Born in 1948 in postwar Amsterdam, van der Kolk grew up in a country still scarred by Nazi occupation. While he did not experience the Holocaust directly, the pervasive atmosphere of loss and resilience in Dutch society may have seeded his early fascination with how human beings endure and are shaped by catastrophe. He studied medicine and psychiatry in Chicago and then at Harvard, where he began his long affiliation with the Boston Veterans Administration (VA) hospital.
Crucially, van der Kolk found that the area of the brain responsible for speech, Broca’s area, often shuts down during trauma. This is why trauma victims often lack the words to describe their experience. Asking them to talk about their pain was like asking a person with a broken leg to run a marathon. The very tool required for the cure—language—was often the tool that had been disabled by the injury. bessel van der kolk
At the time, psychiatry was a world of talk therapy and logic. But van der Kolk noticed something unsettling: his patients couldn't simply "talk" their way out of their pain. When they tried to describe their trauma, their brains often shut down, leaving them speechless or overwhelmed by visceral sensations —a tightening in the chest, a hollow pit in the stomach. Born in 1948 in postwar Amsterdam, van der
This observation led van der Kolk to a crucial epiphany: Crucially, van der Kolk found that the area