The Body Keeps the Score

[eightpartqueen]

This book is what got me started on the path toward healing and living instead of existing and surviving. It's also what made me make the choice to go to a therapist. It is incredibly story, data, and experience-driven from the therapist's side. He's someone who's worked with children, women, and men of all ages.

This book explicitly deals with PTSD, while C-PTSD is not differentiated, so it made me doubt for a while that I could have PTSD, since a lot of the cases covered were more sudden and more unimaginable. But since all of the symptoms and reactions matched, I kept reading. In the book, all manifestations of trauma are eventually covered, even the long-term developmental kind. Memory problems too. 

He writes a good bit on the ACE test and how childhood adversity affects health and longevity. Apparently if you score over a 4, then you're more prone to autoimmune and earlier death. I took the test and scored a 6. This book is what helped me realize that my "ADHD" was actually trauma. I'd always wondered why taking ADD medication didn't really calm the storm, but intensified it. It taught me that my invisible "autoimmune disease" and "food allergies" were somatic symptoms. It explained why CBT is not a great therapy option. In C-PTSD, we have all the symptoms of PTSD plus the more complex developmental problems, but since they're hard-wired into the entire nervous system, the logical rationality of CBT doesn't fix the problem. I learned about Internal Family Systems (IFS) and EMDR.

I can't say how much validation this book gave me for my PTSD symptoms and the physical basis of it. It's a book you wanna quote when you need to educate someone else on trauma or if you need to draw boundaries with them based on your own health.

I've turned to more C-PTSD focused books now, but I thought I'd share for anyone doubting that C-PTSD is still definitely PTSD.