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Robert Scaer, MD, has practiced neurology and rehabilitation for 36 years. His three books, The Body. Bears the Burden, The Trauma Spectrum, and 8 Keys to Brain-Body Balance, address the intimate relationship between life trauma and chronic disease, the ubiquitous association of modern society with toon meer intrinsic sources of trauma, and the role of somatic techniques for healing trauma. toon minder

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scaer's analogy bw vehicular whiplash and trauma generally is creative and clear

the text abounds with references to double-blind experimental studies, case studies, and anatomical theory of western medicine

but scaer's myopic focus on the discrete, atomic links of biological mechanisms obscures his analysis, and leads him to say absurd things like: whiplash involves no injury to the soft tissues of the neck, rather it involves a dysfunctional neurological relation to the soft tissues of the neck in such a way that is nearly indistinguishable from an injury. he says such things with a straight face

basically, its a decent book. but there r MUCH better ones out there
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sashame | 1 andere bespreking | Feb 26, 2020 |
This book is an excellent introduction to the interaction of our brain with the rest of our body, especially how this interaction is impacted by trauma. Scaer also investigates some common illnesses, like chronic fatigues and irritable bowl, and suggests that they might be trauma related, which opens another door for healing them. The 8th key, on healing the damage, was a bit disappointing given the depth of the rest of the book. Maybe this reflects our current level of understanding: We are just starting to understand how trauma impacts the body, so tools for healing us are not yet as developed.… (meer)
 
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RachelAB | Aug 8, 2015 |
It's a bit scary for the reader who comes to a book like this as a result of trauma perhaps I'll just say of pain, trying to make sense of it all (and if Scaer can be trusted, the former part of that if not the latter applies to basically everyone) and is presented with the Raymond Williamsian keyword, trauma. Like any other keyword--God, the Revolution, anything else in capital letters and basically anything else ad infinitum, for somebody--it promises an explanation, and for a person who doesn't understand why they're thinking and feeling the awful things they are, why their life turned out the way it did despite their best intentions (and who doesn't have good intentions?), that's intoxicating--pharmakon, the poison that cures.


So you follow the neurological explanations of trauma, of how the fight-flight response of the reptilian brain is overlaid by the sensitive emotional palette of the mammalian limbic system, which gives us a greater, more subtle gradation of responses, at the price of having to deal with emotions, which reptiles do not. And you follow the idea that if fight and flight fail, the limbic system leads us to the freeze response as a last, least-bad-remaining option--wait for it to be over and pick up the pieces later. And so your mouse or wolf, after a traumatic experience--meaning any experience in which a perception of threat is combined with a sensation of helplessness--shakes and sweats and cries out their freeze, and retains it in procedural memory for the next time they're faced with a situation in which the experience of the prior danger might come in handy. But the human being, for reasons that Scaer ultimately throws his hands up on a little bit but certainly maintains are at least in part cultural ("be brave") and in part just due to the fact that above the reptilian and mammalian brains we have the sapient brain, the cerebral cortex, and are unavoidably planners, strategizers, looking for ways to fix and resolve the situation, and thus the experience of helplessness leads us in a way it doesn't the wolf or mouse to the experience of hopelessness--humans dissociate. And when that terrible experience that's burned onto our limbic system comes up again--when daddy comes home drunk, when the motor vehicle accident activates the procedural memories of being hit from behind by the nuns at Catholic school, when you get that teary call that pulls you out of sleep and says in a voice full of terror and rage, "Who's Monica?" and Monica is nobody, just someone you met, but there's so much sadness and hurt and history behind the words that you don't know how to do anything but space out and wait till it's over--you dissociate again.


And, no surprise, this is harmful! We need to resolve trauma and store it, and instead we get trapped in this cycle of excessive arousal and dissociation that--to hear Scaer tell it--is responsible for so much of what's wrong with us humans that it's seductive and dangerous to think on for long. Like, I hear that whiplash is basically acknowledged now by most doctors to be a freeze response to trauma, the body's attempt to protect itself from a motor vehicle accident in which it's no longer involved, and I think "how come nobody knows this! get the word out, doctors! get the word out, Robert Scaer!" Because I never had whiplash, dude. And when I hear that intrusive thoughts of hurting or being hurt and recurrent flight-flight-freeze responses where you can't tell the present from the traumatic past come from the same place (for more on this, see Bessel van der Kolk, "The Compulsion the Repeat the Trauma"), something leaps within me and at the same time something gives way, because damn have I ever felt like this, and the idea that it could have an explanation and be resolvable just has to be true. When you hear an explanation that seems like it might work, you just can't afford to not have it make sense. I guess that's how people find religion, too.


But when you start hearing that things like GERD and fibromyalgia are/can be/are probably a result of unresolved traumatic events too, that part that leaps gets a bit too excited, leaps a bit too desperately. "This chronic sadness, this inescapable horror of these last few years", you think "this worst experience of my life, which I could well believe is rooted in deep-seated life experiences but actually think is itself--if that makes sense--mostly represents only itself, is an adult and a recent trauma, primarily, and in that sense the me I remember full of bursting joy and cool confidence in his ability to be a positive presence and be worth something is recoverable. BUT NOT ONLY THAT! This acid reflux which the doctor says is because of a faulty valve or whatever is actually because of trauma too--the faulty valve is--and hey, didn't I wake up feeling pretty fucking sore the other day? Maybe that's trauma-induced fibromyalgia! Maybe you don't now how bad you felt until you feel better, and this awfulness will have all been worth it because everything is gonna be SO GOOD once I get through this, fix all ailments real or imaginable in one fell swoop, and learn from this triumph over damage a gentle strength and a deep wisdom." And the old you would have laughed at that totalizing tendency, that apparent need for total victory over all life's hardships to be the only thing that could make this experience worthwhile. But that was the old you, and the new you is susceptible to big promises and even to seeing big promises where there are none, to taking excessive encouragement from--oh, hugz, people who seem to promise to love you even if you can see that they're not ready for it and neither are you, and certainly from books by learned and obviously compassionate doctors who explain everything that is wrong with you as a result of trauma that can be fixed. You're way too vulnerable to hear those kinds of promises, because what if they're not true?


Scaer obviously really cares. He begins with a story of his own youthful trauma, and spends a huge chunk of the book drawing attention to ways in which our current practices--birthing, childrearing, medical practices, to say nothing of the practice of sending young boys off to die in Iraq for fuck's sake, basically imply unversal trauma of some sort. It makes you go over with new eyes the split between people who sneer cruelly at the feebleness of the millennial psyche, our inability to suck it up the way e.g. our grandparents (Lest We Forget) did, and those who see the past as nasty, brutish, short and uncaring, and want us to recognize the pain of being in a new way, clinical, not existential--there's an obvious answer: we are neither weaker than our forebears nor more compassionate; it's just that existence is more traumatizing now. And that really only goes so far, obviously--I don't know when the last time was I was raped by pillaging Mongols (sorry to pick on the Mongols, but) or saw my big brother and my little brother and four of my kids perish of the Black Death)--but it still rings true to me. The chance for bonding with the mother immediately post-birth, the early immersion in family and village life, the things that build up the strong foundation early that make the rape and the Black Death more survivable--these are gone now. Maybe it's not a question of more or less--maybe marketing and bureaucracy, the arousing and dissociative arms of late capitalism, just traumatize us in more insidious, harder-to-recognize ways.


So I appreciate this book; I learned a lot from it; I like the way he throws down the gauntlet to mainstream allopathic medicine and says "acknowledge the currently unquantifiable, macho scientist fucks"; and god I like his assertions about how much the resolution of trauma can make better for us. I just worry that he promises too much. Even if it's all true, what about people that are too hurt, that can't overcome (a category into which I'm emphatically not trying to put myself)? What do they do when it doesn't get better? We need to speak truth about the sources of human pain; I just wonder then what we do for people for whom understanding doesn't end up fixing anything, and who really aren't ready to be let down again.
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MeditationesMartini | Nov 11, 2010 |
"Physical traumas and emotions traumas are powerfully interrelated. This book
identifies the ways that the helplessness and terror of sudden trauma induce
changes in brain function and the resulting consequences these changes can have
on muscles, digesting, blood pressure, and many other bodily systems. The Body
Bears the Burden offers new hope to anyone suffering from whiplash,
post-traumatic stress disorder, or a history of abuse. It even provides ways to
cope with new traumas to minimize the emotional and physical damage!"--back
cover
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collectionmcc | 1 andere bespreking | Mar 6, 2018 |

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3
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1
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146
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