Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”

So I had a therapist give me EMDR about 5 years ago for little-T trauma. I have no idea whether EMDR is scientifically back or not or whether trauma is overdiagnosed, I just know it worked for me.

But what she said about the therapy (since I always want to know how everything works) is that trauma is basically emotional memory. Y’know how you might have a visual memory about how a certain place looked like when you visited, or sensual memory of how a favorite food tasted, or muscle memory for how to ride a bike, or cognitive memory of how to solve a math problem? The same thing happens with emotions - they get stored away in the brain’s memory centers and can intrude on your present at some later time.

But emotion, by definition, is “that which causes motion”. So if you have a bunch of traumatic memories (oftentimes not even with visual or cognitive components - mine didn’t have them), those emotions continue to influence how you behave for years afterwards. That’s what memory is.

And the point of EMDR is that for some unknown reason, the act of focusing your eyes across the parts of your visual field controlled by different hemispheres forces those emotional memories back into consciousness, where you can then recast and retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is implanting false memories - that’s the point - but you want false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no longer serving you well in the present.

I've had pretty brutal body pain my whole adult life, I saw a lot of different flavours of skelatalmuscular therapy type folks over the years, you name it, I've had it. Around 6/7 years ago I was under a lot of stress with work, some particularly intense interpersonal business stuff to work through and my body pain was at an all time high. I booked an appointment at a random chiropractor near my office first thing in the morning the next day, the guy went to adjust me and then told me that I needed acupuncture first. I told him no because every time I have acupuncture I sob uncontrollably, not from pain, just from reasons I didn't understand, but that the person usually had to stop. He said exactly, I need acupuncture first. He took me to another room in his office, lights out, and stuck some needles in me, no crying, he said he needed to get me crying, moved needles around, found a spot, emotions exploded, crying. He moved the needle, more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip. A bunch of muscles I didn't even know existed let go, and that was the best adjustment I've ever had by a mile. It was actually this experience that lead me to reading the body keeps score (Connie Zweig is good also if this kinda stuff interests you).

(Edit: someone emailed so for posterity, It was Steven Schram E 28th St NYC, no clue if he's still there it was some time ago.)

Thanks for sharing. And yes, once you experience something like that, you don't even need scientific evidence that the body keeps the score -- you've experienced it. You know it the same way you know the sky is blue.

And that's what's frustrating when people want to invalidate the whole thing. They just don't know -- they haven't experienced anything like it. But they act like they do know.

Now obviously, scientific validation of these things is important to better understand causes, mechanisms, and healing methods.

But when people claim that the body doesn't store trauma as muscular tension, it's just frustrating because it feels like willful ignorance. Whether they don't know the stories of millions of people like yourself, or choose not to believe them.

Thanks for sharing. I'v'e read the book, and for me it made everything click. I've had serious childhood trauma (violence, alcoholism, etc) and have been "clumsy" all my life. Basically, I was all brain, and I completely neglected my body till I was 40. After reading the book, I posited that clumsy is trauma-related, and since I've resolved the trauma, there is no reason why I can't fix the clumsy. It's a process, and clumsy is almost gone.

I think people who deny this have not experienced serious childhood trauma. I agree that body might not keep the score for everything, but sometimes it really does.

The other thing that happened after reading the book is that I've become aware of how common trauma is. 4 out of 5 my college buddies experienced variety of early traumas: SA, alcoholism. Often I can sense trauma while speaking with someone. There is awkwardness, intensity in their gaze, emotions slightly off. I used to be attracted to it.

man I love stories like this. I know that that's impersonal and it was really hard for you. but it's very comforting and... inspiring?... to hear about people managing to face things they've held onto for many years. I feel like we get used to a model where people stay stuck how they are for most of their lives and I'd like to think that everybody can keep growing (past bad things, in many cases), and this kind of thing is a reminder of that.

>where you can then recast and retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is implanting false memories - that’s the point - but you want false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no longer serving you well in the present.

I have a hard time seeing this. I find it incredibly difficult to fool myself intentionally. Any time I try my brain just remembers it in a way where I don't get fooled.

Also, the mechanism you explained implies that you could get rid of trauma by yourself any time you remembered the traumatic experience and just blasted yourself with another emotion. Eg eat chocolate when you remember that painful fall.

EMDR is based on the earlier, broad therapeutic and communications paradigm Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) [1] of Richard Bandler and John. NLP is broad approach borrowing a lot from linguistics (Chomsky, Korzybski) and cybernetics. It also has been a bit tarnished by its connection to marketing and other things.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10879-023-09582-x

> I find it incredibly difficult to fool myself intentionally

I'd call it more recontextualizing than fooling yourself. Here's a science analogy:

As a toddler, you probably learned that the sun is up during daytime and down during nighttime. As an older kid, you likely learned that it rises in the east and sets in the west. The ancient geocentric viewpoint was that the sun goes around the earth. Ptolemy noticed that this doesn't match the observed data exactly, and so introduced the idea of "epicycles". A couple thousand years later, Copernicus discarded the idea of the earth as the center of the universe, and proposed that the earth revolves around the sun. Kepler refined Copernicus's ideas into the planets moving in ellipses, with the sun at one focus. Einstein then discarded the idea of having a central point at all, all motion is relative if you set up the correct metric tensors to model acceleration and gravity. But then if you ask a mathematician, Ptolemy was correct in the first place, his idea of epicycles was just a Fourier series decomposition of the observed measurements of the position of planets, and no more or less legit than any other mathematical model that explains the data. The math was just hard to work with.

All of these viewpoints are true, but they explain your senses in more or less detail, and progressively newer and more complex models are capable of explaining a greater variety of situations in greater precision.

The same with emotions. As a kid, the time your mother lost you in the mall was your whole world, because your mother was your whole world. You may have learned that big open spaces filled with crowds are not safe, and carried that forward with you as part of your model of the world. But the point of therapy is to contextualize that emotion, to realize that it was one time, and your life is very different now. You learn to feel it as an emotion, and as a memory, complete with context and everything else, and not as an unconscious rule of thumb that you need to live your life by.

> Also, the mechanism you explained implies that you could get rid of trauma by yourself any time you remembered the traumatic experience

You can! That's the amazing part. Once you've actually had successful EMDR sessions, you can learn the pathways to access your emotions, and just do it by yourself while you're lying in bed. There are apps for it too. And eventually, once you get adept enough at just accessing your emotions and feeling your feelings, you can dispense with the lights too and just recognize what you're feeling in the moment.

Now I just spend the car ride to work or back home decompressing and feeling all the unpleasant emotions that I bottle up during the day because it's my job. If you're doing it right, you can get rid of the therapist after a few years and become emotionally self-sufficient.

I had a similar experience with my first EMDR session. It was in the middle of a normal couples talk therapy session, our therapist said "You're standing on the edge of your unconscious. I want to try something", brought out the lights, gave me the instructions, turned them on, and I just started sobbing. I've always been one to seek a rational explanation for everything, so after she put the lights away, I was like "What the hell just happened?" and she gave me the background for how the therapy supposedly works.

What you're touching on here is a deep and persistent question in the history of psychotherapy: is it therapeutic to provide "reparative experience" (something that heals the original pain in a way that didn't happen at the time), or is that an illusion? in which case perhaps it is better to help the client adapt to reality (what actually happened at the time, painful though it may be).