The Body Trauma Expert: This Eye Movement Trick Can Fix Your Trauma! The Body Keeps The Score!

TL;DR

Trauma is not a memory but a perceptual reliving where the brain’s timekeeper (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) goes offline, making past feel present. EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) cured 78% of adult‑onset trauma cases in van der Kolk’s NIH‑funded study by activating brain pathways that distinguish past from present.

Key insights

• Trauma is a “speechless experience” – the cognitive part of the brain shuts down during reliving, leaving only emotion.
• The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the brain’s timekeeper, goes offline during trauma, so the person cannot distinguish past from present.
• Small‑t (relational) trauma – being unseen, unheard, or having your existence unacknowledged – is as real as big‑t trauma and is the most common issue in van der Kolk’s practice.