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Bessel van der Kolk sat cross—legged on an oversize pillow in the center of a smallish room overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Big Sur. He wore khaki pants, a blue fleece zip-up and square wire-rimmed glasses. His feet were bare. It was the third day of his workshop, "Trauma Memory and Recovery of the Self," and 30 or so workshop participants — all of them trauma victims or trauma therapists — lined the room's perimeter. They, too, sat barefoot on cushy pillows, eyeing van der Kolk, notebooks in hand. For two days, they had listened to his lectures on the social history, neurobiology and clinical realities of post-traumatic stress disorder and its lesser-known sibling, complex trauma. Now, finally, he was about to demonstrate an actual therapeutic technique, and his gaze was fixed on the subject of his experiment: a 36-year-old Iraq war veteran named Eugene, who sat directly across from van der Kolk, looking mournful and expectant.
从不大的房间望出去，大瑟尔地区太平洋的风光尽收眼底。贝塞尔·范德科尔克(Bessel van der Kolk)盘腿坐在房间中央的超大号靠枕上。他戴着方形金丝眼镜，身穿蓝色拉链式绒头织物衫和卡其布裤子，赤着脚。这天是他主办的“创伤记忆与自我恢复”(Trauma Memory and Recovery of the Self)研讨会的第三天，约30名研讨会参与者（均为创伤受害者或创伤治疗师）沿着房间的四壁围成一圈。他们也都赤脚坐在舒适的靠枕上，手里拿着笔记本，眼睛盯着范德科尔克。两天来，他们聆听他讲解了创伤后应激障碍(post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD)及其鲜为人知的同类——复杂创伤(complex trauma)的社会历史、神经生物学和临床现状。现在，他终于将向他们演示实际的治疗技术。范德科尔克将目光落在自己的实验对象尤金(Eugene)的身上。这是一名36岁的伊拉克战争退伍军人，此刻他正坐在范德科尔克的对面，面带悲伤，又充满期待。
Van der Kolk began as he often does, with a personal anecdote. "My mother was very unnurturing and unloving," he said. "But I have a full memory and a complete sense of what it is like to be loved and nurtured by her." That's because, he explained, he had done the very exercise that we were about to try on Eugene. Here's how it would work: Eugene would recreate the trauma that haunted him most by calling on people in the room to play certain roles. He would confront those people — with his anger, sorrow, remorse and confusion — and they would respond in character, apologizing, forgiving or validating his feelings as needed. By projecting his "inner world" into three-dimensional space, Eugene would be able to rewrite his troubled history more thoroughly than other forms of role-play therapy might allow. If the experiment succeeded, the bad memories would be supplemented with an alternative narrative — one that provided feelings of acceptance or forgiveness or love.
像过去一样，范德科尔克的治疗从讲述自己的亲身经历开始。“我的母亲对我毫无教养和疼爱之心，”他说。“但我却能让自己体会到在她关爱和抚育下成长的全部感受，并让它们成为我的‘记忆'。”因为他做过一项非常特别的练习，他解释道，而这也正是现在尤金将要尝试的。具体的做法是这样的：在场的人们将应尤金的要求扮演各种特定的角色，从而帮助他重现那段深深困扰他的创伤。他将对着这些人表露他的愤怒、悲伤、悔恨和迷茫，而他们则将依据所扮演的角色对他作出相应的回应，或道歉、或宽恕，也可以认同他的感受。通过将自己的“内心世界”投射到三维空间，尤金将得以重塑自己最不堪回首的经历，而且效果会比其他形式的角色扮演治疗更加彻底。如果实验能够成功，那些悲惨的回忆将可以通过另一种方式——一种可以获得认可、宽恕或爱的方式来重新描述。
The exercise, which van der Kolk calls a "structure" but which is also known as psychomotor therapy, was developed by Albert Pesso, a dancer who studied with Martha Graham. He taught it to van der Kolk about two decades ago. Though it has never been tested in a controlled study, van der Kolk says he has had some success with it in workshops like this one. He likes to try it whenever he has a small group and a willing volunteer.
这种做法被范德科尔克称为“构造”(structure)，它还有个名字叫做精神运动疗法(psychomotor therapy)。舞蹈演员艾伯特·佩索(Albert Pesso)创立了该疗法，并在大约20年前教给了范德科尔克。尽管这种疗法未在对照研究中接受过检验，但范德科尔克称，在几次类似的研讨会中，他们已经有过若干成功的先例。无论何时何地，只要他身边聚集了一小群人，而且有人愿意站出来，他都喜欢尝试一下这种疗法。
With some gentle prodding from van der Kolk, Eugene told us how he came to be a specialist in the United States Army, how he spent a full year stationed in Mosul, the largest city in northern Iraq, and how his job involved disposing of exploded bombs. It was a year of dead bodies, he said. He saw, touched, smelled and stepped in more bodies than he could possibly count. Some of them were children. He was only 26.
在范德科尔克温和的鼓励下，尤金向我们讲述了他的故事：他怎样成为美国陆军的技术兵；他在伊拉克北部最大的城市摩苏尔驻扎的那一整年时间，是如何度过的；以及他的工作怎么会涉及处置已爆炸的炸弹。那一年都在和尸体打交道，他说。他目睹、触摸、嗅闻乃至踏过的尸体简直不可胜数，其中有些还是儿童。而尤金当时只有26岁。
People turn to grease when they explode, he told us, because their fat cells burst open. He witnessed multiple suicide bombings. Once, he accidentally stepped in an exploded corpse; only the legs were still recognizable as human. Another time, he saw a kitchen full of women sliced to bits. They'd been making couscous when a bomb went off and the windows shattered. He was shot in the back of the head once. He was also injured by an improvised explosive device.
尤金告诉我们，当人被炸碎时，脂肪细胞都会爆裂开，于是人就变成了一大团动物油脂。他曾目击过多起自杀式炸弹袭击事件。有一次，他不小心踩在一具爆炸后的尸体上——只有腿部还勉强有点人型。还有一次，他看到一个厨房里，到处散落着女人身体四分五裂的残片——她们正在做古斯米时，一枚爆炸的炸弹震碎了窗户。尤金曾经头部后侧中弹，也曾经因土制的爆炸装置受伤。
But none of those experiences haunted him quite as much as this one: Several months into his tour, while on a security detail, Eugene killed an innocent man and then watched as the man's mother discovered the body a short while later.
但这些经历对他的困扰，与下面这件事相比，只是小巫见大巫：在任职几个月后，尤金在一次安保任务中杀死了一名无辜的男子，然后他还眼看着那名男子的母亲在不久之后发现了儿子的遗体。
"Tell us more about that," van der Kolk said. "What happened?" Eugene's fragile composure broke at the question. He closed his eyes, covered his face and sobbed.
“请讲得再详细一些，”范德科尔克说，“发生了什么事？”简单的问题打破了尤金强忍着的镇定。他闭上眼睛，用手遮住脸，开始抽泣。
"The witness can see how distressed you are and how badly you feel," van der Kolk said. Acknowledging and reflecting the protagonist's emotions like this — what van der Kolk calls "witnessing" them — is a central part of the exercise, meant to instill a sense of validation and security in the patient.
“见证人看得出你有多么痛心和难过，”范德科尔克说。范德科尔克像这样承认事件主人公的情绪，并对其情绪做出反应，他把这个过程称为“见证”，这是练习的核心部分，旨在向患者灌输受到认可的感觉以及安全感。
Eugene had already called on some group members to play certain roles in his story. Kresta, a yoga instructor based in San Francisco, was serving as his "contact person," a guide who helps the protagonist bear the pain the trauma evokes, usually by sitting nearby and offering a hand to hold or a shoulder to lean on. Dave, a child-abuse survivor and small-business owner in Southern California, was playing Eugene's "ideal father," a character whose role is to say all the things that Eugene wished his real father had said but never did. They sat on either side of Eugene, touching his shoulders. Next, van der Kolk asked who should play the man he killed. Eugene picked Sagar, a stand-up comedian and part-time financial consultant from Brooklyn. Finally, van der Kolk asked, Who should play the man's mother?
在此之前，尤金已经拜托了一些小组成员来扮演他故事中的角色。居住在旧金山的瑜伽教练克雷斯塔(Kresta)担任他的“联络人”，就像是一个向导，帮助主人公承受回忆唤起的创伤。联络人通常就坐在主人公的身旁，在需要时提供一只支持的手臂或一个可以依靠的肩膀。戴夫(Dave)是虐待儿童案件的幸存者，现在是南加州的一个小企业主。在这里，他扮演的角色是尤金的“理想父亲”，他的任务是对尤金说一些尤金一直期盼能从自己真正的父亲口中听到，但真正的父亲从来没有说过的话。这两个人分别坐在尤金的两侧，手搭在他的肩膀上。接下来，范德科尔克询问尤金希望由谁来扮演那名被自己杀害的人。尤金选择了塞格尔(Sagar)，来自纽约布鲁克林区的脱口秀笑星及兼职财务顾问。最后，范德科尔克问道，谁来扮演那男子的母亲？
Eugene pointed to me. "Can you do it?" he asked.
尤金指着我。“可以拜托你吗？”他问。
I swore myself in as the others had, by saying, "I enroll as the mother of the man you killed." Then I moved my pillow to the center of the room, across from Eugene, next to van der Kolk.
“我愿意扮演被害人的母亲，”我学着其他人的样子宣布承担这个任务，然后把自己的靠枕搬到了房间的中央，面对着尤金，挨着范德科尔克。
"O.K.," van der Kolk said. "Tell us more about that day. Tell us what happened."
“好了，”范德科尔克说。“请告诉我们更多关于那一天的事吧，都发生了些什么？”
Psychomotor therapy is neither widely practiced nor supported by clinical studies. In fact, most licensed psychiatrists probably wouldn't give it a second glance. It's hokey-sounding. It was developed by a dancer. But van der Kolk believes strongly that dancers — and musicians and actors — may have something to teach psychiatrists about healing from trauma and that even the hokey-sounding is worthy of our attention. He has spent four decades studying and trying to treat the effects of the worst atrocities we inflict on one another: war, rape, incest, torture and physical and mental abuse. He has written more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on psychological trauma. Trained as a psychiatrist, he treats more than a dozen patients a week in private practice — some have been going to him for many years now — and he oversees a nonprofit clinic in Boston, the Trauma Center, that treats hundreds more. If there's one thing he's certain about, it's that standard treatments are not working. Patients are still suffering, and so are their families. We need to do better.
精神运动疗法目前既没有在临床实践中广泛实施，也没有得到临床研究的支持。事实上，大多数执业精神科医生恐怕都不会看它第二眼。它听起来就像做戏，而且还是由舞蹈演员创立的。但范德科尔克相信，舞者——以及乐手和演员——在促进精神创伤的愈合方面可能的确有过人之处，值得精神科医生借鉴，这个方法虽然有些矫揉造作，但仍然值得关注。他花了40年的时间，来研究人们施加在彼此身上最惨痛的暴行，比如战争、强奸、乱伦、拷打，以及生理和心理的虐待所造成的影响，并尝试进行治疗。他撰写了100多篇关于心理创伤的经过同行评议的文章。而且，作为一名训练有素的精神科医生，他的私人诊所每周都接诊数十名患者——其中有些人找他看病已有多年。此外，他还负责着位于波士顿的一家名为“创伤中心”(Trauma Center)非营利性诊所，那里还为另外数百名患者提供诊治。如果有一件事是他可以断言的，那就是：常规的治疗方法不管用。患者们仍然痛苦不堪，他们的家人也不能幸免。我们还需要做得更好才行。
Van der Kolk takes particular issue with two of the most widely employed techniques in treating trauma: cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy. Exposure therapy involves confronting patients over and over with what most haunts them, until they become desensitized to it. Van der Kolk places the technique "among the worst possible treatments" for trauma. It works less than half the time, he says, and even then does not provide true relief; desensitization is not the same as healing. He holds a similar view of cognitive behavioral therapy, or C.B.T., which seeks to alter behavior through a kind of Socratic dialogue that helps patients recognize the maladaptive connections between their thoughts and their emotions. "Trauma has nothing whatsoever to do with cognition," he says. "It has to do with your body being reset to interpret the world as a dangerous place." That reset begins in the deep recesses of the brain with its most primitive structures, regions that, he says, no cognitive therapy canaccess. "It's not something you can talk yourself out of." That view places him on the fringes of the psychiatric mainstream.
范德科尔克尤其对创伤治疗中最常用的两种方法持有异议：认知行为疗法（cognitive behavioral therapy，简称CBT）和暴露疗法(exposure therapy)。暴露疗法是让患者一遍又一遍地面对最困扰他们的问题，直到他们对此变得麻木。范德科尔克把它贬斥为“最不可能治疗”创伤的方法。它的成功率还不到一半，他说，就算“成功”了也无法提供真正的解脱：脱敏与痊愈是两个不同的概念。他对认知行为疗法，也有类似的看法。认知行为疗法试图通过一种苏格拉底式的对话，帮助患者认识到自己的思想与情绪之间的联系调试不良，从而改变患者的行为。“但创伤与认知可没有一丁点儿关系，”范德科尔克说。“真正的问题在于，创伤改造了你的身体，让你觉得这世界很危险。”这种改造源于我们大脑中最原始结构的深处，认知疗法所无法触及的地带。“这不是你劝解自己说几句就可以解决的。”这些观点令他游离出了精神学主流。
It's not the first time van der Kolk has been there. In the early 1990s, he was a lead defender of repressed-memory therapy, which the Harvard psychologist Richard McNally later called "the worst catastrophe to befall the mental-health field since the lobotomy era." Van der Kolk served as an expert witness in a string of high-profile sexual-abuse cases that centered on the recovery of repressed memories, testifying that it was possible — common, even — for victims of extreme or repeated sexual trauma to suppress all memory of that trauma and then recall it years later in therapy. He'd seen plenty of such examples in his own patients, he said, and could cite additional cases from the medical literature going back at least 100 years.
范德科尔克并不是第一次陷入这种境地。20世纪90年代初，他是记忆抑制治疗(repressed-memory therapy)的一名主要的拥护者。该疗法后来被哈佛大学的心理学家理查德·麦克纳利(Richard McNally)称为“自脑叶切除术时代以来降临到心理健康领域的最大灾难。”在当时的一系列引人注目的性虐待案件中（均与恢复受抑制的记忆密切相关），范德科尔克担任了专家证人，作证称遭受极端或反复性创伤的受害者有可能——甚至普遍——会压抑自己关于那些创伤的所有记忆，直至多年后在治疗中才回想起来。他表示，在自己的患者中见过很多这样的例子，此外，他还能从医学文献中找出此类案例，至少可以回溯100年。
In the 1980s and ‘90s, people from all over the country filed scores of legal cases accusing parents, priests and day care workers of horrific sex crimes, which they claimed to have only just remembered with the help of a therapist. For a time, judges and juries were persuaded by the testimony of van der Kolk and others. It made intuitive sense to them that the mind would find a way to shield itself from such deeply traumatic experiences. But as the claims grew more outlandish — alien abductions and secret satanic cults — support for the concept waned. Most research psychologists argued that it was much more likely for so-called repressed memories to have been implanted by suggestive questioning from overzealous doctors and therapists than to have been spontaneously recalled. In time, it became clear that innocent people had been wrongfully persecuted. Families, careers and, in some cases, entire lives were destroyed.
20世纪80年代和90年代，全美各地涌起了一股性虐诉讼的风潮，人们纷纷指控父母、牧师和日托服务人员犯下了恐怖的性犯罪，并声称，他们是在治疗师的帮助下才刚刚想起来的。一时间，法官和陪审团都被范德科尔克等人的证言说服了。他们直觉感到，人的心灵确实会找一种途径来屏蔽过度痛苦的经历。但随着指控变得越来越稀奇古怪——譬如被外星人绑架或神秘的撒旦邪教之类——支持这一理论的声音日渐衰弱。大多数心理学研究专家认为，与其说是受害者自发地回忆起了这些所谓的“被压抑的记忆”，可能性要大得多的是，过分狂热的医生和治疗师的暗示性提问在他们的头脑中植入了这样的故事。随着时间的推移，事实逐渐浮出水面：的确有无辜的人被错误地起诉了。他们的家庭、事业、甚至在某些情况下整个生活，都被毁于一旦。
After the dust settled in what was dubbed "the memory wars," van der Kolk found himself among the casualties. By the end of the decade, his lab at Massachusetts General Hospital was shuttered, and he lost his affiliation with Harvard Medical School. The official reason was a lack of funding, but van der Kolk and his allies believed that the true motives were political.
待这场日后被称为“记忆之战”的争论尘埃落定之后，范德科尔克自己也付出了代价。90年代末，他在马萨诸塞州总医院(Massachusetts General Hospital)的实验室被关停，还失去了在哈佛医学院(Harvard Medical School)的职位。官方给出的理由是资金不足，但范德科尔克及其支持者认为，真正的动机是政治因素。
Van der Kolk folded his clinic into a larger nonprofit organization. He began soliciting philanthropic donations and honed his views on traumatic memory and trauma therapy. He still believed that repressed memories were a common feature of traumatic stress. Traumatic experiences were not being processed into memories, he reasoned, but were somehow getting "stuck in the machine" and then expressed through the body. Many of his colleagues in the psychiatric mainstream spurned these ideas, but he found another, more receptive audience: body-oriented therapists who not only embraced his message but also introduced him to an array of alternative practices. He began using some of those practices with his own patients and then testing them in small-scale studies. Before long, he had built a new network of like-minded researchers, body therapists and loyal friends from his Harvard days.
范德科尔克将自己的诊所并入了一家规模更大的非营利组织中。他开始募集慈善捐款，并将关注的目标集中在创伤记忆及创伤治疗之上。他仍坚信，记忆抑制是创伤应激的一个普遍特征。范德科尔克解释道，创伤经历并没有被加工成记忆，而是莫名其妙地“卡壳”了，日后才在躯体上表现出来。精神病学的主流研究者大多都对这些理论嗤之以鼻，但范德科尔克在另一个群体中找到了更愿意接受它们的人：身体导向治疗师们不仅欣然接纳了他的观点，还向他介绍了一系列替代疗法。他开始使用其中一些疗法来尝试治疗自己的患者，并在小规模的研究中对他们加以测试。不久，他就与志同道合的研究人员、身体治疗师以及他在哈佛时结交的忠实伙伴建立起了一个新的关系网络。
The group converged around an idea that was powerful in its simplicity. The way to treat psychological trauma was not through the mind but through the body. In so many cases, it was patients' bodies that had been grossly violated, and it was their bodies that had failed them — legs had not run quickly enough, arms had not pushed powerfully enough, voices had not screamed loudly enough to evade disaster. And it was their bodies that now crumpled under the slightest of stresses — that dove for cover with every car alarm or saw every stranger as an assailant in waiting. How could their minds possibly be healed if they found the bodies that encased those minds so intolerable? "The single most important issue for traumatized people is to find a sense of safety in their own bodies," van der Kolk says. "Unfortunately, most psychiatrists pay no attention whatsoever to sensate experiences. They simply do not agree that it matters."
这群人秉持着一个简洁有力的观念：精神创伤的治疗应该通过身体而不是通过心理进行。很多病例中，受到严重侵犯的是患者的身体，是他们的身体辜负了他们的期望——腿跑得不够快，手臂抗拒得不够有力，呼救的声音还不够大，以至于他们未能逃脱魔爪。如今，同样是他们的身体屈服于哪怕最轻微的压力之下——一听到汽车防盗器的鸣叫声就会慌忙躲闪，每见到一个陌生人就觉得那是一个蓄势待发的攻击者。如果容纳思想的躯体如此不堪重负，那他们的心灵又怎么可能会痊愈？“对于创伤受害者而言，唯一最重要的问题就是要让自己的身体找到安全感，”范德科尔克说。“不幸的是，大多数精神科专家对感官体验都不屑一顾。他们根本就不觉得这有什么重要。”
That van der Kolk does think it matters has won him an impressive and diverse fan base. "He's really a hero," says Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. "He's been extraordinarily courageous in confronting his own profession and in insisting that we not discount the bodily symptoms of traumatized people as something that's ‘just in their heads.' "
范德科尔克对身体感受的重视为他赢得了背景各异的众多粉丝。“他是一个真正的英雄，”北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校(University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)的精神病学教授史蒂芬·波格斯(Stephen Porges)表示。“他一直表现出大无畏的态度，挑战自己的学术圈子，并始终坚持不应简单地认定创伤受害者存在身体症状‘仅仅是脑筋出了问题'。”
These days, van der Kolk's calendar is filled with speaking engagements, from Boston to Amsterdam to Abu Dhabi. This spring, I trailed him down the East Coast and across the country. At each stop, his audience comprised the full spectrum of the therapeutic community: psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, art therapists, yoga therapists, even life coaches. They formed long lines up to the podium to introduce themselves during coffee breaks and hovered around his table at lunchtime, hoping to speak with him. Some pulled out their cellphones and asked to take selfies with him. Most expressed similar sentiments:
连日来，范德科尔克的日程表被约得满满的，演讲地点从波士顿到阿姆斯特丹，再到阿布扎比。今年春天，我跟随他的脚步，走遍了东海岸和全美各地。每到一站，捧场的观众均遍及治疗领域的方方面面：精神科医生、心理学家、社会工作者、艺术治疗师、瑜伽治疗师，乃至生活教练。在讲座的中间休息时间，他们排成长队逐一到讲台上去做自我介绍，午餐时还会在他的桌子附近徘徊，希望能和他搭话。一些人掏出手机，想要与他合影留念。很多人表达了诸如此类的观点：
Thank you so much for what you said about this treatment, that therapy, those studies.
非常感谢您宣讲了关于这种治疗、疗法或研究的信息。
Your research on cutting, child sexual abuse, family violence confirms what I have seen in my own patients, or experienced myself, for decades now.
您关于自我割伤、儿童期性虐待和家庭暴力的研究证实了过去几十年来我从自己的患者或者亲身经历中所见证的事实。
Can you help me?
您可以帮助我吗？
Van der Kolk's entire life has been a study in human trauma. He was born in The Hague in the summer of 1943, three years into the German occupation of the Netherlands and one year before the great Dutch famine, when a military blockade cut off food and fuel shipments to the country's western provinces and more than 20,000 people starved to death. His father was imprisoned in a Nazi work camp. According to van der Kolk family lore, his mother had to ride her bike to the hospital when she went into labor with him, and his first birthday cake was made of tulip bulbs because there was hardly any flour.
范德科尔克自己的整个人生就好像一项关于人类创伤的研究。1943年的夏天，他在海牙出生。这是德国占领荷兰的第三年，次年，军事封锁切断了通往荷兰西部省份的粮食和燃料补给，导致逾2万人饿死，史称“冬季饥荒”。他的父亲被囚禁在纳粹集中营里。按照范德科尔克家族中的传说，他的母亲快要分娩的时候不得不自己骑自行车到医院，而他的第一个生日蛋糕是用郁金香球茎做的，因为当时基本上没有面粉。
He was a weak and scrawny boy, but daring nonetheless. Ask him about his childhood, and he will tell you about playing amid the bombed-out ruins of his native city. Nearly everyone around him was deeply traumatized. His neighbors on either side were Holocaust survivors. His mother did not enjoy motherhood; she was pulled out of school at 14 to care for her father and then pulled away from a satisfying career to assume her wifely duties. By the time Bessel, her middle child, was old enough to know her, she had grown bitter and cold. His father was an executive at Royal Dutch Shell, and despite being a devout Protestant and dedicated pacifist, he suffered violent rages and inflicted them on his children. In his new book, "The Body Keeps the Score," which comes out this fall, van der Kolk mentions being locked in the basement as a little boy for what he describes as "normal 3-year-old offenses" and hating himself for being too puny to fight back.
范德科尔克是一个骨瘦如柴的孱弱男孩，但这丝毫没有减损他的勇敢。如果问起他的童年往事，他会告诉你在故乡城市遭受轰炸后的废墟上玩耍的故事。他周围几乎每个人都遭受了深深的创伤。左右的邻居都是犹太人大屠杀的幸存者。他的母亲一点也不乐意当妈妈；14岁的时候她就辍学照顾自己的父亲，之后又被迫离开了自己喜爱的职业以承担身为人妻的责任。在家里的第二个孩子贝塞尔懂事之前，她的性格已经变得刻薄而冷漠。范德科尔克的父亲是荷兰皇家壳牌集团(Royal Dutch Shell)的高管。尽管他是一名虔诚的新教徒，也是忠实的和平主义者，但盛怒之下他也会在孩子们身上泄愤。在秋天将要面世的新书《身体记得》(The Body Keeps the Score)中，范德科尔克提到，当他还是个小男孩时，曾经因为“正常的3岁孩子都会惹的祸”而被关在地下室里，只能怨恨自己太弱小，无力反抗。
As a teenager, he began traveling on his own. He liked to hitchhike into France. On one such trip, as he passed a monastery, he heard the chanting of monks and was so taken with the sound that he asked the driver to let him off there. He spent the rest of that summer, and the following Easter break, and the summer after that, at the monastery contemplating monkhood. The abbot took a liking to him and promised that if he joined the order, they would send him to Geneva for medical school. "I seriously considered it," he told me. But in the end, a youthful thirst for adventure beat out any yearning he might have felt for quiet meditation, and he chose the University of Hawaii instead. "I still have some spiritual feelings," he says. "I believe that all things are connected. But organized religion gives me the creeps."
十几岁的时候，他开始独自旅行。他喜欢搭便车到法国去。在一次这样的旅行中，他在途经一所修道院时听到修道士们诵经的声音，并为之深深打动，于是请求司机让他在那里下车。他在那所修道院度过了当年夏天剩下的所有时间，然后是次年的复活节假期，以及之后的又一个夏天，甚至考虑要不要成为一名修道士。修道院院长对他很有好感，并承诺如果他加入修会，他们就送他到日内瓦读医学院。“我认真考虑过这个提议，”他告诉我。但最终，年轻的心对冒险的渴望战胜了他对安静冥想的向往，于是他选择了夏威夷大学(University of Hawaii)。“我仍然有一些精神感应，”他说。“我相信万事万物都彼此关联。但组织有序的宗教让我浑身发毛。”
And so in 1962, he came to the United States and made his way from the University of Hawaii to the University of Chicago to Harvard Medical School, where he posed to science and medicine all of his many questions about the horrors of human nature and the miracles of human resilience. "The human species is messed up," he says. "We make the same mistakes over and over, and I'm deeply curious about why that is. Why do we keep doing things that we know are horrible and will have terrible consequences?"
就这样，1962年，范德科尔克来到了美国，并先后就读于夏威夷大学、芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)和哈佛医学院。在这里，他将自己关于人性中恐怖的一面，以及人类神奇的适应和恢复能力的许多问题，摆在了科学和医学面前。“人类这个物种可真是一团糟，”他说。“我们总是一遍又一遍地犯同样的错误。我真好奇这究竟是为什么。为什么我们明知道会酿成大祸，惹来不可收拾的后果，却还是会一意孤行？”
One of van der Kolk's first jobs out of school was as a staff psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs clinic in Boston; he arrived there in 1978, in time for the influx of Vietnam veterans. "The waiting list to see a doctor was a mile long," he says. "And the clinic's walls were pocked full of fist imprints."
离开学校后，范德科尔克的头几份工作里包括在退伍军人事务部下属的一家波士顿诊所担任精神科医师。他入职时正值1978年，越战老兵洪水一般地涌来。“等候看诊的队伍足有一英里长，”他说。“诊所的墙上到处是被拳头打出来的印记。”
The first thing van der Kolk noticed about his new patients was how utterly stuck in the past they were. Even the older veterans from World War II seemed to vacillate between one of two states: immersion in their wartime experiences or lifeless disengagement. In Rorschach tests, every inkblot was a dead baby, a fallen comrade or nothing at all. It was as if war had broken the projector of their imaginations, he says, and their only options were to play one reel over and over or turn the machine off altogether.
在这些新患者身上，范德科尔克首先注意到的一件事是，他们都将自己完全困在过去里。即使是那些从二战战场上归来的老一批的退伍军人也常常在两种状态之间摇摆：或是沉溺于战争经历中无法自拔，或是看破红尘四大皆空。在罗夏测试(Rorschach test)中，他们不是把墨迹看成死去的婴儿或倒下的战友，就是觉得什么都不像。仿佛是他们脑海中的投影仪被战争弄坏了，范德科尔克说，于是他们只能选择把一卷影像翻来覆去地看，或者干脆把机器彻底关掉。
The second thing that struck van der Kolk was how the men managed their own conditions. Almost all of them claimed that highly risky behaviors were capable of yanking them into the present in a way that no form of therapy could (one patient, for example, rode his Harley at breakneck speeds whenever he felt himself swirling into a rage or disconnecting from his surroundings). Van der Kolk's treatment — the only thing he had been taught in medical school — involved getting the men to talk. In both group and one-on-one sessions, he would ask them about their horrible memories, nightmares and troubles at home. But talking didn't seem to help; in some cases, he thought, it made things worse.
令范德科尔克感到震惊的第二件事是这些人控制自己状况的方式。几乎所有人都声称，与任何形式的治疗相比，高风险的行为更可能将他们拉回现实（例如，一名患者称，每当觉得自己快要暴跳如雷或者游离于现实之外时，他就骑着哈雷摩托车玩儿命地飙车）。范德科尔克的治疗手段——也就是医学院唯一教他做的——是让这些人敞开心扉，多多交谈。在小组和一对一的治疗会话中，他都会询问他们很多问题，关于那些可怕的回忆、关于梦魇以及在家里遇到的麻烦等等。但谈话似乎并没什么帮助；甚至在某些病例中，他觉得适得其反。
Van der Kolk scoured the clinic's medical library for books on shell shock and combat fatigue — anything that might help him better understand what he was seeing or give him some clue about how to treat it. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not yet a recognized condition. Then he came across a book at Harvard's Francis A. Countway medical library, "The Traumatic Neurosis of War." It was published in 1941, just before shellshocked American veterans would return from World War II. In its pages, van der Kolk found the first seeds of an idea that would ultimately shape his career: The nucleus of neurosis is physioneurosis. In other words, he thought, the root of what would eventually be called PTSD lay in our bodies.
范德科尔克翻遍了诊所的医学图书馆中关于炮弹休克症(shell shock)和战斗疲劳症(combat fatigue)的书籍，寻找可能帮助他更好地了解患者症状的任何信息，或者有助于他进行治疗的任何提示。在那个时代，创伤后应激障碍还未被公认为一种疾病。后来，他在哈佛的弗朗西斯·A·康特韦医学图书馆(Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine)里发现了一本书：《战争的创伤性神经官能症》(The Traumatic Neurosis of War)。该书出版于1941年，正好是在饱受炮弹休克症困扰的美国老兵从第二次世界大战中归来之前。在这本书中，范德科尔克找到了一些最初的灵感。这些灵感最终指明了他职业生涯的方向：神经官能症的核心在于躯体性神经官能症。换句话说，他认为，日后所称的PTSD的根源深埋在人类的身体之中。
This meshed perfectly with what van der Kolk was seeing in his patients. In addition to their nightmares and hallucinations, many of them had a host of physical ailments, including headaches, fatigue, digestive troubles and insomnia. When he tried accessing their traumas in therapy, they often became jittery, broke into cold sweats or shut down. The book, van der Kolk said, did not offer any suggestions for treatment, but it did give him a starting point. In the two decades that followed, he made a careful study of all his patients' physiological symptoms. And in 1994, not long before his Harvard lab was shuttered, he wrote a paper in The Harvard Review of Psychiatry summarizing all he had learned. Traumatic stress, it seemed, triggered a cascade of physiological catastrophes that affected almost every major system in the body.
这与范德科尔克在患者身上的所见所闻完全吻合。除了噩梦和幻觉，许多患者还遭受着众多生理症状的折磨，包括头痛、疲劳、消化系统疾患和失眠等。当他在治疗中试图触及他们的创伤时，他们往往一下子就变得如同惊弓之鸟一般，浑身冷汗涔涔或者将自己完全封闭起来。范德科尔克表示，虽然这本书并没有提供任何治疗建议，但给了他一个起点。在接下来的20年里，他仔细研究了他所有患者的生理症状。1994年，就在他在哈佛的实验室被关闭前不久，他撰写了一篇论文总结了自己的所有发现，并发表在《哈佛精神病学评论》(The Harvard Review of Psychiatry)上。创伤应激似乎可以触发一连串的生理性灾难，几乎影响到身体的所有主要系统。
Eugene was on military leave in San Francisco, about halfway through his tour of duty, when he first realized something was wrong. The bay was cool and breezy; people were walking around in parkas and hoodies. But he was sweating profusely. He thought his months in the desert had maybe activated some weird sweat gene that needed time to turn itself off. He figured it would pass eventually. It didn't. By the time he came home for good, sweat was the least of his problems. He was seeing dead bodies on the side of the road. And he could not stop going to the bathroom. At his first post-military job in the corporate offices of a large bank, he went to the bathroom so often that he was sure his co-workers wondered what was wrong with him.
尤金第一次意识到自己出了问题时，他的服役期差不多已经过半，当时正在旧金山军事休假。海湾天气凉爽，微风拂面；四周漫步的人们都身着风雪大衣和连帽衫。但他自己却满头大汗。他一度以为这是因为数月来自己在沙漠中的生活，激活了某些与出汗有关的奇特基因，需要过一段时间它们才会自行关闭。他估计慢慢就会好起来的。但事实并非如此。等他彻底退役回家时，他才发现，出汗只是个最最微不足道的问题。他出现了幻视，看到路边堆积着尸体。他需要不停地去卫生间。他退伍后的第一份工作是在一家大银行的总部办公室任职，由于他去洗手间太过频繁，他敢肯定同事们都怀疑他有毛病。
