The complicated work of treating trauma

DR. BESSEL VAN DER KOLK HAS SPENT 30 YEARS FIGURING out why people behave so strangely.

- BELINDA LUSCOMBE

His specialty is treating those who have endured traumas so horrific-war, carnage, incredible pain that they couldn't stop-that their brains have not been able to fully process them, and their bodies have reacted to their brain's precarious state in ways they could not explain or control. But many human behaviors still puzzle van der Kolk, 82. He doesn't understand why the medical community doesn't take childhood trauma more seriously.

He doesn't understand why leaders still send citizens to war without factoring in how it will deplete their capacity to live normally for decades. And he's not quite sure why a woman recently came up to him on the street and kissed his feet.

"I said, 'What are you doing?"" says van der Kolk via video call from his home in the Berkshires. Van der Kolk's is a specific type of fame. Most people haven't heard of him, but for those who began to understand why they― or someone they loved-behaved the way they did via his 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, he's a miracle worker.

Hence the feet-kissing.

In the book, the psychiatrist, who was born during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, makes the case that trauma is more present and more powerful than people realize. He argues that while trauma injures the brain, its effects go much deeper. "Trauma victims cannot recover," he writes, "until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies." The Body Keeps the Score is not a self-help book; it is a summary of the scientific advances in understanding and treating trauma in the past century and why van der Kolk believes medicine is still not grappling with it effectively. But for many readers, it was an epiphany. As the book has lingered atop best-seller lists for the past five years, trauma has been elevated from a subject discussed mostly in the medical and military communities to a feature of the national conversation.