The Body Remembers

What we forget in the mind, the body often carries for us.

On a chilly spring walk, I reflect on the idea that the body keeps the score—holding stress, memory, and emotional pain long after the mind has pushed it away. Drawing from trauma theory, mind-body medicine, and personal experience, I explore how symptoms in the body can point to unresolved experiences, forgotten feelings, and old adaptations that still shape us. A walk about remembering, healing, and listening more deeply to what the body is trying to say.

Walk with me.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. Welcome to Embodied Wisdom. This is a walk and talk. Dr. Brooke, thanks for being with me. Um chilly. Didn't expect it to be so chilly. Uh when I looked at the weather said it was going up to 51 right now, but it's at 70. So I had a this idea it was not going to be this chilly. Sure, that's because later it will get more humid or whatever. But anyway, lots of blooms. Beginning of spring, finally. As I mentioned before, uh never have it's been spring been so notable. I guess after this kind of winter. Um so today I I was contemplating what to speak about, and I think I want to um focus on, let's see where it takes us, the idea of the body keeping the score. Now this is a line that um I use a lot, but it is actually from a book that uh by uh Bessel Vanderkolk, Dr. Bethel Vanderkolk, that's called The Body Keeps the Score. And very, very interesting trauma work. If you know it, great if you want to get to know it. There's an old podcast that that this is a a patient who introduced to me uh Dr. Vandalkolk et al. Which you know is a really interesting, I think I've mentioned him before in the podcast, but um very interesting. She introduced me to him. I did not know of him by before. So there is um an interesting summary if you're interested at all, because sometimes it's you don't have to read a whole book or if it's just something you have interest in. If you are interested in this book, though, I will say it is if you have experienced the trauma he talks about. You know, he cut he opens up with veterans, but what people really can feel this book, you know, so that a lot of times you don't read it in one sitting or you go back to it, so can reference it. But sometimes I just if you want to just get information about something, you know, a podcast is nice when they, you know, if you look, if you listen to the uh interview with the author, you sort of get a um a you get a little synapsis. So anyway, there is a summary of that book. It's an old podcast, but it was on with Krista Tippett on being. I believe it's an MPR show, but I listen to it just um you know online. So if you're interested, you're interested in a summary version. But I'll give you a little info here, but I just love that idea in general, it's worked really well for me. Um and so you could take you could take a look at that. It's a really nice interview. Um, and really gives a nice synopsis of the book. Well, anyway, for our purposes, the idea is that although we might not remember our trauma consciously, let's say, especially if we don't remember our trauma consciously, our body remembers it for us. And I have some ideas about this, or you know, this this is like my perspective on it, but it's it's there's an understanding that when if emotional information is not able to be digested consciously, or it's too painful, or we can say, you know, it's going on in childhood and it's this ongoing circumstance, um, and it's too difficult to remain conscious. This is the idea of repression, it it gets put away, disremembered, dismembered, huh? It's like your psyche becomes dismembered and it's in there, and that's why I I love, you know, I I've done like some research, and I like you know, I like the etymology of words, and I think it's so interesting the word remember. Because it's like you re- you re-put yourself together, you re you know, you you tie together again who you are by remembering. Um and in this context, you become sort of disjointed of God, you know, in in the integrity of your psyche and integrity of who you are, you become sort of disjointed by the forgetting. But the bridge is your body, so there are you know organs in the body that are known to be deeply affected, mechanisms in the body that is known to be deeply affected, and the word that you know everyone uses is stress, which yeah, if you don't, if you're trying hard not to remember a memory, or your body's doing that, or you learn to forget and you just keep forgetting, you know, keep forgetting, then um then interrupted. I find my my thought process is rather interrupted today. I think um it's like it's my body keeping the score and saying stop putting so much information in your brain, Dr. Brooke, and take it easy. So I was sort of gonna talk about that. So there's certain systems, there you go, certain systems in our bodies that are particularly pick up on these, let's say, forgetting mechanisms pick up, or they they they it's like how you process, how you process your food is is not going to be that much different than how you process your information. Your mind body's connected. So um if your mind body is connected and you're having trouble digesting your food, this is IBS. Okay, autoimmune disease. You know, the real thing I think about the center of autoimmune disease is my experience around this is that the center of that is self-hatred. So um, I mean you really hate something about yourself. And as a result of that, and this is an origin of autoimmune illness. So by the way, when we talk about the body and the mind, I always look at things as as very multidimensional. I was gonna say deeply multidimensional. I don't know if multi-dimensional can run deep, but when I what I mean by that is I was talking to someone about this the other day, and it's never one thing. So if I was to use myself, you know, as an example, and I have come into understanding that I have certain sensitivities, that either, and the two systems that I was gonna that I was gonna um reference today was digestion and skin. Digestion and skin, um, deeply affected, known to be by uh stress, but also food, the food you put in your body, how you nourish your body, like everything's interconnected. So how we operate psychologically, and how we operate physically, and how we operate um uh emotionally, and how we operate spiritually, our body houses that it's like that idea your body is the altar. Um, but that that body is a temple. I know Eastern philosophies, you know, can can introduce these things, and it's like so it's all interconnected. So if what aggravates me is when you know your neck hurts, and maybe you really do, like, or your lower back hurts, and and they're not finding, okay, so if you have a slip disc, not to say that however you were carrying your stress in your body um somehow contributed to that injury or that happening, yes, most likely yes, you're carrying your body a certain way, but you know, if you played a sport where you were like hunched over all the time, or you know what I mean, like and you have an injury there, that's where that's like an injury. So it's like we're always trying to lump things, or I find this, I mean to generalize, but into like this causes this, this causes that, or try to isolate where it's getting caused from, or just um reduce it to the to the most likely, you know, to the to the simplest, simplest explanation, but it's complicated. So I'm always particularly interested, you know, like uh John Sarno's work, the mind-body prescription, he was someone who introduced the the idea of this of psychology being stuck, you know, our psychology or the way we process our emotions being stuck in the back in the back. And he developed some techniques where you know you write about what's bothering you, you rip it up, you throw it out, you let it go, and had found that there was a there was a very good amount of success um with um doing that um uh for people's backs. In other words, back pain where there was no physical injury and with and and highlighting or understanding the idea that the body keeps the score psychologically, so it so writing out or expressing what is happening to you gets it out of your body. So this is one of these things when you see these things work. I mean, there is a very famous study that was popular when I was doing when I was doing my fellowship. I was doing a research on psychological aspects of pain of pain at the time. Now, which is so crazy, I could put that into AI and get back a summary of something it took me six months to write in uh what year is that? 2000 and this is extraordinary for me as a researcher to see how quickly you have uh information at your fingertips. It's actually very exciting. Well, anyway, I was doing research on that and there was this rather famous article about women who were were in a group therapy support situation that had breast cancer. And there, I don't know the I don't I don't know exactly the results of the study, so I don't know if they're cancer remitted. All I know is that it was beyond a shadow of a doubt that the emotional processing that those women did positively affected their recovery from the cancer. And so this kind of went it went like um viral type of thing. Well, as much as anything could go viral then, uh, before basically before social media. So um, but the thing is they had a really hard time replicating it, and this is the thing about research, you gotta be able to replicate it. I do not know if Sarno has done any empirical research to show that that technique works, um, and especially in the psychology realms, very, very difficult, in my opinion, to break down constructs uh because it's so process-oriented, very subjective. And even though there's a ton of psychological research done, I think sometimes it's difficult to capture these mind-body type of nuances. Well, anyway, I don't know really the answer if Sarno's done that. I think I think I don't know if it's she's just a clinician seeing patient results, and I have patients who have seen results with that method, and and and and creativity, I could talk about that in another course, and how that reconnects the mind body, and that helps us to remember. Well, anyway, these women healed, and you know, of course, everyone's like, Oh my god, what what did you guys do? And the reason why it's hard to replicate is what I said. So those women tried a bond, it was never done before, there was no expectation. I don't know the nature of exactly the group, but it probably wasn't um there was a structure, I'm sure, because it was research, but otherwise they had no predetermined expectation. The people running it didn't like it wasn't like, oh, I gotta make this work, I gotta make this work. They just there was an idea someone had, they were testing it out, and then they had cut trouble replicating it. Now I don't know, you know, sometimes, and we'll talk about this in the research world. It's like sometimes you don't understand why there's funding that goes in a certain direction. Sometimes you don't understand certain results, and I have had the experience of discovering that the results that they put out, the media put out, or uh the you know, um whoever is the media outlet for uh these studies, um, you know, sometimes they're not properly represented either. So I don't know. I don't know if this was actually replicated and then not put out, and it did work, but anyway, the reality is very, very difficult to replicate circumstances or phenomenon that seem very mysterious, right? You can't see the intervention, can't see it. It's not a pill, it's a process, and what I think is so interesting about process is we're always in a process, our bodies are always in a process, our digestion is always processing, it's always happening. Our body is always processing. So the idea that we would leave our emotions out of that process because something's physical in the body. Um oh yeah, I think I I must have I've I've touched on this before with um with the idea of embodiment at all, right? That the that the um very wet hearing me. Do I want a second of this puddle? Okay. Um so it's been okay. Some days it's so easily interrupted. I do wonder if that's my mind body process, depending on what's going on with me. But anyway, I really decided to give this talk today because I am very tired and with my body is tired, kind of like a mind-body type of tired, but um I didn't know it. I didn't know it till I went to my acupuncturist and she said, Oh, are you feeling this? And the next time I went back to see her, she was like, Oh, are you feeling this way? And I wasn't that I wasn't really conscious of it. That is what concerned me, and this is what I mean about remembering. So it's what we're not aware of in our body, too, that leads to these problems because we we we we push it down. And the other thing that's also interesting is like about these two systems is what I mentioned earlier is about the food, too. So, look, you could have food that's aggravating you or inflaming you, and then you get upset, and then you judge yourself for that upset for some reason. Because I I think that like what I'm talking about with the self-hatred, what I'm talking about with processing these, how we process our emotional information, how complex our systems are, how multidimensional they are. That when we tried, when we just have one explanation for where a symptom comes from. Um, like for example, another example, I had I was I I have had something going on with my shoulder. And when this is not the first time this happened to me. Here's a body keeps the score, it's not the first time. And when I was growing up, um so anyway, I'm having this problem with my shoulder. I'm having body work done on my shoulder, kind of like you know, the same idea as the there's the acupunctures, and she's making me aware of my physical being. Well, this is another body worker making me aware of what's going on with me physically, but leaving room for this, you know, the spiritual emotional piece, because the underlying foundation of Chinese medicine includes, again, as we go back to the mind-body connection, the embodiment, and what I had mentioned in the other podcasts is that the embodiment isn't even it's not even a word in Eastern philosophical thought because they don't they they don't they don't see the mind-body as disconnected. And I think that that's interesting because the mind-body does disconnect, right? That never is disconnected, but if we we if we're shoving things away, we can end up forgetting and then severing parts of ourselves away, and our body's still processing that, but we're not processing that consciously, and that has an effect on the mind-body, like even brain fog, you know, these types of things that happen, and we're electro, um, you know, we are electric, you know, we are we're all we're we're we're getting electric, you know, we have there's sort of an electrical system the way our body works, and so you can imagine if you're putting food that inflames you in, and then you you're repressing memories and you're not processing them well, and then you're you're you're um maybe maybe you're wearing something that your body's reacted to, and that whole body is heating up, the more of that that you can get your hands on, the food that's bothering you, the the memories that aren't remembered, um, the the the clothes you wear on your body, the more you can incorporate all of that into your healing process, the more likely you are to heal. But this is the thing. First of all, that's not philosophically the way our culture usually understands illness or dis-ease. It's a dis-ease with the body. There is an idea that it all starts in the mind. But again, I am not ruling out injury, I am not ruling out body issues, you know, symptoms that are in the body that came from something other than what was psychological as well, but still it all plays in, it's all interconnected, you can't separate it. So everything's just about karma. There's no right answer. It's sort of like, how am I gonna manage these symptoms I have? And they're complicated. But if we rule out any any of the things I'm talking about, then our healing process could be incomplete. So even though we've stopped, we take these supplements, we've stopped eating inflammatory foods, our body can still hurt if those memories are stuck in there. So, anyway, back to my story with the body worker. So I'm I'm I'm having memory. While she's working on my shoulder of sitting in the in the in the band with playing the French Horde. And I hated it. And I didn't sing and I didn't draw because my parents didn't allow me to. And this is the thing about did my parents not allow me to. They didn't prefer. I don't know if if I bought them, but I that wasn't my personality style. So they said play this because it differentiates you. So when you go to college, it looks good on your resume. Um but so I I I you know was a good soldier, did this, but I hated it. And I didn't like the idea of doing something and faking it. Faking it. In other words, I wasn't doing that because I like it. And in fact, also it was not fun to be in the band. I didn't think it was fun. And so what I usually find is that there are people, and a couple friends like this in the band, they're wonderful musicians. They loved playing the music, and they had to tolerate being the band geek, whatever. But I was tolerating being the band geek, and I really didn't like it. I I do enjoy singing. I would have loved to learn to sing, um, and I would have loved to learn to draw, but that wasn't wasn't going to differentiate me enough. So, but listen, I sat there years, and where did that all that angst go? Into like kind of my heart chakra behind my back. So this all comes up, but what's most important about what I learned about it, because and then uh when I tell you that the shoulder pain starts to get better, it's it, it's not completely resolved again because there's stuff going on in my body to understand what's going on um electrochemically for me. There's stuff going on in my body that is also contributing to it, but all these things are contributing, so it made it made it better, except our body's mechanistic. So, so let's say that mechanism that I learned sitting there is that it's safer for me to make choices that will supposedly secure my future than it is for me to do what I want to do. That's I learned that idea. Now that's a mechanism. So now I'm doing potentially doing things I hate and behaving in a way I hate, and maybe even hating myself because I can't be like everybody else and just do it. Like, I don't know. I remember the feeling, it was just such a yucky feeling. Um, but sort of the price we pay for love. I I you know, and it's like, and what am I supposed to what are we supposed to do with that? Oh, my parents weren't trying to kill me, they were trying to secure my future. So this is the way they thought, or the way the culture thought. So, and that got passed on, that's in my body, that's making me angry every single day. So the reality is, is if you have pain there and you don't resolve that, either it's gonna take longer to heal, um, maybe, or maybe there'll always be some residual, you know, stuff in there, like kind of always stiff or something, because in the end, you're not really giving the root of that attention. So I'm gonna say that if you have an issue in your body and it's not resolving, and you've hit a lot of these different, you know, kind of I call them lily pads, and you've looked at all the physical stuff and you've had the scans and you've gone to the doctors, and it's about your skin, or it's about your digestion, these more chronic processing types of organs. I mean, oral organs are processing, but I think you get um sort of the dist, you're not getting resolve, and it's it's likely because you have to remember something. Remember something you forgot, and the body remembers for you, and that's what somatization really is, if you know that word. And a lot of times people don't like that word because they really do feel that it, and maybe let's say it does, um, they really do feel like it's an undermining of because it's an emotional system. I feel like it like emotions are like because they're hidden, or maybe because they're so powerful. They get like like, you know, like probably because they're unseen. I don't know, they're so easy to uh manipulate. So they don't they don't they don't get enough attention. It's like I feel like I'm like the representation for the emotions, which you know could be a blessing and a curse. So so anyway, consider that. Consider that there are emotions that you have yet to un you know untie within you, knots that you've yet to untie within you, um, injuries that you get to, emotional and or physical that you yet to recognize and heal from. And then, of course, there's always emotional issues that come with um like like what happens to you when you're a kid. Like, I broke my foot. This is another memory that came up in body work that I'd had. And the memory around that was my father needing to leave work, my mother wasn't available, but she was usually available. My father was very disgruntled with me because he had to leave work. He's like, it's not, you know, it's not um broken, it doesn't look swollen. Meanwhile, it's you know, everyone's like it looks pretty swollen and it's broken. So I think in the end, the end of the day, we must, we must, or it behooves us to remember. It behooves us to remember so we can give our mind and body the respect it deserves when we're in pain. Um, and to give our emotions the respect they deserve so we can remember and can contribute to our overall well being. So I hope this is helpful for you today, and I very much appreciate you joining me as usual. So take good care. See you next week. Walk with me again soon.