What is limbic system therapy
and how is it useful in the treatment of trauma?
According to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk most interventions
that he recommends for working with trauma
fall within the category of limbic system therapy.
Here Bessel describes how we can conceptualize
the limbic system and why it's crucial
to focus on these particular areas of the brain and body
when working with trauma.
- There's a metaphor I'd like to use
in that so much of trauma is in the limbic system,
or what people used to call the limbic system.
And that all these areas of the brain have to do
with danger, safety, perception of the world get changed.
Basically most of the therapies that I'm advocating here
is limbic system therapy.
It's all about understanding or figuring things out,
'cause that's not really where the trauma sits.
Trauma sits in your automatic reactions
and your dispositions and how you interpret the world.
In order to really re-wire those automatic perceptions,
you need to have deep experiences
that for your survival brain contradicts
how you are now disposed to think.
- Bessel just mentioned the limbic system.
Broadly speaking, it's the emotional part of the brain.
It contains both the hippocampus and the amygdala,
the hippocampus is associated with memory,
and the amygdala is involved in detecting threat.
Now you might have noticed that he said,
"What people used to call the limbic system."
That's because there's some question about whether or not
it's still useful to think of all the parts of the brain
that make up the limbic system as a unified system.
However, what's important to take away here is this.
Trauma doesn't necessarily live in the part of the brain
that's concerned with reason and insight.
It inhabits the parts that shape our temperament,
the way we understand the world,
and our automatic reactions.
So when we target the part of the brain
that's feeling and reacting automatically,
when we create a new experience
that contradicts the lesson that that part of the brain
has learned from trauma, that can change the way a person
with a trauma history is wired to respond.
So what does it look like to have an experience like that,
an experience that re-wires the brain?
- For example if you grow up thinking that you're helpless
and that anybody can do anything to you
unless you yell at them, that becomes your disposition.
But now if you take a martial arts course
and you get to deeply feel like wow, I can kick anybody
in the groin at any time because I feel like it,
and I can protect myself.
If you have experienced this, of becoming a martial artist,
then that feeling of I'm always helpless
will dramatically change.
You cannot do that abstractly, and so you need
to have experiences that directly contradict
how your body is disposed.
Who understands this best is the US Army,
who learned it from the Dutch Army,
that learned it from the Roman Army over 2000 years.
And that if you want to take a bunch of young recruits,
the best way to get them to do things
is to do basic training.
In basic training you march, and you climb,
and you crawl through the mud,
and every night you go to bed and say,
"Oh my God, I'm amazing, I survived this.
"I thought I could never do this, but I can."
And by the end of 12 weeks these kids are transformed
because they have experiences that have brung them
to the max of new challenges.
And we should have experiences like that
in every mental health center.
That is limbic system therapy.
- So to change the way a client's body reacts after trauma,
we need physical experiences that directly contradict
what the body has learned.
Now I'd like to hear from you.
How will you use this idea in your work with your patients?
Please leave a comment below and thanks for watching.
(peaceful music)