BookStack Saturday : this is your body on trauma

One of the most beloved gifts in our home is the BookStack, a stack of books chosen with love for the recipient. Sometimes there is a theme, like the time little Emma spent hours at Malaprop’s finding books for me whose titles were simply years (1492 or 1967, for example). So, the BookStack is a big concept in our house, and since I am reading a lot in my recuperation, I’ve decided to reintroduce BookStack Saturday posts here periodically – and more regularly in my upcoming subscription bi-weekly letter, “From My Yellow Chair.” More info on that soon.

On to this week’s BookStack. I have been making a deep dive into trauma, mine and the world’s. And primarily, I am interested in the impact of trauma on the body, hence this week’s BookStack.

The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D.

I am just starting this book. I got it from the library and already know I need my own copy to mark up as I read. He is illuminating what our brains are like on trauma, the imprint of trauma, and paths to recovery in a densely thorough, and meaningful way.

From the “paths to recovery” section alone, you’ll learn about the miracle and tyranny of language (see also Teach Us To Sit Still, below), how to let go of the past, learning to inhabit your body, and rewiring your brain, among other modalities.

If you are interested in the impact of trauma on the body, this already looks invaluable to me as I dive into it.

I used to have a site called Haiku Book Reviews, so perhaps I will bring that back as well:

Trauma embedded,

heaviness of memories

letting go of then.

Teach Us To Sit Still: A Skeptic’s Search for Health and Healing by Tim Parks

Tim Parks will get a letter from me when I finish this book. So much of it is alien to me – his malady, for example – but so much resonates as he finds relief in “paradoxical relaxation.” This memoir of agony from tension and the desire to let it go is beautifully written, such that I will re-read it to pay attention particularly to the language. But for this first reading, I am appreciating the language for how it moves this story forward, a story that I might not otherwise read were I not trying to learn to sit still myself, a story full of bladder pain and having to get up to pee five and six times a night, but being unable to. He paints an agonizing picture of the pain, and an exquisite picture of the relief.

As someone who teaches translation in Italy, he brings in my world of literature to great effect and delight for this English major (it didn’t hurt that we both love Moby Dick), each element moving his story forward, forward, each step up and down those stairs at night to the bathroom moving forward. He is exploring the connection between his mind and body in beautifully small and honest, and sometimes brutally honest, ways, and we are witnesses. One chapter, “Dreams of Rivers and Seas,” was the rivet around which it all swirled for me, with its exploration of how language and words both serve and imprison us.

“Language builds domes, then other domes over them, as the first dissolve. Because words are never still.” And, he says, words keep us out of the present moment – we are forever thinking of the next word, for example, our hands typing faster than the now, throwing us into the future as we quickly decide how to finish this sentence we are typing. And his job, in order to heal, is to drop himself, body and mind, into the now.

Fascinating read, and I’ll read his other books as a result of reading this one.

Everything is taut,

tense, pushing against instead

of being in now.

Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Rick Hanson, PhD.

This book is satisfying my need to know more about how my brain works, having seen many MRIs and other scans of it over the past two months following what has been called a traumatic brain injury in November. All those white patches – what are they? How can I keep my brain’s plasticity in good shape? More than that, how can I retrain my brain to look for the good?

“The brain evolved a negativity bias that makes it like Velcro for bad experiences but Teflon for good ones.” Hanson’s work centers on having us be more mindful of those experiences that meet our three essential needs, “safety, satisfaction, and connection” in order to imprint those experiences onto our brains and build new, positive, happy neural networks. He wants us to grow happiness. “Mindfulness itself only witnesses, but alongside that witnessing could be active, goal-directed efforts to nudge your mind one way or another.”

By sustaining our focus on positive experiences, we can overcome the negativity bias we have inherited, and this book offers a strategy for doing just that. Well worth a read.

Want to be happy?

Harvest the good with your brain

and create new paths.