Nathanael Miller / 13 April 2025
Bessel Van Der Kolk’s brilliant examination of the physiological impact of trauma reduces to a truth rooted in classical physics: energy can transformed or stored, but never destroyed.
Whatever one’s belief about the existence of the human soul, humans are more than merely biological machines. Human beings transcend simple animal existence, connecting mere instinct-based behavior with a realm where instinct can be examined, considered, and even (with consistent dedication) rewritten.
For example, as mammals, our natural instinct in the face of danger is to fly or fight.
Animals make decisions (based on instinct and experience) whether to fly or to fight in the face of a threat. Animals can choose one or the other, but they have to activate one or the other.
However, humans can choose to ignore both flight and fight. We can consciously decide to engage one or the other…or ignore both.
Confronting fire triggers our animal instinct to run like hell—to fly. However, if we see someone trapped (even an animal), our capacity for empathy activates. We have the ability to fly…or to ignore the flight response, running into danger to save the other.
Self-sacrificial decisions require the self-awareness we humans possess. Thus, we can act in opposition to instinct.
However, though we transcend the merely animal, we are not free of it. While our minds and, as I believe, our souls can fly into the etheric firmament of the divine, our physical existence is still rooted in mammalian biology. We’re hybrid beings; creatures of animal flesh and spiritual light all at once.
The laws of classical physics stubbornly and ruthlessly govern the everyday world we move in. We might sing “I believe I can fly,” but, if we jump off a roof without artificial wings, gravity rudely reminds us that our reality doesn’t include biological wings.
We speak of “emotional energy” with good reason. We’re jazzed up by emotions—we’re given energy by emotions. Our species has been debating and exploring this experience for, well, our whole history.
However, our physical bodies also experience our emotions. We can’t have one without the other—what our souls feel, our bodies feel…and each feels it in its own way. Watch someone sleeping. When they have a nightmare, their bodies react as if the situation was real (same with good dreams).
Our bodies experience emotional through the physics of electrical nerve impulses and neurotransmitters.
“Neurotransmitters” is a fancy word for chemical energy.
Electrical impulses tell our muscles to tense up when we face trauma, but it’s the neurotransmitters, the chemical energy, which fuel the response (hydroelectric power is great, but if there’s not a truck load of water—store mechanical energy—ready to flow, the power isn’t generated).
Those who’ve experienced trauma (repeated trauma is always discussed, but a single traumatic experience can have the exact same result), and especially from a young age, are often ill-equipped to expend that emotional energy (both spiritual and biological) in a timely manner…if at all. Being prevented from processing through results in our bodies literally becoming stuck in time because the chemical energy is still in there.
The traumas build and pile up like a reservoir overtopping a dam. With no clear spillway, all that water eventually over lows, causing destructive flash floods in life. Hell, if the dam fully breaches, a person can be drowned so completely they do what I did in 1998—take five boxes of sleeping pills to end their entire life so as to end the eternal pain.
This is where Van Der Kolk’s brilliant The Body Keeps the Score lines up with classical physics. The Law of Conservation states that energy can only be transformed or stored—and that’s it.
Neurotransmitters obey the Law of Conservation. If that chemical energy (the neurotransmitter) is not expended, that energy has to go somewhere. So…where?
It goes into storage. One unprocessed traumatic event is enough to disrupt a life (the water occasionally overtopping the dam), but a lifetime of repeated unprocessed trauma is a crap load of stored energy. The dam over tops so frequently that flash floods become the defining aspect of how we experience ourselves. Life becomes pain because our storage reservoir is literally beyond physical capacity.
Van Der Kolk demonstrates that trauma recovery requires a truly holistic method. Talk therapy is great, but it left me stuck in a cycle of repeated flash floods…and the eternal fear of the next flash flood. There’s a reason my body remains tense, cramped, and quivering even when my mind is calm. My body is reacting to the store chemical energy bursting the dam.
I used to hate the word “resiliency.” Over many years of well-meaning counseling, that word came to mean “just get over the crap that happened.” That philosophy ignores the physics of biological existence. You literally can’t move on until you’ve transformed (“expended”) the chemical energy of the experience.
Studying Van Der Kolk’s work, along with the integrated mind + body + soul path I’m on now with my current guide/counselor, I discovered a far more accurate definition of “resiliency:” the ability to maintain control of your story regardless of the experiences you encounter.
You gain that capacity by treating the mind and body as one. Repairing the dam (the mind) might reinforce it against collapse, but if you don’t simultaneously drain the reservoir of all that stored energy, the flash floods continue. The mind might be at peace, but the body remembers.
Physics rules the material world we exist in. The laws of emotional physics are the same laws of classical physics. Emotional energy is energy. The energy fueling the body’s response is, specifically, chemical energy, but it’s energy. Energy must be transformed (expended), or stored.
Accessing and then transforming that crap-ton of chemical energy stored in our bodies is a critical—and tragically ignored—aspect of mental health.
However, accepting the reality that physics applies to our emotions just as much as our thoughts apply to them allows us to start draining the reservoir while reinforcing the dam. After all, if we faithfully learn and obey the laws of existence, physics always takes care of the rest.
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