For anyone interested in this, I highly recommend the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist who studies PTSD.

He writes about this clearly and elegantly—must read for those dealing with anxiety, and certainly with any traumatic stress.

Have you read the Body Keeps the Score? It felt pop in the sense that it was on the leading edge, but I felt the author made a best effort to put forth the available science

The brain can be reshaped again following trauma. The Body Keeps The Score is a book that talks through the effectiveness of different approaches to healing and how they impact brain changes.

What a pleasant surprise to find this article at the top of HN! Minutes ago I finished a workshop on a somatic therapy technique. It's a relief to see these ideas gaining mainstream attention after so many years of making little progress on my own anxiety, depression, and procrastination.

For other relevant scientific perspectives, I recommend looking into the theory around "memory reconsolidation."

- Kaj Sotala does a good job of summarizing an important book in the field here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/i9xyZBS3qzA8nFXNQ/book-summa...

- How Emotions are Made also provides a perspective from neuropsychology on what's going on: https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Made-Lisa-Barrett/dp/132....

- The Polyvagal Theory stuff mentioned in the article is also great, and some classic accessible books on the overall topic include The Body Keeps the Score and Waking the Tiger.

I'm personally a fan of a technique called Emotional Resolution (EmRes), which is notably simple and effective, and that you can learn to apply to yourself after a 90 minute course, but there are many other approaches: Organic Intelligence, somatic experiencing, cranio-sacral therapy, bioenergetics and core energetics, and many more. Effective self-therapy methods include Core Transformation, Focusing, and "self-therapy".

Keywords to search for are: "somatic therapy," "body work," "energy work" or "energy medicine."

I have read about half the books in the list and this is the only one I have read from that list that didn't really feel like pop science. This is an amazing book and is the only one I am familiar with from that list that I would actually recommend everyone should read.

Edit: I will also add that The Body Keeps The Score is an interesting book, but I would definitely not recommend everyone read it. If you have suffered some trauma it is definitely worth a read.

As someone who's been coming out of a lot of sexual trauma from my early childhood, I feel it's important to take a multi-pronged approach to alleviating the anxiety & pain, psychologically and physiologically. For me, pelvic pain was a huge impediment to having a healthy sex life. Left untreated, it got worse and worse, to the point that I had constant pain my body. Now I am seeing a pelvic floor physical therapist who is teaching me how to relax the muscles, and a psychoanalyst who is helping me deal with reframing the traumas that got me where I am.

The Body Keeps the Score is a pretty good book that covers how much trauma affects the body in myriad ways.

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect, helped me identify some negative patterns around depending on others too much for happiness and working to put myself first.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, overview of how PTSD forms and how to use break the patterns

I'd recommend checking out a book called "The Body Keeps the Score". It talks about how people's minds and bodies can stop functioning normally due to traumas like sexual abuse, war, etc.

I would have thought that since traumatic experiences have been around forever, humans would have adapted to dealing with those better by now. And yet the medical evidence laid out in this book seems to show that healing from traumas is difficult. To me, that means there is something "unnatural" about trauma (or at least the most awful cases).

I'm probably not doing the book enough justice. Here's the goodreads profile for anyone who wants to explore further: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18693771-the-body-keeps-...

Some people have their schizophrenia awakened by stressing in their finals. While some people get much brutal stressors like rape and don't have any lingering issues.

> And does that imply that an avoidance strategy, or a wise-cracking support group, might have better mental health outcomes than time with an empathetic therapist ?

See fight-flight-freeze-fawn response: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-and-recove....

But generally, yeah, that's a lot. Try going to therapy. Or reading a book like "The body keeps the score" that explains how trauma affects people (including things that happened to you). I think you might find yourself in some pages of that book.