I have about 50 pages left in Bessel Van Der Kolk's beloved and controversial text the Body Keeps the Score. I feel like I've learned so much about how the brain functions and I've even gained some practical knowledge for the management of my own ADHD (neurofeedback here I come).
When I came to Reddit to read discussions about the book, I wasn't surprised to find criticism. I was surprised, though, by how many people read the first chapter (which contains triggering content about the Vietnam war) and stopped reading there. These folks decided that Van Der Kolk must be morally reprehensible because he expressed empathy for an American veteran who admitted to committing war crimes. I scrolled through endless comments that essentially said, "murderers and rapists don't deserve empathy or therapy, they deserve to feel guilty forever or die."
In no way does the book advocate or support war crimes, murder, rape, or abuse of any kind. It does acknowledge the fact that trauma compounds and causes more trauma in an ever expanding web. The veteran discussed in the first chapter watches his unit die around him, takes revenge in the worst possible way, and then brings all of that rancor home with him, where it begins to affect his innocent wife and child.
How can we ever hope to resolve the circumstances that cause atrocities without ever examining them directly? What good does pushing it away do?
I'll admit that at times Van Der Kolk's language isn't exactly to my taste, but when one places him in his context (a professional white man who has been considered a leading expert in his field for decades) the vaguely chauvinistic tendencies in his writing make sense.
Is our collective reading comprehension really this low, or is it just that the content is potentially quite triggering and people make snap judgements based upon their own trauma rising to the surface?
(Having read the Body Keeps the Score, I'm leaning towards the latter).
I'm guess I'm concerned about what seems like a societal predisposition towards silencing/dismissing any content that doesn't fit inside an easy-to-digest, morally uncomplicated box. Van Der Kolk has gone on record saying that this book was intended for clinicians, so it may be an extreme example with a mismatched audience, but I've seen this modern Puritanism in plenty of other spaces too.
I'd love to read your thoughts. I've previously discussed this at length in fanfiction spaces, but I'd love to hear some discourse about published works as well.
by dimension_surfer