Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

I really disliked The Body Keeps the Score. But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.

I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution. Somatic experiences might help them.

To be honest, reading the book was more helpful than critiquing whether or not my testosterone levels were too low as a 11-year-old, or if I had elevated inflammation because of my diet. Perhaps I'm biased.

This is an interesting point.

Every book doesn't have to be for everyone universally. It's kind of binary to where we might not catch ourselves thinking that way.

It could work for a specific group of people who might have an outsized positive experience and review of it.

>> I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution.

I agree. Like diets, whatever works for you is the "right" answer. At lot of psychological theory can be thought of as just a model to help you make changes regardless of the physical validity of the model.

> But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.

The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.

For some people, this is true. Identifying and addressing trauma is helpful.

Many conditions can occur without a traumatic root or trigger, though. For people trying to understand and improve their condition, falling into one of these trauma books sends them down a path of trying to force their problem to fit the trauma mold so they can use the trauma tools.

I've written on HN before about how one of the more famous trauma influencers and frequent podcast guests does this (I'm not going to name him because it triggers reactive downvotes and attacks from his fans and I don't want to debate that): He starts searching for "trauma" in his patients' past to use as a starting point for therapy. If he can't find anything he goes back further and further, until arriving at birth. Birth, he claims, is a deeply traumatic experience that can cause issues later in life like relationship problems, attention issues at work, and so on. In this way, everyone who has ever existed now qualifies for trauma therapy because everyone was born, and therefore everyone has trauma that might explain all of their problems in this world.

The conflict of interest is obvious: Once they get a taste of book sales, podcast appearances, or social media fame it becomes against their best interests to narrowly define their practice to classic textbook trauma. So to maximize their appeal, they redefine trauma to be something much simpler such that everyone qualifies (to buy their book). This does a disservice to people with PTSD and really dilutes the concept of these psychiatric terms.

Indeed, if it works for you, great. What’s at issue here is whether you put the book that worked for you in the “science” section or the “fiction” section of the bookstore.

The mind-body link is too important to get the causality wrong and The Body Keeps Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.

I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.

For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.

I'm glad to hear how well this worked for your cousin! I don't eat breakfast often enough.

I specifically wanted to touch on the cycle of trauma & ADHD that's discussed in the article.

> That is, the ADHD leads to very negative experiences. Having had negative experiences (trauma) doesn’t lead to ADHD.

I think integrating traumatic experiences can have a lot of benefits to people, especially in the absence of easy fixes - as far as I know there's not really a smoking gun for ADHD, or borderline, etc. I'd argue the causality matters a bit less here. I say this even though I genuinely hated the fatalistic nature of the Body Keeps the Score, but I think Everett is a bit too quick to discard that the mind is relevant at all. I'd love to be proven wrong.

At least for myself, I've noticed increased well-being / reduced trauma responses when I avoid relationships that cause me a lot of stress, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly. But my baseline disposition is still there, and it's hard to untangle whether or not that's from trauma or from my body.

Everett argues that it's probably just my body (low T / high inflammation / too sensitive?) and I don't think that's very actionable. I'd argue that mind-body link goes in both directions, but that's purely anecdotal.

I also really liked softwaredoug's take on Adverse Childhood Experiences in the thread above.

> The Body Keeps [the] Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.

No it isn't. You might have interpreted it that way, but there's no such assertion. Quite the opposite in fact: the book details therapies like yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback, and somatic experiencing; each demonstrating body to mind causality.

This is really interesting on the ADHD side. For me, I’m pretty sure the traumatic experiences did lead to the ADHD. My mom kept all of my report cards and you can see exactly where it started. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was 36 or 37. I made it through undergrad (barely) and grad school (kicked ass in the challenging courses, took 6 years to finish an MSc thesis). After my diagnosis, I can retrospectively see a lot of ways my life could have been different if I’d known earlier but I have essentially no trauma caused by the ADHD traits other than a few failed relationships in my 20s.

Lying to people is never useful, look at the history of religion it always becomes a breeding ground of gross exploitation. If people are going to help themselves and others they have to be given tools that can work.

> The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.

You could replace trauma here and start describing most self books or even some business or leadership books. At least some I have read over the last 35 years.

I bet that social media, influence culture, etc makes it easier to reach a wider audience so the problem is larger or maybe just more obvious and definitely speeds up and feedback loop that seems to bottom out to rent seeking in some cases.