How do you trace the beginnings of your research into traumatic stress? I’ve read a few different accounts of how you stumbled into this field. Tippett: This field you’re in, of trauma, traumatic stress, nowadays this language is everywhere, right? This language of trauma and traumatic stress has made its way into culture, movie, TV scripts, the news, public policy discussions. Van der Kolk: Yeah, a multiplicity: my parents were fundamentalist Christians, in some good and some not-so-good ways, and as an adolescent, I spent a fair amount of time in a monastery in France called Taizé. I’m just wondering, was there a religious or spiritual background to your childhood? I always start my conversations with this question, whoever I’m speaking with.

His own father spent time as a religious prisoner in a German concentration camp during World War II. In the second half, I pick up with Bessel van der Kolk to mine that wisdom for 2021. We take off, this hour, from some of my original conversation with him, laying out intricacies of his insights into the human brain and body and strategies for transmuting trauma that logic and language cannot reach. That was in the wake of the Vietnam War, and from there, it was identified and studied in other parts of the population. I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.īessel van der Kolk has been a leading researcher of traumatic stress since it first became a diagnosis.

His knowledge is so very practically helpful - a distinctively illuminating perspective towards meeting what is happening in our world and inside each of us.

So I have needed to catch up with him in a time unlike any other in my life, in which we are living through one vast, overwhelming experience after the other, and The Body Keeps the Score has become one of the most widely read books in the pandemic world. And I described him as “an innovator in treating the effects of overwhelming experiences on people and society” - what we call trauma, when we encounter it in life and in the news.

Krista Tippett, host: When I interviewed the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk for the first time, his book The Body Keeps the Score was about to be published.

The body knows the score