeling of being in charge of your life: knowing where you stand, knowing that you have a say in what happens to you, knowing that you have some ability to shape your circumstances.
This line feels deeply empowering. Agency begins in the body through interoception—the ability to sense what is happening within us. Agency is not something we think our way into; it arises through the capacity to feel, notice, and attune to our internal landscape, and the more we can do this, the more choice we have in how we respond to the world around us. Interoception (from the Latin meaning “to look inside”) forms the foundation of this inner awareness—you can explore this further in this blog (Ignite your senses). The greater our interoceptive awareness, the greater our capacity to shape how we move through life.
The more we feel, the more we can choose
Where do I feel in charge of my life?
Where do I feel disconnected from my body?
What would it feel like to trust my inner signals?
I once worked with a patient experiencing alexithymia—the inability to find words for feelings. As he slowly began to reconnect with his body, sensations started to emerge. From sensation came emotion, and from emotion came language. In learning to recognise the relationship between physical sensations and emotions, not only did his internal world begin to shift, but so too did how he saw and moved through the world.
How they felt changed how they saw and moved through the world!
Part Three: The Minds of Children
This section explores attachment, development, and the profound shaping influence of early relationships. It reveals how the nervous system is formed not in isolation, but in connection—with caregivers, environment, and emotional attunement.
⭐️ Mastering the skill of self regulation depends to a large degree on how harmonious our early interactions with our caregivers are
The nervous system does not develop alone, it is shaped in relationship. Regulation is first learned through being regulated by another; we learn to regulate through relationship long before we are able to do it alone.
⭐️ Attachment patterns often persisted into adult adulthood. Anxious toddlers tend to grow into an anxious adults, while avoiding toddlers are likely to become adults who are out of touch with their own feelings and those of others.
What is formed early becomes a template—quietly influencing how we relate, connect, and protect ourselves later in life.
⭐️ The reactions of children to painful events are largely determined by their parents ‘state’
The nervous system of a child is deeply attuned to the emotional availability and internal world of their caregivers. This highlights the invisible transmission of nervous systems and how presence matters much more than perfection.
⭐️ Dissociation which is manifested in feeling lost, overwhelmed, abandoned, and disconnected from the world and in seeing oneself as unloved, empty, helpless, trapped, and weighed down.
From a journal entry in the Journal of Infant, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy (2003), Karlen Lyons-Ruth concludes that infants who are not truly seen and known by their mothers are at high risk of growing into adolescents who are unable to know and to see. A protective response emerges when presence becomes too much—the system learns to leave. Not through absence, but protection; a system finding a way to survive.
⭐️ Does inflicting harm on oneself begin as a desperate attempt to gain some sense of control?
A confronting yet compassionate reframe that opens space for deeper understanding—toward behaviours that often arise from overwhelm rather than intent, inviting us to see them as adaptive rather than broken.
⭐️ When there’s no relationship between diagnosis and cure, a mislabelled patient is bound to be a mistreated patient.
This line stayed with me and reinforces something I hold deeply, because I have always believed meet the person before the label
Before the diagnosis.
Before the treatment plan.
Meet the human.
Part Four: The Imprint of Trauma
This section explores how trauma is encoded within memory, perception, and the body itself—how experience is not only remembered, but imprinted.
⭐️ The adrenaline that we secrete to defend against potential threats helps to engrave those incidents in our minds.
The body records what the mind may try to forget.
⭐️ The more adrenaline… the more precise the memory
Intensity deepens the imprints, making past moments feel vividly present. In heightened states of survival, the body records with intensity; moments are etched not as neutral narratives, but as vivid sensory imprints—felt, embodied, and enduring.
⭐️ Denial of the consequences of trauma ca wreak havoc with the social fabric of society
What is unspoken does not disappear—it shapes culture, behaviour, and collective responses in subtle but powerful ways; it becomes woven into systems and patterns.
⭐️ Nobody wants to remember trauma. The essence of trauma is that it is overwhelming, unbelievable, and unbearable.
There is a natural resistance to turning toward what overwhelms. The body protects itself through avoidance, fragmentation, and forgetting. Healing asks something quieter and more tender—it invites us to gently turn toward what was once too much, not alone and not all at once, but with safety, support, and deep compassion. This invites tenderness, as trauma is not something we resist lightly—it is something that once exceeded capacity.
Part Five: Paths to Recovery
This section feels like a return—a remembering of what is possible when healing is supported, embodied, and gently held over time.
⭐️ The only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.
These words carry a quiet but profound impact: they gently shift healing away from force or control and toward awareness and relationship. They remind us that change does not come from overriding what we feel, but from turning toward it with presence—becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is happening within us. In that shift, the inner world becomes less something to fix and more something to meet with care, opening the doorway to regulation, integration, and lasting change.
⭐️ At the core of recovery is self awareness. Body awareness puts us in touch with our inner world. Mindfulness puts us in touch with the transitory nature of our feelings and perceptions.
Change does not begin with force—it begins with noticing. Awareness becomes the doorway back to choice, presence, and regulation.
⭐️ In order to recover, mind, body and brain need to be convinced that it is safe at a visceral level and allow yourself to connect that sense of safety with memories of past helplessness.
Safety is not an idea—it is a felt experience that must be slowly, consistently built within the nervous system. True healing lives in the body, not just the mind.
⭐️ You need a guide who is not afraid of your terror and who can contain your darkest rage, someone who can safeguard the wholeness of you while you explore the fragmented experiences that you had to keep secret from yourself for so long.
This line feels personal. I am so honoured to be a guide—to walk alongside others gently, slowly, and safely. We dip one toe in… then step back… gradually building capacity, trust, and resilience over time. I am so honoured to be a guide for multiple ages, genders and experiences. Guide clients and patients to psych we dip one toe in the water and then take it out again to gradually approach. This speaks to the power of co-regulation and being held without judgement.
⭐️ Without a brain that is alert and present there can be no integration and resolution.
These words point to a foundational truth in healing: without a brain that is alert and present, integration and resolution cannot occur. They highlight the importance of presence as a prerequisite for change—reminding us that the capacity to process, make meaning, and integrate experience depends on a system that is regulated enough to stay engaged rather than shut down or overwhelmed. In this way, presence itself becomes the doorway to healing.
⭐️ Drugs cannot ‘cure’ trauma; they can only dampen the expressions of a disturbed physiology. And they do not teach the lasting lessons of self-regulation.
They may soften the edges, but the deeper work remains relational and embodied.
⭐️ Silence about trauma leads to death of the soul. As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself.
Expression becomes life-giving—finding voice where there was once none.
⭐️ Mindfulness increases activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and decreases activation of structures like the amygdala that trigger our emotional responses. Increases our control over the emotional brain.
Presence increases our control over the emotional brain. It is not passive, but profoundly active in healing.
This truth lands deeply: Finding words where words were absent before… is one of the most profound healing experiences
There is a quiet, often overlooked truth at the heart of healing: if you are not aware of what your body needs, how can you truly care for it? So much of our experience unfolds beneath conscious awareness—through sensation, breath, and subtle shifts in the nervous system. Without connection to these signals, it becomes easy to override, disconnect, or move through life on autopilot.
This is why I am continually drawn to breathwork. The breath is both simple and profound—always with us, always available, and deeply responsive to our internal state. It becomes a bridge between the body and the mind, between what is felt and what is known.
Because when we notice our breath, we arrive. We ae fully here. Fully Present.
We cannot breathe in the past or the future.
The breath anchors us in the now, gently guiding us back to the present moment—the only place where awareness, regulation, and healing can truly unfold. In this space, we begin to listen more closely, respond more consciously, and reconnect with the quiet intelligence of the body.
We are evolving into a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. Increasingly, we are recognising that trauma is not an isolated psychological event, but something that can shape every layer of our lived experience—from biology to behaviour, from perception to relationship.
We have moved forward in society and are becoming trauma-conscious. Trauma changes brain development, self regulation and the capacity to stay focused and tune with others throughout life we have learned how experiences changed the structure function of the brain and even affect the genes we got from our parents and the genes we pass on to our children.
We are beginning to understand how trauma esperiences can influence and shape:
* brain development and neural wiring
* self-regulation and emotional capacity
* attachment and relationship patterns
* attention, focus and cognitive clarity
* and even, in emerging research, gene expression and physiological stress responses
With awareness, judgement softens into curiosity—and where there is curiosity, compassion can enter.
This awareness shifts everything. When we begin to understand impact, we move away from labelling behaviour as “good” or “bad,” and instead recognise it as adaptive or protective. We soften toward ourselves and others, acknowledging that every response once made sense within a context of survival. With awareness comes responsibility—not in a heavy or punitive way, but in a deeply human, relational way. A responsibility to meet people where they are, and to honour and understand what has shaped them.
⭐️ As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish project. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and who’s opinion they value.
Presence increases our control over the emotional brain. It is not passive, but profoundly active in healing.
Something profound shifts when we feel safe—the nervous system settles, the body exhales, and the internal world begins to reorganise itself around safety rather than threat.
Safety expands capacity, and connection fuels courage.
Because connection heals, safety secures, and presence heals.
This book has supported me for 11 years—and continues to ripple through my work with the people I have the privilege of walking alongside each day in the world of Intuitive Guidance and Vision Therapy.
It is not just a book or text on a shelf.
It is a living, breathing reference point that continues to deepen and unfold with time.
The body keeps the score… but it also holds the path to healing!
With love,
Hannah 🤍