The first half of the book is "here's all the ways people adapt to trauma, 99% of it negative" and the second half of the book is "here's all the great ways people can cope with that trauma if it just happened but you'd best get on it MFer because if you let it go unaddressed for more than a month or so there's absolutely fucking nothing you can do about it."

Metabolism? - nothing you can do about it.

Tendency to fly into rages? - nothing you can do about it.

Lack of physical coordination? - nothing you can do about it.

Fundamental distrust of the world? -nothing you can do about it.

Flat affect? -nothing you can do about it.

Inability to bond? -nothing you can do about it.

Bessel van der Kolk is very explicit that if you do not start aiding people in their processing of trauma within a very short amount of time after it happens, they're fucked. He mentions a little bit about talk therapy and Freud and getting through stuff but he also spends a lot of time talking about the time horizon for dealing with such things. "In an Unspoken Voice" is worse because while van der Kolk dealt with a lot of veterans and a lot of recent trauma victims, Peter Levine dealt with people in the goddamn emergency room and he's even harsher about it. If you don't start healing mental wounds before your physical wounds scab over, they will never fucking heal.

I get that these books are great for clinicians and people with recent trauma and people dealing with people with trauma in your past, but if you see yourself in that book, that book is telling you "you are broken and utterly beyond repair. Let's focus on people we can actually help."

I was going to buy a copy and go through it with a highlighter so that my wife would get a sense of the kind of shit that's going on behind my forehead but even that was a bridge too far. Talk about it? Hell nah. Shit I can't even pick up a mutherfucking highlighter.