The Body Keeps the Score: What It Taught Me About Trauma, PTSD and Learned Helplessness

What
The Body Keeps the Score
Taught Me

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s work is revolutionary—not because he wants to "fix" patients, but because he chooses to hear them. His book The Body Keeps the Score opened my eyes to the deep, often invisible imprint trauma leaves on the body.

This post is the first of many where I’ll break down valuable insights from the book—and the personal realizations they triggered.

---

⚡ INESCAPABLE SHOCK: Understanding Learned Helplessness

(Inspired by Chapter 2: Revolutions in Understanding Mind and Brain, p. 29)

Let’s start with a shocking (literally) experiment by Steve Maier and Martin Seligman:

Researchers gave electric shocks to dogs. After repeated shocks in locked cages, the dogs stopped trying to escape—even when the doors were open.

• Dogs who had never been shocked, Escaped.
• Dogs who had been shocked before whimpered and stayed.

                       The Promise of Uncertainty 

a transactional love is not what you deserve 

The promise of certainty tends to mellow down to the basic needs of love.
As children, we tend to look for cues in the face of our primary caregiver.
When the kid is unable to differentiate between the basic emotions taught to them in flashcards, they feel abandoned.
Much like a person unable to understand a word they have been reading for the longest time.
When a child feels abandoned, it's scared of not receiving love from the caregivers.
So the basic needs of love, kindness, warmth become transactional.
They give away a part of them to satisfy the needs of those unavailable parents in order to receive what's called 'love.'
Often we grow up absolutely unaware of the fact that love was never there, and that's why we seek that same from others and that sometimes leads to abusive or unhappy relations—be it in occupational, personal, or social domains.