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Criticisms of “The Body Keeps the Score”
- bobbyprograms 1y agoHaha yeah my wife used to use that always as a nice way to explain why she should be able to punish me at all times for all my “failures”. Lol
- all2 1y agoOof. I'm seeing lots of issues packed into this. You need good counseling. Not marriage counseling (that's a scam in most cases), but individual counseling. Even just a bro to talk to while you turn wrenches or heft iron. Just find a guy who is older than you, married, and well adjusted and talk to him. I can make some recommendations on where to find men like this, if you would like.
- bobbyprograms 1y agoHeck yeah honestly
- all2 1y agoA chapter of ARM is a really good bet. All you have to do is check their website and show up to a public event and introduce yourself. Lend a hand with setup and teardown. A church might be a bit of a reach. A man of God (not a pastor, unless he is ex military/cop/etc or was in the trades) might be able to advise you, but if you aren't Christian I don't think it'll be super helpful.
- hollerith 1y agoPsychological trauma is one of the more complicated aspects of the human condition. Because such claims are so hard to verify and so rhetorically potent, I would be in favor of a rule that claims of having been traumatized cannot be presented as evidence in court.
- freejazz 1y agoDo you ever litigate torts? Being 'traumatized' is not a legal claim to which simply stating 'I was traumatized' serves as any evidence, so I'm not sure what it is you think you'd be sparing the world. It is obviously the case that anyone could testify regarding the facts of what happened that caused what they believed to be trauma, but I'm not sure where you got the idea that people simply say "I was traumatized" and then win a civil case or send someone to jail.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hollerith 1y agoThe rule I propose would disallow not only unsubstantiated claims, but also any argumentation or evidence that tries to substantiate the claim (including testimony by expert witnesses in my ideal the version of the rule) in legal proceedings. For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".
- freejazz 1y agoWhere do courts allow unsubstantiated claims? >but also any argumentation or evidence that tries to substantiate the claim (including testimony by expert witnesses in my ideal the version of the rule) in legal proceedings. So you wont also let people substantiate claims? What?? >For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma". Have you ever been involved in such a lawsuit, out of curiosity? The intentional infliction of emotional distress has long been recognized as a tort. You have to substantiate it, of course.
- hollerith 1y ago
- jrm4 1y agoFunny, I just recommended Antifragile by Nassim Taleb to my book club, and of course, that idea is pretty much the perfect foil to this.
- kelseyfrog 1y agoairplane_with_red_dots.jpg
- waldothedog 1y agoI get the ref, but not the link to anti-fragile or NNT. Help me out?
- Benanov 1y agoAs we know or a quick STFW will educate - the "airplane with red dots" refers to the idea that the planes that came back had damage indicated on them with red dots and so the initial idea was that the designers of the planes needed to armor those spots... When it was really the case that the spots that weren't damaged were the ones that actually needed to be armored, because the planes that took damage there didn't come back. In this case, the data that survived a selection process ("I just recommended this book that dovetails nicely") is the only data considered, when really all of the data needs to be considered. I'm seeing this as "you're reading the data wrong" or more accurately "you're barking up the wrong tree"
- ahazred8ta 1y agoThat dovetails with "Dolphins must be friendly, because we always hear about them pushing drowning sailors to shore, and we never hear anything about dolphins pushing drowning sailors out to sea." Wait a minute...
- hrimfaxi 1y ago> Chances are, you’ve heard of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. At 79,898 reviews, the book has more reviews on Amazon than the first book of A Game of Thrones. > “The Body Keeps the Score has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting. To date, it’s sold 3 million copies and been translated into 37 languages.” Wow 3 million copies despite being translated into 37 languages? The Game of Thrones finale had 19 million viewers. I don't know anyone who has heard of this book and even if all of the 3 million copies were sold to Americans, only 1 in 11 of them would have heard of it.
- Pet_Ant 1y agoThat's funny because I swear almost every woman in my life has read it or at least knows enough to reference it. Even women who are from different walks of life and don't know eachother.
- ndriscoll 1y agoThere are ~130 million US households, so if each copy were bought by a unique household and all 3 million copies were sold in the US, that would mean ~97.5% of US households don't have a copy. Maybe there's some huge multiplier on borrowing from libraries? Personally I've never heard of it, but it seems like it's pretty far outside of my bubble of interests.
- throwup238 1y agoThen a hundred Instagram and TikTok influencers make videos about the book. Reading is at an all time low in the US, the majority of people who have heard of this book probably haven't read a single sentence of it. It's mostly coming from social media content about the book.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- justin66 1y ago> I don't know anyone who has heard of this book I can't imagine polling everyone I know about a specific book. How does that work?
- hyperhello 1y agoStoicism is the pole that you cannot control the world, but you can control your reactions to it. It's hard work. The other pole is that you cannot control your reactions, but you can try to control the world. This is much easier to fit into a consumerist framework.
- bad_haircut72 1y agoA DNA molecule without an environment is just a glob of atoms. Information flows in both directions. On a purely human level though, you should go find some veterans with PTSD and tell them they're just not working hard enough at being stoic.
- mobilene 1y agoThank you.
- hyperhello 1y agoI never told any veterans to work harder at being stoic, nor did I imply anyone should. That's part of a reaction you had to what I said. I can't control what you say, but I can control my reaction to you. That's what stoicism is.
- retr0rocket 1y ago[dead]
- Muromec 1y agoIt's a good framework to survive in authoritarian country and maybe even a good one to promote as a dictator. You can in fact very often change what other people think, say and do.
- walkabout 1y agoStoicism specifies that one needs right acts, in addition to right thoughts. It’s far less passive than e.g. Russell (though I love Russell, and I even love The History of Western Philosophy in which he levels these criticisms, while many others seem to dismiss it) describes it, though treating it as purely an internal-mindset thing is certainly easier and I think a lot of people in-fact only apply those parts.
- yrcyrc 1y agoRead it a few years back and found some answers. Generational trauma does exists I believe. As for the article I think it claimed the whole theory was BS without much backing arguments
- nearbuy 1y agoThe article goes through and refutes 25(!) claims from the book. I'm not sure how many more backing arguments you could possibly want from a blog post.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoIt's safe to assume any grand claims linking specific behavior and the brain are bullshit. Humans don't have the technology yet to make the necessary observations.
- rusk 1y agoF-MRI
- lotsofpulp 1y agoF-MRIs are not going to give you enough data to cleanly determine cause and effect. I'm sure there is lots of good data for researchers, but I don't think it's going to be easily package-able into these kind of pop psychology books.
- AIorNot 1y agoWhat I’ve found is that the nature of viral movements (bestselling books, pseudoscience claims, self help, programming movements, architectures, social media phenomena etc) is that the truth or proof for the underlying claim of the viral movement is not important only its widespread virality and ability to spread Ie the idea has to be convincing enough to spread from person to person as a meme but also have enough armchair level depth to pass the bullshit filters of most reasonable people- ie popularity wins over truth Most people do not have the intellectual curiosity or time to deeply verify these claims - but inevitably these fads die as they appear.. Clearly this is one example
- kouru225 1y agoThomas Kuhn would say that the exact same thing happens in science literature.
- jamestimmins 1y agoI've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false. The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus. Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.
- walkabout 1y agoOne of a couple varieties of books covered by the If Books Could Kill podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That Explains Many Things type. They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)
- mm263 1y agoMichael Hobbes, host of IBCK is guilty of those inaccuracies too. Here's him being fact checked regarding claims in the Maintenance Phase podcast: https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/ https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/
- walkabout 1y agoYeah, I’ve seen those criticisms before and been convinced-enough that it’s contributed to my not bothering with that podcast. IBCK has been accurate enough when they’ve covered books I’m familiar with that I’m less worried about that being a problem with that show (though I’m sure they do sometimes get things wrong)
- jccalhoun 1y agoI enjoy If Books Could Kill and I used to like You're Wrong About when Michael was on it. However, I have found on If Books Could Kill that they sometimes take the least charitable interpretation of something to ridicule it when a more charitable interpretation might find that there is more nuance than they are presenting. I haven't listened to Maintenance Phase because it isn't really a topic that I'm all that interested in.
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- the_sleaze_ 1y ago> Book falls apart My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true. Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny. It's a soft science, it is what it is.
- luqtas 1y agowe have trouble defining and detecting when someone is in a flow state. or what parts of the brain are involved in grit. heck we are even tipping the begginings on how chronic pain is processed in our brain. if some drug has a greater validity than a placebo, then it's something now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"
- davorak 1y ago> now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science" Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end: > Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk. Which is pretty much nothing. The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.
- blobbers 1y agoUsually if you have to add 'science' to a term its not science.
- jdiff 1y agoWe do that incredibly often just to refer to only one part of an incredibly broad concept of "science." Sometimes they get unique terms like "physics" or "chemistry," but not always. This is not a rule that can accurately be applied to all terms matching the pattern "____ science."
- hiddencost 1y agoVan der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero. That said, this article is just as bad as the book. Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body. Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd. I encourage folks to get more massages if they doubt that there's any causal relationship between these phenomena.
- frereubu 1y agoCan you give a source for the claim of "extensive sexual misconduct"? I've seen allegations of bullying, which is clearly bad enough, but nothing sexual.
- nicklaf 1y ago> Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a hero. I was curious about this accusation, so I read a bit about the scandal. [0] It seems you are actually talking about Joseph Spinazzola, the executive director of Van der Kolk's trauma center, who was fired for sexual misconduct while Van der Kolk was on sabbatical. Van der Kolk was fired two months later, not for sexual misconduct, but for denigrating and bullying employees. [0] https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/07/allegations-of-employee-mistreatment-roil-renowned-brookline-trauma-center/ https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/07/allegation...
- cwmoore 1y ago“Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body. Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.” The relevant parts are good.
- lazerwalker 1y agoThis person takes specific claims from the book and tries to dispute them, while ignoring that the book’s number one big-picture idea of “trauma is unprocessed emotions and memories physically stored in the body” remains the conceptual grounding for all modern non-cognitive trauma processing methods like EMDR (which are clearly effective, even as we do not fully understand e.g. the neurological mechanism by which the adaptive information processing network functions). He then points you to an older article of his that is behind a paywall. I have my issues with van der Kolk’s work (I would personally not recommend The Body Keeps The Score to most people), but this is sloppy embarrassing clickbait.
- int_19h 1y agoI wouldn't say that EMDR is "clearly effective". The studies on it are all over the place so at best it's contentious.
- riazrizvi 1y agoAgreed. I recently started a very physical job after decades of laptop work. Your personality changes quick, anxiety levels etc, as your body adapts. This is at 54 after 3 decades as an IC writing software. Lifestyle is by far the biggest driver, the body’s record is read-write memory rather than write-once.
- bendigedig 1y ago[flagged]
- cwmoore 1y agoPopulation level proof is, at best, a model which fails every minority, including individuals. Which is arguably still useful, but only a different fallacy.
- bendigedig 1y agoYeah, but then the comment was making sweepingly generalised statements based off personal experiences.
- riazrizvi 1y agoI doubt we agree on what the word lifestyle means.
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- cwmoore 1y agoGP got a different job and had an experience? What are you weeping for?
- dang 1y agoWould you mind reviewing the site guidelines and sticking to them when posting here? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Your account has unfortunately been breaking the rules repeatedly; not just here but in other threads too, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45358220
- luxuryballs 1y agociting a paper that says it found “no evidence” of something always seems weak to me in terms of refuting something, I also found no evidence by doing nothing, how do I know the thing you checked or the context in which it was checked is any better than my doing nothing? not finding something doesn’t seem any more or less convincing…
- andai 1y agoI think it's called "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" ?
- esafak 1y agoIt is, though. What it is not, is proof of absence.
- darth_avocado 1y agoI claim I am god. Pretty much everyone who knows me suggested there’s no evidence of me being god. Would you say not finding that I’m god doesn’t seem any more or less convincing?
- maxbond 1y ago> [H]ow do I know the thing you checked or the context in which it was checked is any better than my doing nothing? Open the paper and look for it's methodology.
- PaulKeeble 1y agoMost of psychology doesn't survive past 20 years, the moment someone tries to replicate the results it fails. A lot of the fraud that is happening in medical science at the moment is in Psychology, their methods are unsound and they build entire diseases on foundations made of sand. They repeatedly get caught misrepresenting referenced papers by reviewers but the journals fail to enforce integrity and scientific principles. People should be very sceptical of any psychological findings that are younger than about 30 years and ideally you want to have seen several replications and done with greater size, rigour and controls. Anything younger than this and certainly anything that hasn't yet been firmly replicated is on balance of probability going to turn out to be wrong or fraud.
- tredre3 1y agoPsychology (and psychiatry) is good enough at finding patterns in the symptoms patients go through, and grouping them into so-called disorders. It's not perfect, but it's a useful tool. What they are not good at is all the rest: explaining what causes those symptoms in the first place, and how to treat them in the second place. And this isn't something that has changed in the past 30 yrs. This phenomenon is also not exclusive to soft sciences. Humans (especially domain experts) just really really hate admitting "we don't know."
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- taeric 1y agoI am grateful that I had not, in fact, heard of this book. I would like to say I would have rejected the idea, but I'm not certain. And yeah, these criticisms are pretty solid.
- sonofhans 1y agoConsider the source — the author appears to believe that trauma itself doesn’t truly exist, is not based on physical phenomena or experiences, and is largely a sales idea manufactured by the therapy industry. This article, and others, are riddled with rhetorical bullshit. E.g., someone on Instagram said that their emotionally distant father caused trauma, so “emotional distance” is added into the causes of trauma, and this is used to diminish the power of “trauma” itself. This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative.
- duskdozer 1y agoYes, good to note the overlaps between anti-psychology/anti-therapy and "MAHA".
- lotsofpulp 1y agoAre the claims of lack of supporting data false? They seem pretty specific and easy to verify.
- tredre3 1y ago> This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative. Are you suggesting that only people afflicted with a condition should have the right to research it and look for its causes?
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- amyamyamy2 1y agoI 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.
- j45 1y agoThis 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.
- phkahler 1y ago>> 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.
- wrs 1y agoIndeed, 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.
- Aurornis 1y ago> 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.
- skrebbel 1y agoRegardless of what you think of all this, you gotta appreciate the book title “The Body Does Not Keep the Score”.
- empath75 1y agoThis blogger is a self-help youtuber hawking testosterone treatments and he's a Jordan Peterson acolyte that believes that DMT let's you speak with aliens.
- superb-owl 1y agoProbably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is bullshit. But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together. I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws. [1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-nonsense https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-no...
- blurbleblurble 1y agoHow is this article any better?
- renewiltord 1y agoThis is a pretty good takedown. It seems that most pop psych these days is around trying to convert people to an external locus of control. It isn't "your fault". I can see why that's appealing to many, though it actually seems somewhat unappealing to me. I'd prefer to believe I have greater control over my own experience of the world. Even if I don't, I think acting as if I do allows me to bias on the side that's beneficial to me.
- jodrellblank 1y agoYou have physical symptoms - joint pain, back pain, racing heart beat, chest pain, panic attacks, dizziness, heart palpitations, or etc. Which one of these is more about "your fault" and which gives you more control? a) the traditional view, you have some unknown illness, it's incurable, could have happened to anyone, bad luck. b) people are reporting anecdotally that old horrible memories can lead to physical symptoms years later, and revisiting those memories and coming to terms with them can make the physical symptoms resolve completely in minutes. Maybe there's something scientific to that and maybe there isn't, but here are some of the ways people try it: ..
- claytonwramsey 1y agoI wasn't very impressed by the reporting quality in this article, but it seems as though there are some other reviewers of the book were much more thorough in their critique. Emi Nietfeld writing for Mother Jones has more detail and actually contacted some experts for comment: https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-the-score-van-der-kolk-psychology-therapy-ptsd/ https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-...
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- neom 1y agoFrom my understanding of some of the most recent research, the body probably does "keep score" - but how that happens and who is predisposed to how much "scoring", it very poorly understood: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11449801/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11449801/ / https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0278584615300476 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02785... / https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23768722/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23768722/
- scythe 1y agoThese are all neuroimaging studies. It's generally much less provocative to argue that a behavioral phenomenon has a physical substrate in the brain -- in fact, simple mind-body physicalism requires it -- what is an audacious and less-supported claim is that trauma, however defined, A: affects the body outside the brain and B: does so relatively often.
- fragmede 1y agoThere's a lot of ad hominem it throws around, which doesn't really bolster the argument. It's a catchy headline but it all depends on who you know and what you talk to them about. There are a lot of fucked up, mal-adjusted people out there, and I should know, Because I'm one of them. But enough about me, nobody has a good sampling of the human experience. There are 8 billion humans alive, and there's no way to get a representational sampling of them in order to have an unbiased view of what humans are like. There's especially no way, because you're trapped in your own human body, which bases your experience of other people. Backpacking as a 21 year old woman is way different than backpacking as a 50 year old man. So the question is, has the book helped more per than it's harmed? I don't know. There are certainly people who read it and drew the wrong conclusions, but there are people who have used it to go on to lead healthy productive fulfilling lives. To reduce the entire work down into a single word, bullshit, is reductive to the point of uselessness. Of course that's the headline and the entire article doesn't won't fit up there. The article's author goes into much more detail but even if you don't like the work, calling it bullshit needs to engage more with what level of bullshittery it is and isn't for the review to come across as anything more than an highly motivated takedown because someone in the author's life used it against them.
- dacox 1y agoThere is a podcast, Memory Hole, about the recovered memory movement. There is a lengthy section about this book and the people behind it (not positive)
- mef51 1y agoTrauma to me means there are ways of responding to painful experiences that can keep you in that painful state for a very long time, and/or make things worse. I recognize that simple fact from my own experiences. In that lens, its helpful to reflect on your responses to painful experiences to stop them from developing into long term traumas. Maybe that's why this book, or at least the title, seems to resonate with people. (I haven't read it) ...But it's also good to know the author of the book was wildly mis-citing things
- ergonaught 1y agoThe book has a lot of flaws. The trauma industry that's grown up around it and similar work has a lot of flaws. The post has a lot of flaws. They're all quite confident, though.
- binoct 1y agoBest comment by far. The post suffers from making good points about the lack of rigor and narrative nature of the book, but then does exactly the same thing to claim the opposite conclusion the book makes.
- steve_adams_86 1y agoI agree. As I read this I kept thinking that it seemed too skeptical to be rationally critical. Which isn't necessarily an improvement over the book. My intuition (I know, that isn't better than the book or this post) is that there's truth in both places, and we'd ultimately land somewhere in the middle if we had access to the truth. This touches on the nature vs nurture problem, wherein there never seems to be a clear victor and the answer seems to be that both play a role depending on what you're measuring. It's also very difficult to say how the chicken and egg scenario unravels, since we don't know what's the chicken and what's the egg, so to speak. The author seems to think they know—confidently as you mentioned—but it's abundantly murky to me. I suppose we need confident people pushing in all directions to help us look more deeply in places and ways we otherwise might not. But wow, it gets tiring to see such unapologetic bias in scientific contexts. I admittedly stopped reading just passed the half way point and should probably keep most of my opinions about it to myself.
- o11c 1y agoRegarding rationality of skepticism ... I'm not familiar with the field's research, but how much of the discussed perspective is linked to this book or the paper it is named for? If removing the book would not leave any supporters for the perspective, then skepticism is in fact the rational conclusion. This is more-or-less Russell's teapot.
- blurbleblurble 1y agoThe book might have some flaws but this article is flat out reactionary drivel. Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa1b9db0a-18f6-483a-b7ba-a6cd4b87a32b_2030x1128.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit... What the research _actually_ suggests is something more like a combination of those pictures. Except that the scientific research isn't framed in terms of "bad behavior". So that alone should give you a clue about where this blog post is coming from. That image alone exposes the worldview of the person who wrote this, something like this: ~some people are good quality, some people are bad quality. if you're born as a bad quality person, it's something like bad luck / your fault for falling into bad behavior, no wonder you're struggling. you need to work harder but it might just be that you're a dud.~
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- BigTTYGothGF 1y ago> Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit... This is pretty much that "the child has bad vibes" tweet except serious.
- anshumankmr 1y agoYeah imagine showing this to say a kid abused by their parents, either verbally or physically...the author would be like >> umm... akshually its your fault your daddy beats you
- astura 1y agoWe've all already heard that message from our abusers and have already internalize it. Or maybe just me? It's certainly cruel.
- languagehacker 1y agoI thought The Body Keeps The Score was interesting and informative. I made sure to look up counterarguments afterwards, because there were definitely parts that I wasn't so keen on. Psychology and other social sciences are too multi-variate to speculate on, and the HRB exists so that we don't commit atrocities in the name of properly isolating variables as we poke at the black box we call the human mind. You're never going to get anything right, but we should definitely be referencing surveys of studies instead of single studies. So there's at least one point there for appropriate rigor. Not getting the interpretation of those studies right definitely seems unethical, but so does all of the misconduct stuff Van Der Kolk has been mired in. It's a disingenuous argument to say that your body doesn't change from a traumatic experience, or that stress doesn't express itself through the body sometimes. It's also problematic to say that because it happens to you doesn't mean you can't work through it and learn to manage it or even control it. What I gleaned from the book is that if I have a physical sensation that I can map to stress or a past experience of trauma, I can understand it, label it, and grow from it.
- anechouapechou 1y agoAnecdotal, but recently I've done a complete 180 on: - My diet (Mediterranean), with absolutely zero processed foods. - Sleep (red light on evenings, no screens 1 hour before sleep). - Daily exercise (lifting and 30 minutes of zone 5 cardio weekly). My appreciation for life has skyrocketed, I don't feel like I'm being oppressed by life, and my depression symptoms are gone. I used to think the root cause of it all was a pretty rough childhood. It turns out, it's just 'crap in, crap out.' It has been jarring to me that my inner experience and mental health could so drastically change in such a short amount of time. So yeah, it's anecdotal, but I'm pretty inclined to agree with this article.
- stuffn 1y agoThe gut-brain axis is highly influential in normal every day depression. It makes sense why you think this works for you. I workout vigorously 3-4 times a week, try to avoid the regular bad stuff with diet, etc. It doesn't stop the adrenaline dump from being in an abusive relationship for a number of years when there's a minor problem, and it doesn't stop me from randomly having my brain completely shut down when I (unfortunately) remember some aspects of my childhood. What has helped it CBT and time. The book in mention helped me understand why I feel the way I do, and that deeply rooted trauma (PTSD) exists as a misprogramming of your brain by a traumatic experience that is not "surface level" to trivially identify, and your brain is an excellent helper in compartmentalizing this for your own survival. Whether the information is wrong or right isn't what I care about. It's that it simply provided me a framework from which I could approach the problems I previously didn't really understand and led me on a journey of self discovery and bumpy healing I wouldn't have done otherwise. An inaccurate model is infinitely better than no model. The author of the substack does an excellent job at taking something that we barely understand (psychology has a lot of problems of reproducibility) and generalizing it into a bullshit youtube short tier soundbite of an article with less information than the book he claims is nonsense. Reading his other article for reference I would be suspect of the author's credibility in any aspect of science other than the dangers of inhaling your own farts. I especially the call back to another article of his that suggests that just loading up on exogenous testosterone is positively correlated with less PTSD. Funny enough I have had above-average testosterone through most of my life and yet I still managed to get a mild-to-medium form of PTSD.
- theothertimcook 1y agoKolk was involved in the “memory wars” and repressed memory drama back in the day where people started therapy then suddenly remembered historical abuse by caregivers that in many cases never actually happened (this is a massive simplification DYOR) Having been involved in the publishing of psychology research I have zero faith in the systems ability to properly control for bullshit. Trauma informed muppets like Kolk and Gabor Mate are running around spouting absolute bullshit and it’s hurting people, imagine being raised by a parent who read and believed this bullshit, worse still they’ve been to talks by flops like Gabor Mate and are balls deep in whatever viral self help podcast meme is trending…let them Kolk wrote the article the body keeps the score in 1994 at the height of the memory wars, he spent the next 20 years undeterred, developing and spreading his bullshit and now nearly 30 years later it’s still being talked about and propagated. https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/allegations-against-bessel-van-der-kolk/ https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/alleg...
- imiric 1y agoMeh. I haven't read any of the books the article talks about, but IMO dismissing their entire premise is more unhelpful than any pseudoscientific claim they make. AFAICT, this is a pop psychology book that tries to make some interesting topics digestible to a mass audience. Topics that are mostly speculative to begin with, and don't have concrete evidence in any direction. For example, the entire field of epigenetics has been argued to be pseudoscience, and yet there has been some interesting research around it. Related to the topic of stress specifically, and how effects have been observed across generations[1]. Clearly, more research is needed, but to dismiss it as quackery outright wouldn't be helpful. Many ideas that were initially perceived as outlandish eventually lead to a better understanding of the world. Scientific progress depends on people willing to go beyond the boundaries of conventional knowledge, often at the expense of their reputation. This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that. [1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177343/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177343/
- int_19h 1y agoIt tries to make the author's pet theory digestible to a mass audience. The problem is that the author's pet theory is pseudoscience. And yes, Graham Hancock's theories are also pseudoscience, and branding it as "edutainment" doesn't make that any better (if anything, it's worse because it implies deliberately targeting an audience that can't tell the difference!).
- rcxdude 1y ago>This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that. This is a weak argument. He has a platform far bigger than any actual archeologist, he consistently misrepresents the archeological viewpoint, he 'just asks questions' about a bunch of coincidences to advance a pseudo-scientific theory that just doesn't make any sense, and then he whines about being silenced when some youtube videos (with a view count substantially lower than his audience) say 'these are some cool sites, but what you're saying doesn't make any sense, and BTW archeologists don't actually think the things you're saying they think'
- yosito 1y agoThank you for sharing this! I read The Body Keeps the Score about 10 years ago after experiencing a particularly traumatic event. I had been searching for answers at the time for how to heal from the event, and someone recommended the book to me. I had distilled my memory of the book into the intuitive idea represented by the title that the body remembers what happens to it which of course there is some truth to. So my first reaction to the headline was a bit defensive, "of course it's not bullshit!" But I had forgotten how much emphasis was put on there being significant lasting changes from events that we couldn't even remember. > The idea that trauma causes long-lasting damage to the brain and or body is central to van der Kolk’s thesis. > his narrative paints this hopeless picture of trauma victims as being people who most aspects of their lives are “dictated by the imprint of the past.” And now I remember that when I read the book originally looking for answers to my own traumas, it left me feeling hopeless, overwhelmed and permanently damaged from what I had gone through. I remember thinking that the high stress I was going through at the time was going to leave me permanently struggling with issues like high cortisol and inability to function normally. Absolutely NOT the message I needed at the time. Ten years on, my brain is normal and healthy, and I don't have any perceptible problems with cortisol or PTSD-like symptoms. I'm living a healthy, normal life, and not walking around with a heavy trauma score in my body. That's not to say that trauma from my past didn't play a role in making me who I am today, or that I don't still carry some memories of the difficult events. But I've found my brain to be very plastic and to heal and rewrite itself quite well. And all of the measurable markers of brain health, stress hormones, etc are fully back to normal, healthy ranges. That's just my anecdote, and I also appreciated the thorough scientific analysis in this article!
- softwaredoug 1y agoThis article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic, which doesn't seem to agree with mainstream science (setting aside Body Keeps the Score) > That is, trauma doesn’t lead to dysfunction or abnormal brain function, physiology or hormonal regulation. Rather, an unhealthy person may be more susceptible to trauma. What has been documented about Adverse Childhood Experiences doesn’t agree with this. There is copious evidence that the presence of ACEs, independent of other factors, leads to poor health outcomes [1] It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma [2] There's also data indicating CPTSD, PTSD, and Borderline are distinct disorders [3] 1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/ https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-025-22785-2 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... 2 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5858954/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5858954/ 3 - https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-podcast/episode-215-understanding-complex-ptsd-and-borderline-personality-disorder https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-psychotherapy-p...
- taeric 1y agoI think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them? That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family. Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.
- marcelr 1y agomore information is better if it’s also provided with the context of how to heal. > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma i’m extremely skeptical that people move on they suppress, they survive, but without deep understanding its impossible to say move on you can be ignorant and survive, or face reality and climb the deeply uphill battle of real growth. of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is advocating for that as treatment
- teekert 1y agoI’m a scientist. I haven’t read “the body keeps the score”. It sounds like pseudoscience. But, I do recognize the importance of models. Our brains are complex, lacking the capacity to comprehend everything, we make models. Models are incomplete (by definition) and often false. But can still be very useful. Or very useful to some. Where useful means: help someone lead a more fulfilling, better life. So I try not to judge. Even though I try to seek truth. To be a scientist. I know there are useful models out there.
- nostrademons 1y agoSo 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.
- neom 1y agoI'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.)
- kouru225 1y agoI haven’t read the book, but I’m almost always suspicious of criticism targeted at books like this. Let’s say I write a textbook about biology and I write the sentence: “The Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell” Technically what I’m saying is wrong. What the mitochondria does is so vast and confusing that no sentence like that can ever encompass its role. In fact, even using the word “role” is questionable because it presumes that the mitochondria’s sole function is to work as a team with other organelles/biological structures when in fact biology doesn’t really care about some abstract idea like “team.” All language is derived from analogy, and all analogies are insufficient to describe reality. In fact, mathematicians now agree that even math is an insufficient language. It can’t fully describe the territory. It can only make maps of it, and all maps are only useful because they are compressed and packaged versions of the territory. The question is just, “how much compression is useful?” We live in a world where science communication is so atrophied that the flat earth, and creationist theories are still in circulation. Scientists have dramatically failed to market their ideas to the masses, despite the fact that these ideas are inherently compelling. To me, the reason why they’ve failed seems obvious: because they’re so busy tearing down science communicators that none of them can ever get a real hold on the public. And why? Because the books they write are at compression level that the scientists arbitrarily deem irresponsible. This guy wrote a compelling story about the barrier between mind/body. To do that, he must have distributed a viral package of psychological terminology and concepts. It was then distributed to and consumed by millions of people. In all likelihood, the fact that they were excited by this book probably led them to read other books like it. They probably encountered conflicting ideas, questioned them, and looked them up. They probably have a much rounder understanding of these ideas now than they did when they first read them. Now this other guy writes a story and all it says is “yo that dude was wrong.” How helpful! How useful! And let’s be 100% clear: the person writing this isn’t communicating the absolute truth. They’re also compressing their ideas. In 100 years, I bet you any psychologist that reads both books will shake their head and point out all the flaws in their analogies. Meanwhile, the cycle continues: the scientists tear each other down and the masses continue sacrificing innocent children to appease the blood god.
- greygoo222 1y agoThe Body Keeps the Score is bullshit, but this Substack is even more bullshit. The author criticizes Bessel van der Kolk for failing to prove causation, and then writes this gibberish: "In the textbook Evolutionary Psychology, the authors explain that a particular hunter gatherer population isn’t as susceptible to PTSD despite being exposed to similarly tragic events. They argue that part of the physiological changes that come along with PTSD are increased inflammation in the body. Thus, the inflammatory nature of a standard western diet may make some people more susceptible to PTSD." "A 2020 study on Turkana warriors in Kenya found them to be much less likely to develop PTSD-related symptoms compared to US combat vets despite also experiencing gruesome acts in a war zone." Where is the proof that diet causes PTSD?
- mrguyorama 1y agoThere is nothing funnier about HN than the constant insistence that "The mainstream media is bad and lying to you" while voting random Substack and Medium writers with zero experience or training or authority to the front page. That goes together nicely with everyone on HN insisting that HN commenters are "special" and "different" from people on the rest of the internet. I guess because we are more likely to like the color orange? Most people insist they are above average drivers.
- int_19h 1y agoYou're not wrong, but "The Body keeps the Score" is hardly mainstream science either.
- greygoo222 1y agoIt's completely sensible for most people to believe they are above average drivers, and all be correct. This is because there isn't a single objective measurement for "good at driving." Imagine that 50% of people are cautious drivers, and 50% are fast drivers. The cautious drivers think being cautious is more important than being fast, so they all believe they are above average. The fast drivers, vice versa. Everyone thinks they're above average, and they are by their own standards, no delusion required.
- 1y ago
- vlan0 1y agoI can see why someone might have that opinion. I think the author hasn't met himself yet. As one can only meet and understand another as deeply as they have met themselves. I do wonder if he would gain more awareness of his self after a couple 7g mushroom runs.
- incomingpain 1y agoI love the book; I found it immensely useful personally for trauma. I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it.
- int_19h 1y ago> I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it. That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose to discuss it with, since the problems with this book and the theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented. Start here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10497315231206754 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10497315231206754
- incomingpain 1y ago>That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose to discuss it with, Fair to just say anecdotal or they were being polite. >since the problems with this book and the theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented. Reading this article, it's exactly what the book was written for, it's exactly what's wrong with "the experts" and it's almost certain that these authors did not read the book. > that have limited to no evidence (e.g., massage, acupuncture, yoga, community theater, and neurofeedback), according to the latest treatment guidelines by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies If you read the book, and those authors did not. PTSD experts, including him, had been tracking Traumatic events and the people who almost certainly had PTSD were not getting help from 'the experts'. first responders at 9/11 for example had great benefits and could have seen therapists, had largely gone to chiropractors and yoga to treat their PTSD. Which wasnt something he expected. It wasn't intentional, they simply had body aches and had gone for treatment. But that's how he realized the body connection and how it keeps score. He wrote the book because 'the experts' discount what works and the lay people dont give 2 shits what the experts think.
- int_19h 1y agoYeah, no, that's how we got the Satanic Panic back in the day. (and, in many cases, the people who promoted that are the same ones that we're talking about here)
- pvillano 1y agoPop-trauma allows people to continue to believe "dreams can be achieved through hard work" while not blaming themselves for not achieving their dreams. The reason I'm not living the dream could be that it's impossible, or I haven't tried hard enough. I don't want to believe either of those. I'd rather believe that something happened to me in my past that rewired my brain to stifle my full potential. Then I could still hope to someday achieve my dreams, while not doing anything to progress towards them. It's not popular because it's right. It's popular because it's so, so appealing.
- kulahan 1y agoKind of a silly ending to the article. >I think Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Mate’s heavy handed trauma narrative is [bad] followed immediately by >However if they ‘treat’ their trauma with things like yoga, meditation, psychedelics and have some benefits, it’s very likely they would have had the benefits regardless of whether they viewed it as some sort of trauma treatment or not. I suppose the author has never heard of placebo effects? Talk about a heavy-handed narrative. Author also seems to be skeptical of the idea that stress and inflammation can be a major cause of disease in the body. I might just be reading into things, but if that's an accurate assessment on my part, it's wildly inaccurate.
- shawndrost 1y agoThis article is a midwit dismissal; it may contain valid corrections but it is ignorant on the core topic at hand. This is a shame, because it is extremely interesting and under-reported topic! The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles, and organs, not just in conscious memory." The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the needle, [I did] 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." (Thank you for sharing, neom.) I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening. People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the book contains some of that, but its titular observation is fascinating, true, and maybe even useful! I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.
- socrateswasone 1y ago[dead]
- jodrellblank 1y ago> "and the thought that was there was the memory of.." I haven't read the book; what's the distinction between "the brain has a painful memory which is making it tense muscles" and "the muscles are tense because the memory is encoded in the body and muscles"? I mean, if someone sees a balloon and curls/cringes/flinches their body away because they hate balloons bursting, how would one tell apart "flinching is caused by brain memories of stressful noise" and "flinching is caused by body memories of stressful noise"?
- WarOnPrivacy 1y agoFrom the article: confusing the chicken for the egg is the same reason Gabor Mate’s view that trauma causes ADHD is mistaken. I have an opinion in this area. I worked out a theory about trauma and ADHD. It is that they cohabitate (or operate in) the same area. I suspect they each serve to stunt learning by negatively impacting the reward mechanism that cements learning. The above notions flow from my considerations of my own abuse, neglect and cognizance issues. I have some confidence that they explain much of my long term learning issues. Explanation I have always experienced ADHD as a brain fog that obscures and distorts the details involved in natural learning. During childhood, I required a methodical and rigorous study of the same mundane details that my peers absorbed trivially. When my peers felt reinforcing joy in learning, I felt exhaustion and frustration as I raced to catch up to them. Eventually I could mimic their understanding - but by then they had grown further. During the catching up, I learned a lot of details and had moments where my reward would kick in. But it was for trivialities - for things I achieved that most children learn w/o notice. My positive expressions here could be confusing and discomforting to peers and others and I learned to suppress those feelings. Regarding abuse and neglect. They pushed my reward system out, much more directly. I learned to bury responsive joy when I received abuse in response. I abandoned responsive joy when it lead to nothing (instead of needed, nurturing reinforcement). I will note here that children do not do well when given adult-sized burdens of internalizing emotional systems that, in healthy environments, are openly and freely expressed. Emotional misfires are the predictable result of poor containment. By adolescence, my reward system was reliably - 1) not there when I needed it and 2) often overly-present at unhelpful times. I mistrusted of one of the best parts of being human. For me, abuse and ADHD were two persistent vectors toward this one transformative outcome, my broken reward system. For an epilogue, Adderall has been a late stage, happy-ish outcome to this story. Every day, I reliably get a period of trivially-triggered reward. Into this, I can feed experiences and receive learning and understanding. I often say it is the difference between me receiving a lesson and learning it. This is much better than no payout at all. However, I am distressed by the many interests (DEA,pols) who regularly attack my meds and want to take this away from me.
- Cerpicio 1y agoMy wife and I adopted a boy when he was just a few months old. He was born addicted to drugs, and I've read that even newborns experience trauma when they are adopted because they can tell they are no longer with their mother. He is now six and we've been having behavioral issues with him pretty much his whole life. He isn't ADHD but exhibits several of the same behaviors. "Trauma-based ADHD symptoms" or something like that. We finally found a good counsellor (yes, for a 6yo) and are scheduled to have some tests done with a neuropsychologist. I'm concerned that medication is prescribed too quickly, without trying other options first, but we are hoping to find something to help calm him down a bit. We don't know if he has some kind of chemical imbalance from the drugs that were in his system when he was developing, or if it is trauma. Most of the time he is a great kid, but he is often very defiant, more so than your typical kid. Anyway, I'm not sure what my point is other than to rant a bit, but your comment about ADHD and trauma caught my attention. Thanks for sharing.
- socrateswasone 1y ago[dead]
- pnathan 1y agoThe Body Keeps the Score is stuffed full of, essentially, woo. I assess it as being correct in noticing a lot of "smoke" around mind body connections. But I found almost all the causeual linkages to be "... really???". Consciousness in general seems to be poorly understood outside of the "normal experience" state.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- scythe 1y ago>If it’s not ideology, a better explanation has not presented itself. It can’t be that he just doesn’t understand cross-sectional studies. He can’t be that naive. There were just as many cross-sectional studies that disagreed with his theory that he ignored. In looking for an explanation, he might be outside his expertise. Let's ask someone who does it well. https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_are_not_su.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/01/why_chinese_mothers_... >You will observe that she is writing this nonsense not in a peer reviewed journal that could take her to task, e.g. McCall's, but in the WSJ. Why would the WSJ want to support "the Chinese mother?" Because if you're reading it, it's for you. Scientists, however prominent, announcing a "groundbreaking" theory outside of the scientific press should always be considered with lots of skepticism.
- asacrowflies 1y agoI don't think my day has ever been ruined so much by such an inane story.....that mother is awful... But so is the critic writer..."I'm not saying she's a bad mother " just oof
- ants_everywhere 1y agoThe blog post very much agrees with mainstream science. The Body Keeps Score is pseudoscience. This sort of pseudoscience has a pretty long history. Arguably it's repackaged Freud. Freud aside, therapists have a long history of advocating theories that are not supported by science. For example, repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, etc. CPTSD is an area where there is a lot of bad research partially because it's not a recognized disorder by the DSM and partially because of its political affiliations. This works from two sides. You get downward pressure on good research because it isn't recognized by most American psychologists. You also get upward presure from researchers whose motivations are political rather than scientific. I don't understand why political groups are interested in CPTSD, I just know that they empirically are [0]. There have previously been strong political interest in other pseudosciences like Freudian psychotherapy and Jung etc. I don't understand this either, but I'm sure there's an explanation. > It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma Many people are targeted for abuse because they are different. For example autistic women are especially frequently targeted for abuse. Thus being autistic (genetic) can cause abuse (environmental) and hence trauma. Many people who are especially isolated or have especially poor social skills will be predisposed to being abused multiple times. Partially this is because abusers can tell if you've been abused and, if you have, there's a good chance your previous abusers got away with it. If you look at the subreddit overlap for CPTSD linked below, you'll notice that there's significant overlap with genetic psychological conditions that predispose people to getting abused. This makes correlational data hard to interpret, especially because so many psychological papers study a small group over a small period of time and ask only a small number of questions. > This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic This doesn't mean that mainstream science is skeptical about trauma. There is a great deal of good mainstream research on trauma. However, there is also a ton of systematically bad and wrong information on social media about trauma that is popular despite being wrong. So mainstream science is rightfully skeptical about claims that are unsupported by science. > There's also data indicating... Finding good psychology articles is something that's much harder than it sounds. Psychology articles are easy to read compared to, say, physics. But there is a lot of really bad psychology out there that you won't be able to filter out without a background in research psychology. In some ways, familiarity with applied psychology but not research psychology makes things harder because so much of the bad research comes from applied psychology. For example, is this a good study? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26488918/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26488918/ "Extrasensory Perception Experiences and Childhood Trauma: A Rorschach Investigation"? Well ESP isn't real. Trauma is real. The Rorschach test is nonsense. But it has an nih.gov link. Is J Nerv Ment Dis a high quality journal? What are the biases of its editors? What about this one? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7342092/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7342092/ "Personal Experiences With Auditory Verbal Hallucination and Extrasensory Perception" from Schizophr Bull 2019. I pick on ESP because it's obviously a violation of the law of physics. Yet applied psychologists keep churning out ESP research just like they keep churning out research about things like repressed memory like The Body Keeps the Score. [0] For example see the list of subreddits similar to r/cptsd https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/cptsd https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/cptsd. It's a mix of subs for people with genetic psychological disorders (narcissism, bpd, bipolar, asd, adhd, etc). And a mix of politicized and religious subreddits (FDS, witchesvpatriarchy, menlib, christianity, etc). Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/pr6wh4/cptsd_and_leftism/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/pr6wh4/cptsd_and_lef...
- uvaursi 1y agoWhat % of TBKTS is based on studies? What % of those studies have been repeatedly reproduced? Answers to those two are enough. No further criticism needed.
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- jrflowers 1y agoOh hey look, a clickbait title that breaks the rules here in order to make manosphere garbage look more legitimate. The title of this article isn’t “Criticisms of The Body Keeps the Score”, it is “The Body Keeps the Score Is Bullshit” If we’re going to editorialize titles I would suggest “Seed oil and testosterone youtuber has opinions on a book about trauma”
- pyuser583 1y agoSeems there’s a political angle in this. Conservatives emphasize the importance of “mindfulness” type approaches, while liberals emphasize “trauma” approaches. The ideological appeal is obvious: when there’s a conflict between the individual and reality, conservatives say the individual should change, while leftists say society should change. But is really prefer my psychology not to be dictated by political ideology.
- mns 1y agoWithout even knowing who the author of the blog post was, found that the article is making some good points, especially showing how some of the claims in the book have no real base, and the studies that are cited sometimes have nothing to do with the conclusions that the author of the book draws out. But the interesting part is how the comment section here is in part people attacking the author of the blog post on a personal level. In the end, probably the book is a good read and fun, that's why it has such reviews and it became so popular, it also validates people and tells them what they want to hear, it doesn't matter that some?!? of the science behind it is invented or misinterpreted, people just want to feel good about themselves and read or listen to things that validate their opinions. But it does show that this whole religious approach of "we believe in science" is just that, a religion, because people in general just want to hear things that reinforce their opinions, when science is actually about constant learning, experimenting, change, listening and accepting new things.
- kepeko 1y agoWhat if something works even if the arguments are unscientific? Example: How to get an apple from high up in the tree where I can't reach? My theory is that if I knock them with a baseball bat they fall because they are afraid of baseball bats and don't want to be hit. I have tested it and it works. A physics teacher I know disagrees, and a biologist disagrees. What if psychology has such things that just work even if the theory is wrong? The trauma healing layman psychology industry might have a method that works for some people, so that they get into a better mental state.
- 331c8c71 1y agoYeah I think there's no point denying that we humans need and are affected by narratives. At least on the psychological level, which, in turn, may have impact on the body as well.
- smallpipe 1y agoScience has no problem admitting something works without knowing why. Making stuff up to sell a book is preying on vulnerable people.
- marginalia_nu 1y agoThe problem with the trauma model is that it would explain the outcomes even if it as false, as almost everyone will have had a traumatic or adverse experience at some point in their lives, and anyone who hasn't has been sheltered to a point that is in itself traumatic. Telling someone that past trauma is the cause of their problem, and going through some ritual to find and process it will in some sense heal them, is a textbook example of suggestion. We know this can make people feel better as long as they buy into it, crux being it also works if we say unrestful ancestral spirits or unbalanced humors are at fault.
- spwa4 1y agoThe problem with the trauma model is that only the trauma is looked at. NOT the environment that caused it. Because nearly every trauma ... happens at school, and it is the responsibility of teachers and more generally the government. None of the trauma literature even looks at what to change to prevent this, and certainly not considering that the problem is always specific individuals, essentially always teachers. (because if it's other kids, that too is legally and practically the responsibility of teachers, and it's always specific teachers that don't have a good grip on what happens in class or on the playground) And the problem is not even necessarily that these people are responsible, but that they won't stop and the trauma will repeat and repeat and repeat again and again, until the kids either run away or use violence to resolve it. Then, of course, you punish the kids harshly for doing that, and find extremely scary sounding names for what the kids did. Anti-social behavior. Theft. No conscience. Psychopaths. Oh but teachers bullying kids in class, that is not psychopathy. Even teachers failing to prevent bullies attacking other kids on purpose, that is not anti-social behavior. Teachers asking kids to become drug dealers, that is NOT a sign of no conscience. School, police and government cooperating to hide that this happens is not illegal or wrong or any of those things and certainly they can't be expected to fix such problems, and certainly the state can't be expected to pay for the consequences the way they demand of everyone else. ONLY the kids' behavior is antisocial. Yesterday on Netflix I watched "I am a killer", and they showed that a particular woman was proud of what she's done. Of course there was a slight gap in what the police and judge believed had happened. You see, this kid was abandoned by the government (parents kept her home, and didn't even give her enough food. The government visited every once every 8 months and of course child services help was far worse than being left at home). She fixed this situation ... by drug running, and that, she kept doing for 20 years. Now after 15 years she was in the same house where a drug-related murder happened, and "cooperated" with the murder. By then, she had kids, who where in the house and people she could not physically beat were very angry, so she did not intervene. She called the police on the fight the weeks before. They never showed up. The police accusation of her "cooperation" with the murder is 90% that she never called authorities, and didn't risk herself or her kids. She then pointed out that it isn't even true that she didn't intervene, she had called the authorities hundreds of times over 20 years, including not long before the murder about the very same fight, but her expectations of help ... shall we say "evolved" over those hundreds of times she asked for help. When she called the week before, nobody responded. She then also helped hide the body, expecting that the police would punish her if they found out. Now of course according to the police the cause of such actions are psychopathy, antisocial behavior, not having a conscience, being evil, ... and so on. The cause of the situation is NOT, and shall NEVER be considered to be that she had an expectation that even if the police reacted, they would either do nothing, or punish her. And this sort of thinking, no matter how rational, shall not even be mentioned in the case at any point, no matter how often she repeats it. It shall ESPECIALLY not be mentioned that this is in fact exactly what happened. You see, she was right. The police eventually of course intervened (when the guy was 2 months dead, and it wasn't even theoretically possible to help anyone anymore, by the way) ... and punished her. But of course the state, the non-reaction of everyone whose only job it is to prevent this sort of situation from building to this point, is just totally innocent. The fact that they did not just fail ... but purposefully abandoned her, and especially not that such behavior could be considered to make her reaction rational. Oh and that when she was arrested she fought her way to her kids, and then told them that the police were going to take her away, take them away, and punish her kids for what happened as well, that that is just how the world works, that they should now care for themselves and ask a particular person "for a job" is the reason the judge added 10 years to her sentence. Of course, from some perspectives, she was simply relaying what happened to her, warn them, and give advice that helped her. Obviously this proves she is evil. That she mentioned she was proud of herself for warning her kids, especially, makes her evil, it was called out specifically by the judge. Why? Obviously because it shows what police, and society in general, will do to help you. Not only will the police, and judges, and child services, and schools, and ... NOT help, they will punish YOU for anything that goes wrong. That is all they ever do. They will do this ESPECIALLY if it's their fault and their responsibility that things went bad, and it won't matter, at all, how illegal their actions are (yes, it is illegal for the state to fail to get kids to school. Of course, child services regularly physically prevents kids from going to school. This is apparently allowed for child services, that is normal, and that even fucking death row makes accommodations for inmates to go to school is not hypocritical at all). There is ZERO police culpability for not helping in the lead up to the murder. For not helping her as a kid. Zero culpability for child services for failing for 13 years to get her to school. Zero culpability for the school for not making it happen. None whatsoever. There is ZERO responsibility of the state for not helping her to the point she can't read. For not helping her with violent fights at her home. And, above all, you can't even mention that this, of course, wasn't in fact "the state", or "the police" or ... that didn't help, that it was specific individuals that have a name and a responsibility, specific government employees that could be asked to account for their failures.
- michael1999 1y agoThe core thesis of TBKTS is self-evidently true. Thoughts and emotional experiences can be encoded in the body in self-perpetuating ways that operate outside conscious thought and persist long after the event. Consider something as simple as a limp that persists after the acute injury has healed. A sharp pain from a sprained ankle quickly teaches the body to discover a new pattern that avoids the pain. They weight different toes. The hips shift. The stride shortens and becomes less symmetrical. People chose different paths on uneven ground. Etc. But once healed, there is no corresponding salient "I'm healed" signal to prompt the body back to a more neutral posture. People will complain of their chronically aching hip, or back. When they try to run, it feels weird. If you try to force them to move in a certain way, they will refuse. Posture and movement planning are highly stylized in a complicated organism like humans, and nobody should be surprised when there are feedback loops and meta-stable attractors there. I don't need to use loaded words like "trauma" and "therapy" to explain this. There are simple facts. Thoughts can raise or lower the heart-rate. Bracing the body can restrict breathing. Shallow breathing changes the acidity of the blood which then activates the sympathetic system which changes thinking. Psychologists really do fix many panic attacks by teaching people to consciously manage their breathing. TBKTS takes this to 11. That said, the many assertions about the specific mechanisms by which "trauma" is encoded in the body, and the paths by which they feed back into current thoughts and feelings are more speculative. Some are at best premature, and at worst absolute bullshit like so much of the psych literature. The value of the book is in the thesis, not the long argument.