The Body Doesn't Keep the Score?

"The title alone is a provocation: "The Body Does Not Keep the Score.""

"Van der Kolk's 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, genuinely transformed public understanding of trauma. It landed with such force because it articulated something trauma survivors already knew intuitively: traumatic experiences are not simply abstract thoughts floating around in the mind waiting to be corrected by better cognition. Trauma shows up physiologically. It arrives as panic before language - as a tightening chest, as hypervigilance, as exhaustion, or as the inability to fully exhale."

"His core argument was not that trauma literally lives in bodily tissue independent of the nervous system. It was phenomenological, clinical, and neurobiological all at once: traumatic experiences alter physiology, autonomic responses, perception, and sense of safety in ways that cannot be fully healed through cognition alone."

"Despite the dramatic framing, this is less a takedown of Bessel van der Kolk than an argument about mechanism and metaphor."

Trauma is often experienced as physiological responses that occur before language, including panic, chest tightening, hypervigilance, exhaustion, and difficulty fully exhaling. Modern psychology has sometimes emphasized cognition and information processing while treating the body as secondary. A major influence has been the idea that traumatic experiences are stored in the body, which helped shift attention toward how trauma shows up physiologically. The core claim associated with that influence is that traumatic experiences alter physiology, autonomic responses, perception, and the sense of safety, and that cognition alone cannot fully heal these effects. The newer argument focuses on mechanism and metaphor rather than rejecting the clinical reality of bodily symptoms.

Read at Psychology Today