Confusion about the body-based treatment recommendations in The Body Keeps the Score: "Mother Jones" is Against, "Dear Annie" is For

CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE

Mother Jones (left), Annie Lane (right)

Sources: Mother Jones magazine and Creators Syndicate
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
Within a span of two weeks in December 2024, two national outlets published opposite views on the famously controversial treatment recommendations for trauma in Bessel van der Kolk’s bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score. On December 18, Mother Jones magazine published an article titled “What the most famous book about trauma gets wrong,” noting how van der Kolk’s treatment claims are rubbish. On December 31, the advice column Dear Annie highly recommended van der Kolk’s book to a trauma survivor who was desperate after his previous therapists failed to help.
 
Who Did This?
Mother Jones magazine began in 1976. It was named after Mary Harris Jones, a union organizer and socialist. It currently publishes six issues per year and provides daily digital content. Content is highly progressive leftist.
Dear Annie (Annie Lane) is a nationally-syndicated advice columnist in the style of Ann Landers, “Dear Abby,” and others.
 
The Claims
In the Mother Jones article, journalist and book author Emi Nietfeld explored how trauma victims were portrayed by van der Kolk in his popular book. Upon first reading it, Nietfeld felt “gross and ashamed” after noting how van der Kolk treated sexual assault survivors with disdain. When Nietfeld dug deeper, other scientists she spoke to said “van der Kolk mischaracterizes their research and steers survivors away from treatments that might help them.”
 
In Dear Annie, advice was proffered to a 45-year-old male who had suffered childhood traumas. He wrote that he had sought mental health help for 17 years, and gone through five therapists and as many psychiatrists. None of them could help him. Annie suggested that “the five therapists you saw were probably not trained in trauma. You might try and find a somatic therapist.” She had surmised somehow that talk therapy hadn’t worked because he needed to treat his post-traumatic stress “by releasing bodily sensations.” She recommended van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and Dr. Peter Levine's Waking the Tiger.
 
Analysis
Van der Kolk’s book has remained amazingly popular despite his false claim that psychological trauma embeds itself like demon possession into brains, bodies, and souls, as restated in the memorable title “the body keeps the score.” Based on this canard that trauma is entrenched in the body, he advocated ten bodily-based treatments (e.g., yoga, dance, theater, and Levine’s somatic experiencing therapy). Van der Kolk claimed that the best way, nay, the only way to treat trauma is with bodily-based, or somatic, treatments, none of which have decent research support, as I’ve described in detail here.

​These contrasting articles illustrate ongoing confusion for patients and therapists around what to believe about the impact of trauma on the brain and the best therapies.

​The Mother Jones article got it right. While the so-called somatic therapies can help some individuals (as can placebo), there are multiple excellent therapies for PTSD (i.e., cognitive behavioral therapy) that have much firmer evidence bases than somatic therapies. But, as Nietfeld noted, “Because of The Body Keeps the Score’s enormous success, a single perspective has dominated the conversation about trauma over the past decade.”

Nietfeld’s own therapist refused to engage in cognitive behavioral therapy, and cited van der Kolk’s work as one of the reasons.
 
(Disclaimer: I was interviewed by Nietfeld for the Mother Jones article, but I was chopped by the editor for space. I would have been surprised if my criticisms of van der Kolk’s view of human nature as being highly fragile had made it into a progressive leftist, neo-Marxist magazine.)