Most Replayed Moment: Can Eye Movements Heal Trauma? Bessel Van Der Kolk Explains EMDR Therapy!

How many people do you think I mean, this is maybe a ridiculous question, but how many people what percentage of people do you think have trauma in some form? How you define it? You know, the figures are a quarter of people get physically abused. One of five people get sexually abused. One of eight kids witnesses violence being their parents, etcetera etcetera. So, you know, if I sit in a room you know, it it's it's not a binary issue. It's not either you were traumatized. You didn't get traumatized. But when I talk to a room of professionals, which I do a lot, I assume that at least half the group viscerally knows what trauma means. And what is trauma doing to my brain? You said you've done a lot of neuroimaging Yeah. Scans. If you if I if I was traumatized and you scanned my brain, is there something you could see? Not necessarily. I can see how, your brain may be different from other people's brains. I may take a particular population. You can average it out, and you can say, oh, there's a little more activation of the peria chloride to gray, a little bit less of the, white insulin. So you see see certain patterns of, connectivity in the brain. But to some degree, you know, I think we we learn a lot about the brain, but we don't know much about the brain. And I think people tend to overstate how much the brain pictures can teach us. You know, it's a I love the Hubble's telescope or the Webb telescope. You know, it's our brain is like a universe, and our technology is very inadequate to really know about all the unbelievably connect complex connection the brain is. But we have learned a few things in the last twenty years. So how how does trauma affect the brain? It affects the brain that you tend to there's there's one part of your brain that I call the cockroach center of your brain, the perioculars gray that lights up. It's underneath the amygdala. Everybody knows the bird amygdala these days. Okay. So So the part of your brain that tells you that you're in danger. When you're traumatized, you're likely that that little part of your brain, way back in the your brain stem, is firing all the time. All the time you go like, I'm in danger. I'm in danger. I'm in danger. And so that's where it starts in a very elementary sensory level. You don't know what the danger is, but you just feel that, you should be scared. And then there's certain parts other parts of your brain, for example, your insula, which makes the connection with your physical sensations and your body awareness that for many people get shut down because trauma, basically, experience of trauma is a visceral experience of heartbreak and gut wrench. And if you have a lot of that, you can learn to …