Unburdened by false humility, postmodern trauma activists claim to have understood for the first time what drives all of human suffering
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The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Popular Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong (Michael Scheeringa)11/14/2024
CATEGORY: BOOK REVIEWS  written by Michael S. Scheeringa Read time: 1.9 minutes I wrote The Body Does Not Keep the Score (November 2024) because no one else had published a critical analysis of the claims made by Bessel van der Kolk in The Body Keeps the Score. Given the massive popularity of van der Kolk’s book (reviewed here), and the influence it has on clinical work and social policy, it was amazing that there had been almost no critical analysis of it. It has been one of the most popular books in the world for an amazing eight years and still going strong. My aim was to review the evidence as to whether his claims were true. Book Summary The majority of the 166 pages of text methodically reviews the evidence for 122 claims made in van der Kolk’s book, including 42 claims about neurobiology, 51 claims about treatments, and 29 claims about miscellaneous topics such as child development and memory. These analyses show that van der Kolk’s claims are wrong because he either misrepresented studies, cherry-picked studies that supported only his claims, or made jargon-filled vague statements with no supporting evidence. Contrary to van der Kolk’s claims, I showed that the evidence indicates that any brain differences that exist between individuals with PTSD and those without PTSD pre-existed trauma experiences, and probably serve as vulnerability factors for developing PTSD. Also, the evidence does not support the notion that body-based treatments are superior. In fact, the evidence for his claims is thin to nonexistent. In addition, I addressed crucial topics that van der Kolk ignored. If his theory that trauma damages the brain is correct, what is the mechanism for causing damage? There is a massive amount of research on cortisol and epigenetics that he barely touched. The research on these topics has been unreplicable and far from convincing, which I addressed in a chapter on mechanisms. Also, if his theory that trauma damages the brain is not true, then what explains the research that shows brain differences in individuals with PTSD? He never considers the diathesis stress theory, which is far better supported than any other theory, which I addressed in a chapter on alternative theory. The book includes 265 references for those who wish to consult original sources of the evidence.
My 2021 paper reviewed twenty-five pretrauma prospective studies showing that it is highly unlikely that trauma damages brains [1]. I am also the founder of Trauma Dispatch newsletter. Beyond Neurobiology and Treatment Claims The popularity of van der Volk’s book seems to be due far more to interest in van der Kolk’s neurobiological theory that “the body keeps the score” than to the claims about bodily-based treatments. My conclusions about this neurobiology theory run counter to the consensus in the field among researchers. How could I arrive at such different conclusions? This wrong consensus cannot be simply an honest mistake among very smart people. I addressed this in a chapter on ideology. The premise of van der Kolk’s theory is an ideology that genetics and heredity play no role in creating fixed behavioral traits in humans. His theory depends on human nature being highly malleable, which is appealing to many other aspects of a leftist progressive agenda that have proven extremely popular with a large portion of the population. In this sense, it seems that the popularity of van der Kolk’s book is also about him as a person. The stories of his fighting with psychiatric orthodoxy throughout his career make up a large part of his book. My analyses of this aspect, coupled with his ideological premises, show that The Body Keeps The Score has been popular not because it was about fact-based science, but because it was promoting a certain belief system. REFERENCES 1. Scheeringa MS (2021) Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 30:e1864. doi: 10.1002/mpr.1864 Like Trauma Dispatch? You can subscribe here to a weekly email notice of new posts. Comments are closed.
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