The Body Keeps the Score Characters
The main characters in The Body Keeps the Score include Tom, Bill, and Marilyn, all of whom were patients of the author’s.
- Tom, van der Kolk’s first patient, was a lawyer who was plagued by memories of what he had seen and done during the Vietnam War but who refused medication.
- Bill was a pastor and Vietnam veteran who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia but was really suffering from trauma. He found relief through practicing yoga.
- Marilyn experienced episodes of suddenly becoming violent toward her partners until she was able to confront and heal from her repressed memories of abuse.
Characters
Tom
Tom was a Boston lawyer who was the author’s first psychiatric patient and had served as a Marine in Vietnam. He described being haunted by the memories of atrocities which he saw and in which he participated, including rape and the killing of children. Tom did not want to take pills to stop him from having nightmares, since he felt this would be a betrayal of his friends who died in Vietnam. He drank heavily to cope with his memories of trauma and was often aggressive in his behavior to his wife and children.
Bill
Bill was the pastor of a Congregational church in a Boston suburb. He was also a Vietnam veteran whose traumatic memories of dead and dying children were so strong that the doctors at the clinic regarded them as hallucinations, symptomatic of paranoid schizophrenia. The author disagreed and prescribed medication to deal with Bill’s memories of trauma. Bill tried many different types of therapy and found them all ineffective, until he began to practice yoga.
Sylvia
Sylvia was a nineteen-year-old student at Boston University who was abused by her brother and uncle when she was a child. She refused to eat and was force-fed, an experience which the author thinks must have brought back memories of this abuse.
Julia
Julia was raped at gunpoint when she was sixteen years old. After this experience, she became a sex worker and continually sought out violent and abusive relationships. When she attended college and dated a classmate, she found the experience boring and quickly began a relationship with a drug addict who beat her.
Marsha
Marsha was a Boston schoolteacher whose daughter was killed in a car crash, which also caused the death of the seven-month-old fetus she was carrying at the time. This event traumatized Martha, who blamed herself for the accident and could no longer bear to be around children.
Stan and Ute
Stan and Ute were a couple in their forties who were trapped in an eighty-seven-car pileup. They watched, helpless, as a girl burned to death in front of them before they were rescued. Both Stan and Ute escaped physical injury, but the experience changed their personalities profoundly, making them hypersensitive and irritable, and triggering flashbacks.
Sherry
Sherry’s experience of childhood neglect left her so deeply depressed and withdrawn that she lost feeling in her body. She would pick at her skin in order to feel some sensation. The author found that she derived great benefit from massage therapy and regular social contact.
Marilyn
Marilyn had repressed childhood trauma which prevented her from enjoying adult relationships. She would suddenly become violent, physically attacking and verbally abusing her partners without understanding why she was doing so. It was only after hearing another member of her therapy group describe the experience of being gang-raped that Marilyn was able to face and overcome her own traumatic experience of abuse.
Anthony
Anthony was referred to the Trauma Center at the age of two and a half for troublesome behavior including biting, pushing, and continual crying. His mother treated him coldly and said that he was “a good-for-nothing” like his father. The mother was herself the product of violence and child abuse.
Julian
Julian had repressed memories of sexual abuse by a priest in childhood. When these memories were triggered by press coverage of the priest molesting other children, Julian was overwhelmed by trauma and had to leave his job in the military.
Nancy
Nancy was given insufficient anaesthetic for an operation and was troubled by dreams and flashbacks of the experience. She explained to the author how these...
(This entire section contains 1181 words.)
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flashbacks felt, and eventually regained control over her life through the practice of Pilates.
David
David was a middle-aged man who was violently attacked at the age of twenty-three. This attack resulted in the loss of an eye. His anger was making his home life intolerable when he came to the author for therapy. The author used eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) to treat David, making him calmer and more relaxed.
Annie
Annie was so deeply traumatized by child abuse that when she first came to see the author she could not even communicate verbally. Regular practice of yoga helped her to feel calm and comfortable in her own body.
Mary
Mary was a patient who came to the author suffering from dissociative identity disorder (DID). She spoke to him from the viewpoint of various other identities, including a young woman called Jane, who was hostile to Mary; an angry adolescent boy; and a frightened child.
Joan
Joan was a professional woman who consulted the author about her erratic behavior, including temper tantrums and extramarital affairs, which resulted from the repressed trauma of abuse in her childhood.
Elvin Semrad
Elvin Semrad was a psychiatrist who taught the author at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center and encouraged him to be skeptical of textbooks and clear-cut psychiatric diagnoses.
Steven Maier
Steven Maier is a neuroscientist whose research on responses to electric shocks in dogs helped the author to understand his own patients’ reactions to trauma.
Mark Greenberg
Mark Greenberg is a professor of Human Development and Psychology at Pennsylvania State University. He ran therapy groups for Vietnam veterans with the author and used these as the basis for research.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was a nineteenth-century naturalist and biologist, one of the best-known and most influential scientists who ever lived. The author is principally interested in his late work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.
Stephen Porges
Stephen Porges is a behavioral neuroscientist best known for his Polyvagal theory, which explains such functions as social connection and regulation of the emotions in terms of the vagus nerve.
Ruth Lanius
Ruth Lanius is a professor of psychiatry and expert in PTSD. She was a student and later a colleague of the author’s.
Nina Fish-Murray
Nina Fish-Murray was a colleague of and collaborator with the author at the Trauma Center. She worked as a specialist in educational psychology and studied with Jean Piaget in Geneva.
John Bowlby
John Bowlby was a twentieth-century British psychologist who worked in the areas of attachment theory and child development.
Vincent Felitti
Vincent Felitti is a professor of medicine who has conducted research into adverse childhood experiences.
Stephen Suomi
Stephen Suomi is a researcher who has conducted experiments into the effect of socialization on the psychological development of monkeys.
Pierre Janet
Pierre Janet was one of the founders of psychology as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. He conducted some of the earliest research on trauma and has exercised a major influence over the author’s work.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud was the pioneer of psychoanalysis and perhaps the best-known figure in nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology. The author refers to him primarily as the originator of the talking cure.
Albert Pesso
Albert Pesso is a former dancer who has developed a form of drama-based therapy in which patients direct their own plays and decide what structures and forms of validation they wish they had experienced in their lives.
