A paper published recently in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience is making some waves in trauma circles, and for good reason. Written by Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, and Karl Friston, it takes direct aim at one of the most influential ideas in modern trauma psychology: that trauma is stored in the body. The title alone is a provocation: \u201cThe Body Does Not Keep the Score.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before clinicians and clients start questioning everything they\u2019ve built around somatic approaches to trauma, it\u2019s worth understanding what the paper actually argues \u2014 and maybe even more importantly, what it doesn\u2019t. Despite the dramatic framing, this is less a takedown of Bessel van der Kolk than an argument about mechanism and metaphor.<\/p>\n
What Van der Kolk Argues<\/p>\n
Bessel van der Kolk\u2019s 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<\/a> experiences are not simply abstract thoughts floating around in the mind waiting to be corrected by better cognition<\/a>. Trauma shows up physiologically. It arrives as panic<\/a> before language \u2014 as a tightening chest, as hypervigilance, as exhaustion, or as the inability to fully exhale.<\/p>\n For decades, psychology had become increasingly mind-focused and, at times, aggressively scientistic \u2014 reducing human beings into detached objects to be measured rather than lived realities to be encountered. The body often became secondary to cognition, information processing, distorted thoughts, and neurotransmitters. Van der Kolk\u2019s work helped rebalance that conversation. His core argument was not that trauma literally lives in bodily tissue independent of the nervous system<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n And if you actually read the new paper carefully, the authors largely acknowledge this. They explicitly note that Van der Kolk discusses \u201cprefrontal-limbic interactions, interoception, embodied cognition,\u201d and draws heavily from Antonio Damasio\u2019s somatic marker framework. In other words, yes, of course, Van der Kolk understands that the nervous system mediates bodily experience.<\/p>\n What the authors are objecting to is not really Van der Kolk\u2019s clinical model, but an increasingly literalized cultural interpretation of it.<\/p>\n And to be fair, that interpretation does exist. Trauma language has increasingly become mixed with social media<\/a> neuroscience, wellness culture, and overly simplistic biological claims. Somewhere along the way, metaphors that were clinically useful sometimes began getting treated as literal anatomical explanations. The authors are pushing back against the idea that trauma is physically stored in non-innervated tissue independent of the brain and nervous system.<\/p>\n What the New Framework Proposes<\/p>\n Instead, the Frontiers authors propose a predictive-processing framework. In this model, the brain is not a passive recorder of reality but an active prediction machine. After trauma, the brain becomes excessively confident that danger is ongoing. Threat predictions become over-weighted. Hypervigilance, flashbacks, and panic emerge because the nervous system becomes trapped in self-confirming loops: predicting danger, interpreting bodily arousal as proof of danger, and then using that arousal to reinforce the original prediction. The body participates in trauma, the authors write, \u201cbut as messenger, not archive.\u201d There\u2019s nothing in Van der Kolk\u2019s work that would disagree with this.<\/p>\n Where the paper becomes genuinely interesting is in its discussion of \u201cmetastability,\u201d which refers to the brain\u2019s healthy ability to fluidly move between different network states depending on context. In simpler language: flexibility. A healthy nervous system can shift between vigilance and rest, focus and openness<\/a>, action and stillness. Trauma narrows that flexibility. The system becomes increasingly organized around threat detection.<\/p>\n Clinically, this is a remarkably resonant description of trauma. Many survivors recognize immediately that trauma is not only fear<\/a> \u2014 it is rigidity. The inability to return to spontaneity, curiosity, creativity<\/a>, or play. The sense that the nervous system has become stuck in a narrow range of responses organized around danger.<\/p>\n The paper\u2019s most novel \u2014 though admittedly still speculative \u2014 proposal is that flow states may help restore this lost flexibility. Flow refers to those deeply absorbing states where action and awareness merge: surfing, dancing, climbing, music, athletics, immersive creative work. According to the authors, flow may temporarily increase the brain\u2019s capacity for adaptive reorganization and help restore the flexibility that trauma disrupts.<\/p>\n Importantly, the authors are appropriately cautious about overstating this claim. They acknowledge that the theory remains preliminary and that the core idea \u2014 that PTSD<\/a> specifically involves reduced metastability, which flow can restore \u2014 has not yet been directly proven in trauma populations. That kind of transparency is graceful and worth noting.<\/p>\n At the same time, the framework opens up genuinely exciting possibilities for trauma treatment. It may help explain why so many seemingly different interventions can facilitate healing: EMDR, mindfulness<\/a>, exercise, psychedelic-assisted therapy<\/a>, somatic approaches, relational safety, movement practices, or creative immersion. These interventions may all, in different ways, help restore flexibility to a nervous system that has become rigidly organized around threat.<\/p>\n In that sense, the paper may ultimately function less as a rejection of embodied trauma work and more as an attempt to refine its underlying mechanisms.<\/p>\n Cancel Culture in Trauma Research<\/p>\n This distinction is important because there is a growing tendency in trauma discourse to frame theoretical refinement as total invalidation. A framework becomes popular. Clinicians and survivors find it useful. Then comes a backlash cycle in which the theory is flattened into its most extreme interpretation and publicly dismissed wholesale.<\/p>\n