The Body Keeps the Score — Except When It Doesn't

There's a sentence that's been living rent-free in wellness culture for about a decade now: the body keeps the score. It comes from Bessel van der Kolk's 2014 book of the same name, and it changed how a lot of people, including clinicians, think about trauma.

It also got completely mangled in the process.

Here's what you probably think it means: tight hips mean stored grief. A stiff neck is unprocessed anger. Your chronic fatigue is your nervous system "holding" something you haven't released yet. Buy this breathwork course! Try this somatic release sequence! Your body is an archive, and healing is excavation.

The Dance by Henri Matisse

Or, a bunch of people whose body is not keeping the score?

Except that's not what the book actually says.

A paper published this spring in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, co-authored by Karl Friston, argues that the body does not, in fact, keep the score. And a lot of headlines ran with that as a takedown of van der Kolk. That's also not what the paper says. But clickbait's gonna clickbait, and because we're all so overwhelmed, we don't look further.

What's actually happening here is a fight about a metaphor that got too literal, and who gets to profit from that literalization.

What van der Kolk actually meant by "the body keeps the score"

Van der Kolk's argument was always neurobiological. Trauma changes your physiology including your autonomic nervous system, your felt sense of safety, and your capacity to regulate. It shows up in the body not because it's buried in your fascia, but because your nervous system is involved in everything: your heart rate, your muscle tension, your gut response and your ability to breathe fully. His point was that you cannot think your way out of trauma because it operates below cognition. The body is implicated. That's real.

What he was not saying: that every somatic symptom maps onto a specific trauma, that healing means finding and releasing whatever's stored where, or that your body is a filing cabinet of unfinished emotional business. He's also not saying that these autonomic nervous system changes are causing permanent damage — he's simply saying that bodily sensations offer data and that working through trauma means using that data appropriately.

What the new paper means by "the body does not keep the score"

Think about how your brain works when something scares you. It doesn't just react, it also learns. It starts expecting danger in situations that resemble the original one. The resemblance isn't always situational; sometimes it's emotional. That's useful when the threat is real. But in the case of unprocessed trauma, the brain gets stuck in that expecting mode. It keeps predicting danger even when none is present. And your body follows along — heart racing, muscles bracing, stomach dropping — because your body is always responding to what your brain is telling it. That's not the body storing trauma, or "keeping the score." That's the body doing exactly what it's supposed to do, just in response to a signal that's misfiring.

The practical difference is significant. If trauma were actually stored in your tissues, healing would mean excavating it — finding where it lives and releasing it through the very best deep tissue massage you can find. For the record, I do love a deep tissue massage — but that's not what this research is talking about. If trauma is a pattern your nervous system keeps running on a loop, then healing looks different. It's about giving your nervous system enough new experience that the loop finally updates. Safety isn't a concept you understand intellectually in your thinking brain. It's something your body has to actually feel, repeatedly, over time.

And here's the part that actually gives me some hope: wildly different treatments all seem to produce real results with trauma. Talk therapy, EMDR, somatic techniques, relational treatments — these look nothing alike, but they work. This is because what they actually work on is giving your nervous system a lived experience that it can come out of high alert. Not excavating an archive, but restoring safety to a system that got stuck in a state of alarm. Once we realize that prolonged safety is possible, we can settle the alarm system.

The part no one's talking about

Neither van der Kolk nor Friston is the problem here. The problem is what happens to nuanced clinical ideas when they pass through the wellness industry's content pipeline. A useful metaphor becomes a literal claim. A literal claim becomes a product. The product gets sold to people who are already exhausted and already looking for answers, with the implicit message that if they just do enough somatic work, they'll finally release whatever their body is holding.

This is where it connects to what I keep writing about in this newsletter. Wellness culture has a structural interest in turning systemic and neurobiological phenomena into individual self-improvement projects. Burnout gets reframed as something you heal with the right recovery routine. Trauma gets reframed as something stored in your body that you personally need to release. The focus stays on you — your practices, your progress, your unfinished work — and away from the conditions that created the problem in the first place.

Taking care of yourself honestly means being willing to ask whether the framework you're using to understand your experience is true, or whether it's just a story that keeps you busy and keeps someone else's Substack funded.

So, your Downshifting Journal Prompt today is just an open question.

What are you telling yourself about the connection between your body and your emotions?

Your nervous system is real. Your somatic symptoms are real. The science of how trauma works in the body is more interesting and more hopeful than the wellness version suggests. You're not an archive of unprocessed experiences waiting to be opened. You're a system that got stuck, and systems can move again.

Hit me up with your thoughts and reply if this resonates. I love your emails and I read them all.

Till next time,

S

Misc. Musings

1.Today is Juneteenth — a reminder that freedom on paper and freedom in the body are not the same thing, and that the gap between them is where so much of what I write about lives. Racial trauma doesn't just live in history; it lives in nervous systems, in hypervigilance, in the exhaustion of navigating spaces that weren't designed with your safety in mind. If you want to go deeper, Resmaa Menakem's My Grandmother's Hands is the most body-centered, clinically grounded thing I've read on this — it reframes racial healing as somatic work, not just ideological work, and it's been sitting on my desk for years.

2.In the spirit of healing, if you watched the Knicks this season, you already know something about collective joy as a survival strategy. There's something worth paying attention to in what happens when a city, a notoriously exhausted, chronically overstimulated city , collectively loses its mind over a basketball team. That's not just sports, that’s people remembering what it feels like to be in something together, to celebrate in public, to need each other's reactions to make the moment real. We don't talk enough about communal joy as a nervous system reset. We should.

3.I had the absolute pleasure of attending my dear friend Dr. Cassidy’s book launch for her book, Mom Needs a Moment. She talked to a room full of moms about her own challenges and the power of margins and spaces where we can tend to ourselves better in order to show up for others. Her ability to disarm her audience with her own vulnerability and then move them to regulation through her expertise is relational healing in action. We are unlikely friends—she’s a sunny California girl who doesn’t drink coffee and I’m, well, me. But I’m proud to know her and to recommend her book to all of you.