Name: Why trauma can destroy our ability to connect with others | Bessel van der Kolk
Uploaded: 2025-10-07T17:59:23.000Z
Duration: 59 min 11 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In the preamble to the definition of ptsd, we write, these people have been exposed to an extraordinary event that's outside of normal human experience.

As it turned out that this is not an unusual experience at all.

The trauma is not the event that happens.

The degree to which, when you're traumatized, your body keeps mobilizing itself to fight.

You have all kinds of immunological abnormalities.

You have endocrine abnormalities, and that really devastates your health, your physical health at the long range.

Oftentimes the physical problems are longer lasting than the mental problems.

One of the largest mitigating factors against getting traumatized is who is there for you at that particular time.

I did the first study on Prozac for ptsd, the first study for Zoloft for PTSD and a number of other conventional drugs.

What we found is that didn't work very well.

I'm a psychiatrist, neuroscientist, the author of the book the Body Keeps Its Core.

I got interested in trauma on my first day working at the Veterans Administration.

But the very first day that I met Vietnam veterans, I was just blown away.

These were guys who were my age who were clearly smart and competent and had done very good things, flying helicopters and running boats and doing good stuff in the military.

And they clearly were just a shadow of their former self.

And what particularly intrigued me is that they had nightmares about what had happened and also that they kept referring back to their dead comrades.

Their hearts seemed to be with the people who were no longer around.

And what struck me immediately is, is they had a very hard time connecting with new people after the war.

What also struck me is how their bodies were clearly affected by trauma.

These were guys who used to be athletic, and now they were sort of slumped over, and

they were uptight and their voices were uptight, and they were sort of passive much of the time.

And then people told them something that was disappointing, and

they went from 0 to 10 and blew up and became extremely angry.

And it was just at the time that we were having two small children who were a little bit like that.

But I know that when a baby becomes very upset within 10 minutes, you can sort of hold them and calm them down.

And these soldiers were very much like little babies, except the stuff that's supposed to happen to allow you to not overreact to the minor things seem to have been destroyed or something seems to have happened to that.

That made it very hard for them to modulate their responses to the environment.

And what was also really striking is that they had a hard time being anyway meaningfully involved in the present.

They had a hard time loving their wives and girlfriends.

They had a hard time really connecting with their kids.

So if something seems to have been destroyed about their capac to engage and possibly even to learn new experiences.

1978 was the year that I first saw veterans.

And that was also the time that my colleagues and I soon joined them, started to think about how is what these guys suffer from different from what other people who are in secondary textbooks?

Because clearly they were different and I couldn't find a textbook to describe them.

Around that time that I first started to work for the va, a group of us started to define what trauma is and started to define what happens to people.

And in retrospect, that shows us how ignorance and narrow minded we were.

Because it turned out that this is not an unusual experience at all.

That one out of five women in America has a history of sexual molestation.

Even a lot of men have histories of sexual molestation.

One out of four kids get beaten very hard by their parents.

One out of eight kids see physical fights between their parents.

When we started to work with inner city kids, the amount of trauma that these kids experienced was just unspeakable.

So somehow we had managed to turn a completely blind eye how what happens in people's environment creates the mind and creates who people become and creates certain forms of pathology.

And there was a lot of debate of what a trauma is to this day, and

even sometimes when I define it in the way we officially do, people still don't like what I say.

But basically what a trauma is, is something that happens to you that makes you so upset that it overwhelms you.

You just stand there or sit there, lie there or whatever, and

You feel terrible, helpless, hopeless, and you collapse.

Basically there's an internal state of oh my God.

So it's not somebody being mean to you or nasty to you, or it is really bad stuff.

But the trauma is not the event that happens.

As a medical student, I was trained to deal with all kind of very difficult situations.

And I remember vividly during my internship that a kid was brought in, a little child with third degree burn wounds all over his body.

But I was trained as a medical student about what to do.

So rather than freaking out, I thought, okay, I need to get my IV going, I need my fluids going, focused on what to do.

So that exposure to these horribly burned kids was not a trauma for me because I was not paralyzed in my actions, because I had been trained to deal with it.

And of course, that happens to policemen, that happens to people in the service, it happens to physicians, nurses, et cetera.

Is that you get trained on what to do and not to get overwhelmed by your feelings, but

to actually able to continue to act and do something.

And when you're traumatized, you just are unable to do anything.

what may be traumatic for you may not be traumatic for me, and vice versa.

Depending on our personality and our training, an event becomes traumatic if your response is, oh, my God, when there is nothing you can think of, you can do to stave off the inevitable, where you basically collapse in a state of confusion, maybe rage, maybe collapse, because you are unable to function in the face of this particular threat.

An event like that may not become a trauma in the long range is if at the moment that you collapse, other people around you come over and say, oh, I see that you're really in bad shape.

Let me take over for you and do things that you cannot do yourself.

And so the greatest protector against the trauma is the people around you, whether they're able to protect you and to do what needs to be done, or whether the people around you actually make make it worse by continuing to do terrible things to you or blaming you for your responses.

Trauma is actually, unlike what we first thought, extremely common.

At least 1 out of 8 kids in America witness physical violence between their parents.

A larger number of kids get hit in very nasty ways by their own caregivers.

A very large number of people in general, but

women in particular have sexual experiences that were clearly unwanted and that left them helpless and befuddled, confused and enraged because they had no choice about what they were doing.

So people usually think about the military when they talk about trauma.

But I like to say, somewhat unscientifically, that for every soldier who gets PTSD in the war zone, there's at least 30 children who get traumatized at home.

The nature of trauma is that an experience enters into your ears, into your skin, into your eyes, into sensations and it goes down into a very primitive part of your brain that automatically interprets what is going on.

That's not your frontal lobe, but your frontal lobe, your conscious cognitive self.

Your survival brain makes the first interpretation and says, is this dangerous or is this safe?

That decision is made for you by that primitive survival brain.

And that's what we learned a lot about when we study trauma, is to power of that primitive brain, which occupies a very large part of our brain that really automatically makes decisions for us.

And on the basis of the messages we get from our body, our cognition interprets in a particular way depending on our prior experiences.

But the message comes from our hormones and our physiological impulses that have to do with survival.

And so when you're being raped or you're being beaten, or you see your parents getting killed, your body starts automatically going to a state, trying to make yourself survive.

One of the states is going to fight flight, to get up and to punch people and to become very angry.

That's oftentimes when people are traumatized.

Those fight flight responses continue to get activated in response to situations where people in their environment says, hey, hey, cool.