This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic, which doesn't seem to agree with mainstream science (setting aside Body Keeps the Score)

> That is, trauma doesn’t lead to dysfunction or abnormal brain function, physiology or hormonal regulation. Rather, an unhealthy person may be more susceptible to trauma.

What has been documented about Adverse Childhood Experiences doesn’t agree with this. There is copious evidence that the presence of ACEs, independent of other factors, leads to poor health outcomes [1]

It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma [2]

There's also data indicating CPTSD, PTSD, and Borderline are distinct disorders [3]

1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

2 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5858954/

3 - https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-p...

I really disliked The Body Keeps the Score. But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.

I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution. Somatic experiences might help them.

To be honest, reading the book was more helpful than critiquing whether or not my testosterone levels were too low as a 11-year-old, or if I had elevated inflammation because of my diet. Perhaps I'm biased.

So I had a therapist give me EMDR about 5 years ago for little-T trauma. I have no idea whether EMDR is scientifically back or not or whether trauma is overdiagnosed, I just know it worked for me.

But what she said about the therapy (since I always want to know how everything works) is that trauma is basically emotional memory. Y’know how you might have a visual memory about how a certain place looked like when you visited, or sensual memory of how a favorite food tasted, or muscle memory for how to ride a bike, or cognitive memory of how to solve a math problem? The same thing happens with emotions - they get stored away in the brain’s memory centers and can intrude on your present at some later time.

But emotion, by definition, is “that which causes motion”. So if you have a bunch of traumatic memories (oftentimes not even with visual or cognitive components - mine didn’t have them), those emotions continue to influence how you behave for years afterwards. That’s what memory is.

And the point of EMDR is that for some unknown reason, the act of focusing your eyes across the parts of your visual field controlled by different hemispheres forces those emotional memories back into consciousness, where you can then recast and retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is implanting false memories - that’s the point - but you want false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no longer serving you well in the present.

> Book falls apart

My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.

Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.

It's a soft science, it is what it is.

I wasn't very impressed by the reporting quality in this article, but it seems as though there are some other reviewers of the book were much more thorough in their critique. Emi Nietfeld writing for Mother Jones has more detail and actually contacted some experts for comment: https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-...

From my understanding of some of the most recent research, the body probably does "keep score" - but how that happens and who is predisposed to how much "scoring", it very poorly understood: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11449801/ / https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02785... / https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23768722/

I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.

Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.

Pop-trauma allows people to continue to believe "dreams can be achieved through hard work" while not blaming themselves for not achieving their dreams.

The reason I'm not living the dream could be that it's impossible, or I haven't tried hard enough. I don't want to believe either of those. I'd rather believe that something happened to me in my past that rewired my brain to stifle my full potential. Then I could still hope to someday achieve my dreams, while not doing anything to progress towards them.

It's not popular because it's right. It's popular because it's so, so appealing.

The book has a lot of flaws. The trauma industry that's grown up around it and similar work has a lot of flaws. The post has a lot of flaws.

They're all quite confident, though.

Agreed. I recently started a very physical job after decades of laptop work. Your personality changes quick, anxiety levels etc, as your body adapts. This is at 54 after 3 decades as an IC writing software. Lifestyle is by far the biggest driver, the body’s record is read-write memory rather than write-once.

This article is a midwit dismissal; it may contain valid corrections but it is ignorant on the core topic at hand. This is a shame, because it is extremely interesting and under-reported topic!

The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles, and organs, not just in conscious memory."

The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the needle, [I did] more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip." (Thank you for sharing, neom.)

I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening.

People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the book contains some of that, but its titular observation is fascinating, true, and maybe even useful!

I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.

I am grateful that I had not, in fact, heard of this book. I would like to say I would have rejected the idea, but I'm not certain. And yeah, these criticisms are pretty solid.

There is a podcast, Memory Hole, about the recovered memory movement. There is a lengthy section about this book and the people behind it (not positive)

I haven’t read the book, but I’m almost always suspicious of criticism targeted at books like this. Let’s say I write a textbook about biology and I write the sentence:

“The Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell”

Technically what I’m saying is wrong. What the mitochondria does is so vast and confusing that no sentence like that can ever encompass its role. In fact, even using the word “role” is questionable because it presumes that the mitochondria’s sole function is to work as a team with other organelles/biological structures when in fact biology doesn’t really care about some abstract idea like “team.” All language is derived from analogy, and all analogies are insufficient to describe reality. In fact, mathematicians now agree that even math is an insufficient language. It can’t fully describe the territory. It can only make maps of it, and all maps are only useful because they are compressed and packaged versions of the territory. The question is just, “how much compression is useful?”

We live in a world where science communication is so atrophied that the flat earth, and creationist theories are still in circulation. Scientists have dramatically failed to market their ideas to the masses, despite the fact that these ideas are inherently compelling. To me, the reason why they’ve failed seems obvious: because they’re so busy tearing down science communicators that none of them can ever get a real hold on the public. And why? Because the books they write are at compression level that the scientists arbitrarily deem irresponsible.

This guy wrote a compelling story about the barrier between mind/body. To do that, he must have distributed a viral package of psychological terminology and concepts. It was then distributed to and consumed by millions of people. In all likelihood, the fact that they were excited by this book probably led them to read other books like it. They probably encountered conflicting ideas, questioned them, and looked them up. They probably have a much rounder understanding of these ideas now than they did when they first read them.

Now this other guy writes a story and all it says is “yo that dude was wrong.” How helpful! How useful! And let’s be 100% clear: the person writing this isn’t communicating the absolute truth. They’re also compressing their ideas. In 100 years, I bet you any psychologist that reads both books will shake their head and point out all the flaws in their analogies. Meanwhile, the cycle continues: the scientists tear each other down and the masses continue sacrificing innocent children to appease the blood god.

Meh. I haven't read any of the books the article talks about, but IMO dismissing their entire premise is more unhelpful than any pseudoscientific claim they make.

AFAICT, this is a pop psychology book that tries to make some interesting topics digestible to a mass audience. Topics that are mostly speculative to begin with, and don't have concrete evidence in any direction.

For example, the entire field of epigenetics has been argued to be pseudoscience, and yet there has been some interesting research around it. Related to the topic of stress specifically, and how effects have been observed across generations[1].

Clearly, more research is needed, but to dismiss it as quackery outright wouldn't be helpful. Many ideas that were initially perceived as outlandish eventually lead to a better understanding of the world. Scientific progress depends on people willing to go beyond the boundaries of conventional knowledge, often at the expense of their reputation.

This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177343/

Kind of a silly ending to the article.

>I think Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Mate’s heavy handed trauma narrative is [bad]

followed immediately by

>However if they ‘treat’ their trauma with things like yoga, meditation, psychedelics and have some benefits, it’s very likely they would have had the benefits regardless of whether they viewed it as some sort of trauma treatment or not.

I suppose the author has never heard of placebo effects? Talk about a heavy-handed narrative.

Author also seems to be skeptical of the idea that stress and inflammation can be a major cause of disease in the body. I might just be reading into things, but if that's an accurate assessment on my part, it's wildly inaccurate.

From the article: confusing the chicken for the egg is the same reason Gabor Mate’s view that trauma causes ADHD is mistaken.

I have an opinion in this area.

I worked out a theory about trauma and ADHD. It is that they cohabitate (or operate in) the same area. I suspect they each serve to stunt learning by negatively impacting the reward mechanism that cements learning.

The above notions flow from my considerations of my own abuse, neglect and cognizance issues. I have some confidence that they explain much of my long term learning issues.

Explanation

I have always experienced ADHD as a brain fog that obscures and distorts the details involved in natural learning. During childhood, I required a methodical and rigorous study of the same mundane details that my peers absorbed trivially. When my peers felt reinforcing joy in learning, I felt exhaustion and frustration as I raced to catch up to them. Eventually I could mimic their understanding - but by then they had grown further.

During the catching up, I learned a lot of details and had moments where my reward would kick in. But it was for trivialities - for things I achieved that most children learn w/o notice. My positive expressions here could be confusing and discomforting to peers and others and I learned to suppress those feelings.

Regarding abuse and neglect. They pushed my reward system out, much more directly. I learned to bury responsive joy when I received abuse in response. I abandoned responsive joy when it lead to nothing (instead of needed, nurturing reinforcement).

I will note here that children do not do well when given adult-sized burdens of internalizing emotional systems that, in healthy environments, are openly and freely expressed. Emotional misfires are the predictable result of poor containment.

By adolescence, my reward system was reliably - 1) not there when I needed it and 2) often overly-present at unhelpful times. I mistrusted of one of the best parts of being human.

For me, abuse and ADHD were two persistent vectors toward this one transformative outcome, my broken reward system.

For an epilogue, Adderall has been a late stage, happy-ish outcome to this story. Every day, I reliably get a period of trivially-triggered reward. Into this, I can feed experiences and receive learning and understanding. I often say it is the difference between me receiving a lesson and learning it.

This is much better than no payout at all. However, I am distressed by the many interests (DEA,pols) who regularly attack my meds and want to take this away from me.

Read it a few years back and found some answers. Generational trauma does exists I believe. As for the article I think it claimed the whole theory was BS without much backing arguments

How is this article any better?

Consider the source — the author appears to believe that trauma itself doesn’t truly exist, is not based on physical phenomena or experiences, and is largely a sales idea manufactured by the therapy industry.

This article, and others, are riddled with rhetorical bullshit. E.g., someone on Instagram said that their emotionally distant father caused trauma, so “emotional distance” is added into the causes of trauma, and this is used to diminish the power of “trauma” itself.

This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative.

Regardless of what you think of all this, you gotta appreciate the book title “The Body Does Not Keep the Score”.

Anecdotal, but recently I've done a complete 180 on:

- My diet (Mediterranean), with absolutely zero processed foods.

- Sleep (red light on evenings, no screens 1 hour before sleep).

- Daily exercise (lifting and 30 minutes of zone 5 cardio weekly).

My appreciation for life has skyrocketed, I don't feel like I'm being oppressed by life, and my depression symptoms are gone. I used to think the root cause of it all was a pretty rough childhood. It turns out, it's just 'crap in, crap out.' It has been jarring to me that my inner experience and mental health could so drastically change in such a short amount of time.

So yeah, it's anecdotal, but I'm pretty inclined to agree with this article.

I love the book; I found it immensely useful personally for trauma.

I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it.

I can see why someone might have that opinion. I think the author hasn't met himself yet. As one can only meet and understand another as deeply as they have met themselves. I do wonder if he would gain more awareness of his self after a couple 7g mushroom runs.

Funny, I just recommended Antifragile by Nassim Taleb to my book club, and of course, that idea is pretty much the perfect foil to this.

What I’ve found is that the nature of viral movements (bestselling books, pseudoscience claims, self help, programming movements, architectures, social media phenomena etc) is that the truth or proof for the underlying claim of the viral movement is not important only its widespread virality and ability to spread

Ie the idea has to be convincing enough to spread from person to person as a meme but also have enough armchair level depth to pass the bullshit filters of most reasonable people- ie popularity wins over truth

Most people do not have the intellectual curiosity or time to deeply verify these claims - but inevitably these fads die as they appear..

Clearly this is one example

I thought The Body Keeps The Score was interesting and informative. I made sure to look up counterarguments afterwards, because there were definitely parts that I wasn't so keen on.

Psychology and other social sciences are too multi-variate to speculate on, and the HRB exists so that we don't commit atrocities in the name of properly isolating variables as we poke at the black box we call the human mind. You're never going to get anything right, but we should definitely be referencing surveys of studies instead of single studies. So there's at least one point there for appropriate rigor. Not getting the interpretation of those studies right definitely seems unethical, but so does all of the misconduct stuff Van Der Kolk has been mired in.

It's a disingenuous argument to say that your body doesn't change from a traumatic experience, or that stress doesn't express itself through the body sometimes. It's also problematic to say that because it happens to you doesn't mean you can't work through it and learn to manage it or even control it. What I gleaned from the book is that if I have a physical sensation that I can map to stress or a past experience of trauma, I can understand it, label it, and grow from it.

The book might have some flaws but this article is flat out reactionary drivel.

Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit...

What the research _actually_ suggests is something more like a combination of those pictures. Except that the scientific research isn't framed in terms of "bad behavior". So that alone should give you a clue about where this blog post is coming from.

That image alone exposes the worldview of the person who wrote this, something like this:

~some people are good quality, some people are bad quality. if you're born as a bad quality person, it's something like bad luck / your fault for falling into bad behavior, no wonder you're struggling. you need to work harder but it might just be that you're a dud.~

The Body Keeps the Score is bullshit, but this Substack is even more bullshit. The author criticizes Bessel van der Kolk for failing to prove causation, and then writes this gibberish:

"In the textbook Evolutionary Psychology, the authors explain that a particular hunter gatherer population isn’t as susceptible to PTSD despite being exposed to similarly tragic events. They argue that part of the physiological changes that come along with PTSD are increased inflammation in the body. Thus, the inflammatory nature of a standard western diet may make some people more susceptible to PTSD."

"A 2020 study on Turkana warriors in Kenya found them to be much less likely to develop PTSD-related symptoms compared to US combat vets despite also experiencing gruesome acts in a war zone."

Where is the proof that diet causes PTSD?

Thank you for sharing this!

I read The Body Keeps the Score about 10 years ago after experiencing a particularly traumatic event. I had been searching for answers at the time for how to heal from the event, and someone recommended the book to me.

I had distilled my memory of the book into the intuitive idea represented by the title that the body remembers what happens to it which of course there is some truth to. So my first reaction to the headline was a bit defensive, "of course it's not bullshit!"

But I had forgotten how much emphasis was put on there being significant lasting changes from events that we couldn't even remember.

> The idea that trauma causes long-lasting damage to the brain and or body is central to van der Kolk’s thesis.

> his narrative paints this hopeless picture of trauma victims as being people who most aspects of their lives are “dictated by the imprint of the past.”

And now I remember that when I read the book originally looking for answers to my own traumas, it left me feeling hopeless, overwhelmed and permanently damaged from what I had gone through. I remember thinking that the high stress I was going through at the time was going to leave me permanently struggling with issues like high cortisol and inability to function normally. Absolutely NOT the message I needed at the time.

Ten years on, my brain is normal and healthy, and I don't have any perceptible problems with cortisol or PTSD-like symptoms. I'm living a healthy, normal life, and not walking around with a heavy trauma score in my body.

That's not to say that trauma from my past didn't play a role in making me who I am today, or that I don't still carry some memories of the difficult events. But I've found my brain to be very plastic and to heal and rewrite itself quite well. And all of the measurable markers of brain health, stress hormones, etc are fully back to normal, healthy ranges.

That's just my anecdote, and I also appreciated the thorough scientific analysis in this article!

Probably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is bullshit.

But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.

I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.

[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-no...

Trauma to me means there are ways of responding to painful experiences that can keep you in that painful state for a very long time, and/or make things worse. I recognize that simple fact from my own experiences. In that lens, its helpful to reflect on your responses to painful experiences to stop them from developing into long term traumas. Maybe that's why this book, or at least the title, seems to resonate with people. (I haven't read it)

...But it's also good to know the author of the book was wildly mis-citing things

Kolk was involved in the “memory wars” and repressed memory drama back in the day where people started therapy then suddenly remembered historical abuse by caregivers that in many cases never actually happened (this is a massive simplification DYOR)

Having been involved in the publishing of psychology research I have zero faith in the systems ability to properly control for bullshit.

Trauma informed muppets like Kolk and Gabor Mate are running around spouting absolute bullshit and it’s hurting people, imagine being raised by a parent who read and believed this bullshit, worse still they’ve been to talks by flops like Gabor Mate and are balls deep in whatever viral self help podcast meme is trending…let them

Kolk wrote the article the body keeps the score in 1994 at the height of the memory wars, he spent the next 20 years undeterred, developing and spreading his bullshit and now nearly 30 years later it’s still being talked about and propagated.

https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/alleg...

This person takes specific claims from the book and tries to dispute them, while ignoring that the book’s number one big-picture idea of “trauma is unprocessed emotions and memories physically stored in the body” remains the conceptual grounding for all modern non-cognitive trauma processing methods like EMDR (which are clearly effective, even as we do not fully understand e.g. the neurological mechanism by which the adaptive information processing network functions). He then points you to an older article of his that is behind a paywall.

I have my issues with van der Kolk’s work (I would personally not recommend The Body Keeps The Score to most people), but this is sloppy embarrassing clickbait.

This is a pretty good takedown. It seems that most pop psych these days is around trying to convert people to an external locus of control. It isn't "your fault". I can see why that's appealing to many, though it actually seems somewhat unappealing to me. I'd prefer to believe I have greater control over my own experience of the world. Even if I don't, I think acting as if I do allows me to bias on the side that's beneficial to me.

This blogger is a self-help youtuber hawking testosterone treatments and he's a Jordan Peterson acolyte that believes that DMT let's you speak with aliens.

There's a lot of ad hominem it throws around, which doesn't really bolster the argument. It's a catchy headline but it all depends on who you know and what you talk to them about. There are a lot of fucked up, mal-adjusted people out there, and I should know, Because I'm one of them. But enough about me, nobody has a good sampling of the human experience. There are 8 billion humans alive, and there's no way to get a representational sampling of them in order to have an unbiased view of what humans are like. There's especially no way, because you're trapped in your own human body, which bases your experience of other people. Backpacking as a 21 year old woman is way different than backpacking as a 50 year old man. So the question is, has the book helped more per than it's harmed? I don't know. There are certainly people who read it and drew the wrong conclusions, but there are people who have used it to go on to lead healthy productive fulfilling lives. To reduce the entire work down into a single word, bullshit, is reductive to the point of uselessness. Of course that's the headline and the entire article doesn't won't fit up there. The article's author goes into much more detail but even if you don't like the work, calling it bullshit needs to engage more with what level of bullshittery it is and isn't for the review to come across as anything more than an highly motivated takedown because someone in the author's life used it against them.

Stoicism is the pole that you cannot control the world, but you can control your reactions to it. It's hard work.

The other pole is that you cannot control your reactions, but you can try to control the world. This is much easier to fit into a consumerist framework.

It's safe to assume any grand claims linking specific behavior and the brain are bullshit. Humans don't have the technology yet to make the necessary observations.

citing a paper that says it found “no evidence” of something always seems weak to me in terms of refuting something, I also found no evidence by doing nothing, how do I know the thing you checked or the context in which it was checked is any better than my doing nothing?

not finding something doesn’t seem any more or less convincing…

Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero.

That said, this article is just as bad as the book.

Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body.

Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.

I encourage folks to get more massages if they doubt that there's any causal relationship between these phenomena.

Psychological trauma is one of the more complicated aspects of the human condition.

Because such claims are so hard to verify and so rhetorically potent, I would be in favor of a rule that claims of having been traumatized cannot be presented as evidence in court.

I’m a scientist. I haven’t read “the body keeps the score”. It sounds like pseudoscience.

But, I do recognize the importance of models. Our brains are complex, lacking the capacity to comprehend everything, we make models. Models are incomplete (by definition) and often false. But can still be very useful. Or very useful to some. Where useful means: help someone lead a more fulfilling, better life.

So I try not to judge. Even though I try to seek truth. To be a scientist. I know there are useful models out there.

Haha yeah my wife used to use that always as a nice way to explain why she should be able to punish me at all times for all my “failures”. Lol

Most of psychology doesn't survive past 20 years, the moment someone tries to replicate the results it fails. A lot of the fraud that is happening in medical science at the moment is in Psychology, their methods are unsound and they build entire diseases on foundations made of sand. They repeatedly get caught misrepresenting referenced papers by reviewers but the journals fail to enforce integrity and scientific principles.

People should be very sceptical of any psychological findings that are younger than about 30 years and ideally you want to have seen several replications and done with greater size, rigour and controls. Anything younger than this and certainly anything that hasn't yet been firmly replicated is on balance of probability going to turn out to be wrong or fraud.

> Chances are, you’ve heard of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. At 79,898 reviews, the book has more reviews on Amazon than the first book of A Game of Thrones.

> “The Body Keeps the Score has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting. To date, it’s sold 3 million copies and been translated into 37 languages.”

Wow 3 million copies despite being translated into 37 languages? The Game of Thrones finale had 19 million viewers. I don't know anyone who has heard of this book and even if all of the 3 million copies were sold to Americans, only 1 in 11 of them would have heard of it.