If you are having trouble viewing the panoramic 3D image http://www.silverlight.net/ download silverlight to enjoy. :)

Somatic Psychology

Van der Kolk discusses trauma and more specifically Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. Van der Kolk defines PTSD as an inability to process data that is emotionally overwhelming. War is a situation in which data can be emotionally overwhelming for a soldier. During the Vietnam War soldiers saw things that their emotional intelligence was unable to handle. They used drugs and alcohol to calm their nerves, but when they came back from Vietnam, they faced a society in which the trauma of war caused PTSD in many of the soldiers. The question was how to treat these people that have seen things and lived in another world of fighting and chaos.

Van Der Kolk’s solution to this problem is that they are equipped with all the necessary resources. They have had positive life experiences to reflect upon before going off to Vietnam. They have memories of love and nurture, but they also have new thoughts of guns and bombs. Now that they are home safe, they have the opportunity to look at things in a new light. This new outlook or perspective is the way to try solving some of the issues that are associated with PTSD. It is now time for these soldiers to begin processing new data and allow the emotionally overwhelming war data to dissipate.

I had the wonderful opportunity to listen to the speaker on Friday evening at JFK dive a little deeper into the flight-fight-freeze mentality that Van Der Kolk mentions. She helped me to understand the “flight” mentality by telling a story of how she and her husband were walking in the woods and she heard her husband scream, “run!” She said she levitated over the hills and luckily escaped the snakebite that would have potentially killed her. In other situations, it is better to freeze and she used the example of a car accident in which she helped a woman stay calm and breathe. When faced with trauma, we have fight, flight, or freeze as our options and we do not have time to weigh out the options-it just happens.