The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.

What if understanding trauma could transform your life and the lives of those around you? On the Mom on Purpose podcast, we embark on the first part a thought-provoking book "The Body Keeps the Score" by Bessel Van Der Kolk.

In this episode, we unravel the intricate ways trauma affects our ability to live purposefully. With Bessel's comforting approach, we discuss how trauma induces physiological changes, altering behavior and daily engagement.

Join us as we navigate the complexities of trauma in the brain, examining the pitfalls of relying solely on medication without addressing root causes. Drawing on historical research and case studies from the book, we highlight how trauma can create a disconnect, leaving individuals numb to pain. We delve into the neuroscience behind these experiences and discuss the impact of trauma on children's development.

This episode offers a deep dive into the connections between intense emotions and physical sensations, providing insights for healing those touched by trauma.

What you'll learn in this episode:  

• The impact of trauma on both the mind and body, as explored through Bessel Van Der Kolk's book "The Body Keeps the Score"
• Strategies for healing trauma that go beyond medication
• The role of the brain's structure in processing traumatic experiences
• How trauma can lead to emotional numbness, dissociation, and depersonalization
• The influence of trauma on children's development and future outcomes

Featured on the Show: 

• The Body Keeps The Score: BRAIN, MIND, AND BODY IN THE HEALING OF TRAUMA by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.
• FREE GUIDE: Step-by-Step Formula to Discover Your Purpose and Feel Alive Again

Click HERE to watch this video to learn The 3 Things to Avoid When Reading Self-Help Books

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Transcript

Welcome to the Mom on Purpose Podcast. I'm Lara Johnson, and I'm here to teach you how to get out of your funk, be in a better mood, claim more with your kids. Manage your home better, get your to-do list done and live your life on purpose with my proven method. This is possible for you, and I'll show you how. You're not alone anymore.

We're in this together.

All right! Welcome to the Mom On Purpose Book Club. 

Before we even begin, because a lot of people listen to this on the podcast, I do want to offer a trigger warning, because that's very important to me. We are going to be talking about trauma. Today we're reviewing the book the Body Keeps Score. It's an incredible book but because it is talking about trauma, there are stories that are shared in there that can be very traumatic. And this book is more dated. He is an older author, meaning he's 81 years old and worked in the field when animal testing was more available, and I wouldn't say encouraged, but it was normal practice, so I just want to put that out there. You know, as we are talking about some of these, and I wouldn't say encourage, but it was normal practice, so I just want to put that out there as we are talking about some of these things, so people aren't so offended and or triggered in their own trauma that possibly they could have. So that's a fun introduction to the Body Keeps Score, which is really an amazing book, and I am so glad because this has been on my list to read for the longest time. I had started it multiple times and I never got to the point where I could really sit down, read it cover to cover, and as I was going through it the biggest realization was this is going to be a two-part series because there is so much information in the book and it's so valuable. 

So, as we talk about this, I want to just introduce first the author. His name is Bessel van der Kolk, I think is how you say it. He is Dutch and, like I mentioned, he's 81 years old and has been around for a very long time. I found his style of writing to be very comforting, especially when you're talking about something like trauma. It had a very similar tone to me as the Big Leap, which Gay Hendricks is probably close to the same age, and it just felt like an adopted, like very kind grandpa offering so much wisdom to me. So, I enjoyed reading his stories from that perspective, because it felt so comforting, even though we were talking about very big topics, very heavy topics. Now Bessel is and I'm just going to say Bessel, I don't mean to discredit you know by his last name, Dr. Bessel. How about that? 

He is what Brene Brown is to vulnerability, but in the trauma space. So, he is a trauma researcher and from the get-go he was very intrigued by the way that people were behaving. He was working with Vietnam vets, and he was surprised at how these behaviors kept showing up. And that's kind of where his career started was really with this curiosity and this intrigue. And you know, I have an amazing client. She is a therapist, has been for a very long time. She has expressed something similar how much she felt drawn to trauma. And I am so thankful for people like that that really have that calling to work with very challenging topics and to bring so much peace and healing. And as I'm reading this, I also just fell in love and have such a new appreciation for researchers. I am so grateful that there are people out there doing the research, so we have this knowledge today. 

And then the other thing you know, as we're diving into, the book on the podcast is called a mom on purpose podcast. So, what does trauma really have to do with the coaching space and being able to find an answer, our purpose, as I thought you know, like, how does this fit? There's two parts that kind of come to mind. There's one if you have experienced trauma, then your body is on a very like chemical, neurological, physiological sense, changed by that trauma and that can change your ability to answer, your purpose. That is important to be able to look at it and since I am not a trauma person, I am not a licensed therapist that's where it's important to find someone that is that can help work through that trauma. As well as what he brings into this book you know, what we talk about in this book is a lot of resources for us, for people that have trauma. 

But then the second part is statistically, you know someone that has trauma, that has experienced this and is physiologically changed and all that we're able to see is possibly their behaviors and not understand it. What it provides for us is a very deep understanding of the inner workings of other people's body, which can allow you know, I believe as a Christian can allow us to see them through God's eyes on a much deeper level. So that's kind of the introduction to this book, so that we can dive in and have a lot of fun about trauma, right? All right, so, like I mentioned, we're going to break this into two parts because there is a lot of information. So, he has the book broken down into five different sections. We're going to cover part one, two and three and then we'll save four and five for part two. 

I'm just going to start out with the very beginning of what he says in the book because I think it's important to think about as we are entering it physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain's alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives, at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. So that goes back to the very thing that I mentioned that there is a physiological change, a recalibration of our brain's system. That's crazy to think about. So being able to explain and understand individuals, including the people in our lives that can bring so much peace, individuals, including the people in our lives that can bring so much peace. 

So, then he goes on to talk about his Vietnam vets and how they were experiencing this trauma. So as they were coming back and you know, this is back in the 70s when they're trying to figure out how to help people At this time PTSD wasn't a diagnosis, so all that they were seeing were the behaviors and like the not knowing and understanding of why they were acting a certain way. So, a lot of these men it was primarily men that he was talking with experienced things like numbing with a lot of alcohol. Even though they were married and had a good life, they were numbing themselves from that life. The other thing that happened is they had a complete loss of self. It was like they were disconnected from their everyday life. The other thing that he saw was this strange reorganization of perception where they sometimes weren't actually present, like something triggered them and they would go back to one of those war-torn memories. 

So, an example that he said is you know, somebody had just had their very first baby. He was home, his wife was a nurse, and he was actually like a seminary to become a pastor of sorts, a parish for this church. So, I mean very good man. And he said that as he kept hearing his brand-new baby crying while his wife was away at work, all he could see were images of burned and bloody children's faces. That he experienced when he was, you know, in Vietnam I think he was Vietnam, so that's a really hard thing where, like he knew he was present with his baby, but he wasn't present with his baby and became very fearful of staying in that situation and had to call his wife home. 

The other thing where he talks about is a lot of people become very stuck in their trauma, where they're like reliving it in their day-to-day life, but also in their dreams, and even to the point where so many people loved to talk about these situations, even though they were really hard. It was like they couldn't talk about anything else. So that's kind of like the where all of his intrigue came from, as he started seeing these patterns over and over. So, then he goes on to say we have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past. It is also the imprint left by the experience on mind, brain and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present, for real change to take place, the body needs to learn that danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present. That's a really like, when you think about that's a sad thing that somebody can experience something so horrific in their past and then relive it for the rest of their lives. And that imprint that's where he talks about, like the body keeps score, it imprints on it. So, then he goes on to talk about understanding the brain and how the brain works in order to see how this imprint can actually happen. He talked about. 

You know, before PTSD was an actual thing that they're able to diagnose, they first came up with the DSM-5. The DSM-5 didn't come around until the 1980s. Now, if you're unfamiliar with the DSM-5, this is the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or commonly referred to as the Bible of Psychiatry. This is like the housing place for all diagnoses that we have, and he talks about this later in the book. There still is issues getting trauma put into the DSM-5, so people still are not getting help for the traumatic experiences of their lives, and he talks a little bit more about that later. So just think about how new all of this is and how new all of this research is to us it may feel like. Of course, trauma is impacting people in their everyday lives, but that's a very new concept and I guess I didn't register how new of a concept that was. 

And I will say, prior to all of this, you know the 1970s, people that experienced trauma and had lasting effects were often put in insane asylums. And he talks about his time that he spent where. He said it feels more like a nightmare than it was something I actually saw and that was actually my reality and the way that some of these patients were treated. Now some of them were a little nicer, but obviously some of them were not, especially when you're dealing with very traumatized people and their behaviors can also include a lot of aggression. So clearly, they weren't being treated very nicely. 

So, he talks about how some of these patients used to have these wildly disturbed hallucinations. I'm not going to go into, but he talks about some of what those hallucinations are, and they would often refer to them as crazy, schizophrenic bipolar disorder. And his question was when he was working the floors at night, sometimes these patients would come out and start sharing these unbelievably traumatic experiences that had happened in their life and he said what, if, what the stories I had heard in the wee hours of the night were true. Could all of these quote unquote hallucinations be actually fragmented memories of real experiences be actually fragmented memories of real experiences? And nobody up until that point had ever considered that the behaviors they were seeing could be things that had happened to these individuals. And I'm grateful for again his curiosity and his openness to that, because what a gift now that you know people are treated with so much more compassion and understanding. 

So, then he goes on to say that people have to kind of make sense of this suffering that they experience, and oftentimes people will try and get better, but in the process, they have to disconnect from their memories or their body in order to improve their reality. So, then he says the medicine way. Because you know, as he's, I guess, in my mind I didn't really think about how new pharmacology is as well, where introducing medicine to help with some of these disorders. And although he worked in pharmacology for a long time, he brings in a very interesting point. He said the way medicine approaches human suffering has always been determined by the technology available at any given time. He says, before the enlightenment, behavior was ascribed to God, sin magic, which is an evil. But then they started to bring a new paradigm with science where all of these human problems we can recast as disordered and can be fixed with the administration of appropriate chemicals. And then all disorders are then looked at as a chemical imbalance. And then all disorders are then looked at as a chemical imbalance. So, this is like he said with everybody in the 1970s, this was an amazing thing. They were so optimistic that they could finally conquer human misery with the introduction of disorders and with scientific. 

What was the word? He used Appropriate chemicals. What was the word he used Appropriate chemicals? And then he goes on to share a little bit about how that is such a blessing. But to use that, he said it's almost swung too far. And now that's used as like the solution, when that is just an adjunct help to solving the overall problem. An adjunct helps to solving the overall problem. And he said, although people are getting a lot of relief, if they use that medicine to then numb and not solve the underlying problems, they can't change for the better, they can't alter the physiological changes that are happening to their body. They're just putting a Band-Aid on that problem. So that's kind of where he brings in where we kind of start into more of understanding why it's still important to know our brain and our body, because we can only address so much with medication if we haven't looked at the underlying issues that exist. 

His first understanding of like, oh my gosh, I think there's a change in the body came from a trial, a research trial of somebody else. I love that he gives credit to everybody and their research, but I can't remember all of the names. He always says my club, my colleague or I had this friend that happened to do all this amazing research. So, Stephen Meyer, at the University of Colorado. He collaborated with Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania and what they did is they brought again. This is a long time ago, this is 1984, they brought together dogs and with these dogs they trapped them in cages and provided electrical shocks to these dogs. And he said I love that he said this. Being a dog lover, I realized that I could never have done such research, but I was curious about how this cruelty would affect the animals. 

So, this is where he introduces the concept of inescapable shock. So, these dogs after they were shocked a couple times, they then opened the cage and shocked them again and even though they knew that the inside the cage was painful, their entire body took over and they were unable to escape all of that hurt that was happening to them. All of that hurt that was happening to them. On the flip side, dogs that were not shocked and hadn't experienced it. The second the door went open; all the dogs ran out. So, this introduced the idea that PTSD patients sometimes cannot escape the hard things that are happening to them because of the changes, the physiological changes in their body. Where their body is just going, it's like shutting it down from the trauma. So that's what really led him to looking at what are these changes that are happening that would cause somebody to shut down, because to somebody in a rational brain you know, any of us that are not in a traumatic situation we can't understand why someone doesn't leave. And this is the first explanation that really was introduced, and this was in 1984. Really was introduced, and this was in 1984. 

So he goes on to say that a lot of people that have experienced traumatic situations have such a change of like. Their chemical adjustments in their body have been altered so that even though there might be painful things happening, even though there might be painful things happening. That intense amount of pain reminds them that they feel alive. Remember when I was talking about the Vietnam vets and how they had. That disconnection from self, thing has been transformed, this fear and this trauma. Suddenly they become addicted to the pain of pleasure or the pleasure of pain. At this point he said you know; they did some research with some veterans, and he said that seven of the eight veterans could keep their hands in painfully cold water 30% longer while they were watching traumatic and very graphically violent work. Lips, like the trauma, had completely numbed their body so they no longer even noticed that their hand was in cold water. This suggested that for many traumatized people, re-exposure to stress might provide a similar relief from anxiety, which then means a lot of people again can't escape because of that anxiety that exists out there. That is worse than knowing that the trauma that's happening to them is more of a known trauma. To him is more of a known trauma. 

So, this is the first part where he starts introducing the brain. So here is where he introduces the neuroscience and what's actually happening. And again, this is for every person. It just looks different for someone that's experienced trauma. He said the brain is built from the bottom up. So, the brain stem, you know the very bottom of the brain, that is where we call it the reptilian brain. In the reptilian brain there is also something called the hypothalamus, and I do apologize, I am babysitting my parents' dog, so if you hear growling or a little bark, she's back there. So, these two things are what make up, what control the energy of our bodies. This is where we have all of our body functions, our lungs, our need to go to the bathroom, like all of these, like our basic human survival instincts come from here, like hunger. Okay, this reptilian brain will always control our energy to make sure that we have those basic needs met. He said the best way to think about the reptilian brain is this is what babies are able to do when they come into the world. So, from here then we build up just a little bit more to the limbic system. So, the limbic brain is kind of like in the middle, but it's also lower, towards the bottom of the brain. 

Now the limbic system is what they call the how would you say that? Mammalian? I can't pronounce things, you guys, but this is where emotions are stored. This is also where experience happens after experience, and our emotions are going. This is what kind of creates those neural pathways that exist in our brain. 

Now, within the limbic system, there are two important parts. There's the amygdala and the thalamus. Now the thalamus is what he calls as the cook. It takes all those experiences and mixes them together into this perfect recipe and then presents it to the amygdala. Now the amygdala is what he calls the smoke detector. So, this smoke detector then decides if this is something dangerous or not. So, this amygdala is always on the lookout for danger, and once that starts to happen, it can activate the whole rest of your body. So, from here this amygdala, the thalamus and the amygdala they're letting our body know if we need to be on the lookout for fight or flight. Our body know if we need to be on the lookout for fight or flight, we'll come back to those, okay? 

So, then we come over to the top part of the brain and this is what it calls the neocortex. This is our rational brain. This is where we're able to translate language, we're able to have abstract thought. Okay, all happens in the neocortex. Now, when the neocortex starts to kick in, that's where we're really able to start logically thinking I know I'm not in danger right now, I'm okay, I can lower my body stresses All of that starts to happen. 

But the problem is, if the amygdala has been changed and says that we're in danger, we don't ever access the neocortex. We can't get to that rational thought. He also talks about how this is called like the low road. You can get to the amygdala in less than a split second, but it takes longer to get to the neocortex because everything goes through the amygdala. So, this is why it becomes really hard to access that rational thought, and it becomes nearly impossible. If you have been physiologically changed by trauma. Okay, and you see how it's all coming back together. 

And then the other thing that I was going to talk about, where he introduces, we've got our right and then left. So right brain, this is where intuition lives. This is also where it's our emotional side of the brain, whereas our left brain is more sequential and analytical and linguistic. What's interesting is when something traumatic happens, this goes online, and this goes offline. This goes online and this goes offline. So, when you're working with someone that has experienced trauma, he says, is they often cannot think sequentially about what happens to them. They only are stuck in the emotional side of the experience, that's the heightened emotion state. He said it's also very important to know that when this goes offline, they also lose the ability to speak Again. It goes back to kind of that inescapable shock Someone cannot advocate for themselves. So, we often talk about that fight or flight response that the amygdala is triggering right off the bat. It's activating that stress, but also as part of that we are losing our ability to talk. And in this area, kind of over by the amygdala, is also something called the Broca, the spot on the brain. Now the Broca is what that speech is coming from. 

And when that goes offline, he said it's very similar to somebody that's experienced a stroke. And what I was surprised about you know personally, as I was thinking about this is when someone experiences a stroke, for example, we have a whole team of people that are there helping them through this stroke. But when someone has experienced especially a woman who's experienced sexual assault of some sort, we then ask them to report it and start talking about it immediately, when most likely their physiological change will stop them from doing so. So, then they're not able to get the help that they need. So, even just looking at this information and being able to understand the brain in our body, it's important to think about this in terms of, as we're raising our children, if something were to happen to them or they're experiencing an intense amount of stress and we're asking them what's wrong, chances are they can't tell us what's wrong. If their amygdala has sensed some kind of danger and they can no longer communicate to us, they may only be stuck in screaming. So again, this is why you know these things are so important, I think, to understand and I wanted to spend a lot of time here. 

So, the past trauma will activate this right. The left is deactivated, and then completely thwarts your capacity to experience and organize any kind of sequential events that are happening. And then, without being able to, he says, pretty much people are experiencing a loss of executive functioning. So then what happens is something might remind a traumatized person of their past and immediately their brain will revert back to the moment it was happening, which is kind of crazy to think about. That. No matter how many years later, you are reverted back to that moment where you were in that intense traumatic experience traumatic experience. So, this is how people get stuck in that trauma because their brain starts to perceive everything, their amygdala starts to perceive things as a threat. So, we're going to pause there and skip just a little bit to what else starts to happen. 

So, he then presents a story about two people like their brains on trauma. He said that, um, oh, hold on, actually, I'm going to read this really quick. This is somebody that he says that you know, it was um a comedy that he saw, and one of the quotes from the comedy said you know, he was supposed to be in this anger management class. This is the comedy. He was in this anger management class, and he had learned all these techniques, and they were. Somebody was asking him about how these techniques worked. He says they are great and work terrific as long as you're not really angry. So that's pretty much how it works with our brain and our body. Now, understanding this is that's why it is so challenging especially as moms, you know when these things are activated and then we're telling ourselves we shouldn't be yelling at our kids. Sometimes we can't access that neocortex, that prefrontal cortex that lives here, because we are still stuck over here in the amygdala telling us that there's some kind of danger. So, he goes on to talk about this experience. 

In 1999, this man and woman, stan and Ute. They were in their 40s, they were living their best life, they were attending a business meeting and somehow there was this huge pileup. This 18-wheeler went flying over the trunk of their car. All these cars like slammed into each other and it said that it was the worst road disaster in Canadian history, with 87 cars like in this pile up. But what happened is in this moment, stan and Ute were trapped in their vehicle, but there was somebody that was trapped under a car ahead of them and was then consumed by flames while they were listening to this situation. Now, when they finally were able to get to a spot, stan was able to smash the windshield and pull them free and he went to go get Ute, his wife, and she was frozen in her seat. They finally had to lift her out of the vehicle and, you know, get her to the ambulance. She was unharmed. So, these flashbacks kept happening for them and they kept replaying over and over. 

But he was interested in how he was able to get out despite experiencing this really traumatic thing and why she stayed completely frozen and had to be lifted out of the car completely frozen in time. He said this is what they call the dissociation, which is really where somebody's mind takes them to a different location because of the trauma. So, they were really interested in how does this start to happen and how do people lose their sense of time and be trapped without any sense of past, present or future. So he says, when the amygdala goes into overdrive and you become like chronically scared at all times, he says at this point the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex that also is near all of this, and he said that's located in the side of the front brain and that's what tells us our present experience as it relates to the past, like that's what he calls the timekeeper to the past, like that's what he calls the timekeeper. So when the timekeeper is activated, you know when this is happening, we can be able, we can sequentially put things together, but what happens is when the amygdala goes into overdrive remember you can't access any of that so suddenly all of this, like the whole system, starts to shut down because you've gone into this overdrive. He says, as the thalamus function of the cooked and a relay station that collects sensations from ears, eyes, skin, that all comes together as part of that memory. So, when this starts to break down, trauma is no longer stored as a story where there's like a beginning, middle and an end. It's only put as sensory imprints images, sounds, physical sensations, and that's where, like then, your body starts to shut everything down because there's no longer that filter and you're always in this sensory overload. 

So, in the past I did experience sexual assault as a child from an uncle. That's a very long story for another day. I can understand this feeling where I cannot place things in a sequential order, but I can tell you what I was wearing, you know. So, it's very interesting how, like, I still have this image of the bright pink flowers on my shorts, but I can't tell you where that fit in in the whole story. I can't tell you what happened before that. I can't tell you what happened immediately after that. I have no recollection. Like, my next memory is when I was traveling away from my family with relatives, and my next memory is with my grandma, but I have no idea of any time period in between. So that's where, like, I can feel when that cook, like, goes offline and I no longer have that ability to think sequentially, so she goes on to well, he, excuse me, goes on to say that Ute's brain automatically went into that same survival mode Everything turned off. 

She made herself disappear. This is what they call depersonalization. And then it turns out this is the exact thing, the depersonalization that she used to survive trauma from her childhood, which is why it happened at this point. So later on, he talks about Stan and Ute because he brings them in as part of his research and the amazing opportunity, he had to work with them through such a traumatic event. But I was like having a little bit of a happy ending for them. I do think that for you and Stan had some relief. So now he kind of moves into okay, this is the brain, and then moves into like the body and how it's all connected. He says that so this is actually, you know, from Darwin. So Darwin wrote about the body brain connection, even though he was well known for like his theory on evolution, even though he was well known for like his theory on evolution. So that's something interesting to note is that he was very much at the forefront of the body brain connections where he talked about. 

Intense emotions not only involve the mind but also the gut and the heart, because they intimately communicate with the brain, the heart, the guts through this specific nerve, this nerve that's critical in the expression and management of our emotions. So, when we experience our most devastating emotions and we explain them as gut-wrenching or as heartbreak, that's because that's actually happening in our body. Our brains are able to register those emotions inside of us, which is absolutely incredible when you think about it that way. So, then you get to know where this exposure to extreme stress you have to find this new internal equilibrium and all of this housekeeping that starts to happen is very challenging. Okay, so this is where he starts explaining more about the nervous system, which is more moving down into the body, even though it's starting up here. He says there's two nervous systems autonomic, and then there's the sympathetic. I am going to explain the nervous systems a little bit more in our next one here is being able to understand how all of this works in adults, but also how it works with children. 

So, he spends a lot of time in his next chapters being able to look into how we can predict the outcome of children based on the age and the kind of trauma that they experienced in their lives. So, one of the things that he talks about is when he was working with some of these kids, and they were showing them you know they had all been in this facility. They were he calls them. They were wild creatures who could not sit still and who hit and bit other children and sometimes even the staff and all these behavioral issues, but nobody had taken the time to look at experiences that they grew up in. So, when he came in and started working with these children, he said it's little wonder that most of them had been diagnosed with ADHD. They all had some kind of change, physiological change based on the horrific examples of their lives. So, as he started doing research with them, he was showing them these very simple images and kids without trauma could provide like an imaginative story around this image, whereas the children with trauma were creating these horrific examples because their brains could only see the world as dangerous. He goes on to say we could only conclude that for abused children, the whole world is filled with triggers and that nobody had taken into account working with these kids, these angry, rebellious kids, any of those impacts of trauma and how that changed their behavior. 

He talks about the difference between attunement and attachment and ensuring that a secure attachment and adults that are attuned to a children's need plays out for their well-being overall. He says a secure attachment, combined with the cultivation of competency, builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life. Securely attached children learn what makes them feel good, they discover what makes them and others feel bad, and they acquire a sense of agency. He says securely attached kids learn the difference between situations they can control and situations where they need help. Trauma and this physiological change teach that there is no one they can attach to, where they can learn some of those things to make them successful, capable adults, which is very heartbreaking. It's hard as you read this because you're talking about children, but it's also hard because you start to think about yourself as a mother and hope that you are providing for your children. And he must have known that there was that fear that was going to come up in the readers as they talk about the children. 

He talks about how it doesn't take much to be a good enough mother, or he calls it a caregiver. I took it as mother because you know I'm a mother and I appreciated that, because it's very easy for us to become very fearful in times where we've experienced depression, anxiety. You know hard things and then you know we're worried about the way we're showing up for our children. And he said it's very easy for caregivers to create a very safe environment where we are able to show up for our children. Hoping I could find the exact quote because I wanted to leave on a little bit more of a positive note. But I think that's the biggest thing is just being able to see that when these things actually happen and when they come up, it's important for us to take a moment to check in with our brain, you know, to check in with our kid's brain, to be able to provide a safe place where they are seen and heard. That's the other thing that he talks about. Being a good enough mom is providing a space, not always because we are human, but for a large portion of the time, or even more than half of the time, we can show up for our kids and help them feel seen and heard, and that's the biggest indicator that they will be healthy adults later on. So that's where we are going to stop. 

I hope you enjoyed a lot of science and a lot of understanding about the brain and how that impacts with trauma. Next time, part two, which we're going to pick up next week, we will dive more into. What do we do about it now? Now that we understand it, it's not enough to just think happy thoughts when we're trying to work to change the physiology of our body. We want the tools that we can use to change that permanently for the health and well-being of all of us. Thank you for listening. Please share, review and subscribe to this podcast so that together we can live life on purpose.

Thank you for listening. Please share, review, and subscribe to this podcast so that together we can live life on purpose.