Danielle Carr, ‘Tell Me Why It Hurts – How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives.’, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trauma-bessel-van-der-kolk-the-body-keeps-the-score-profile.html, New York Intelligencer (JULY 31, 2023)
The War on Terror effected a pivot in the type of trauma research that was funded, toward the neurobiology of PTSD. This came as a vindication to van der Kolk and gave him a chance to shake off the dead weight of the recovered-memory wars. Federal funding was also adopting an increasingly open mind to non-pharmaceutical treatments. Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, van der Kolk and the Trauma Center treated first responders and civilians using eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing, in which a patient thinks about a traumatic experience while a clinician guides the patient’s eyes back and forth. Though initially skeptical, van der Kolk became an EMDR evangelist, leading a study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, comparing EMDR to Prozac for the treatment of PTSD. In 2008, he started the first NIH-funded study on yoga’s effectiveness in treating PTSD. He also conducted research on neurofeedback, a therapy that shows patients real-time readouts of their pulse and brain waves and teaches them to self-regulate. What united this arsenal of “somatic therapies” was that they targeted the body, rather than cognition (like cognitive behavioral therapy) or language (like talk therapy).