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A new neuroscience paper argues that the popular idea that the body keeps the score may be incorrect.

Despite its provocative title, the paper ultimately supports many embodied trauma interventions.

Trauma may be better understood as a disorder of prediction rather than literal “storage” in the body.

Flow states like music, athletics, creativity, and surfing may help restore the flexibility trauma disrupts.

A paper published recently in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience is making some waves in trauma circles, and for good reason. Written by Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, and Karl Friston, it takes direct aim at one of the most influential ideas in modern trauma psychology: that trauma is stored in the body. The title alone is a provocation: “The Body Does Not Keep the Score.”

Before clinicians and clients start questioning everything they’ve built around somatic approaches to trauma, it’s worth understanding what the paper actually argues — and maybe even more importantly, what it doesn’t. Despite the dramatic framing, this is less a takedown of Bessel van der Kolk than an argument about mechanism and metaphor.

What Van der Kolk Argues

Bessel van der Kolk’s 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score, genuinely transformed public understanding of trauma. It landed with such force because it articulated something trauma survivors already knew intuitively: traumatic experiences are not simply abstract thoughts floating around in the mind waiting to be corrected by better cognition. Trauma shows up physiologically. It arrives as panic before language — as a tightening chest, as hypervigilance, as exhaustion, or as the inability to fully exhale.

For decades, psychology had become increasingly mind-focused and, at times, aggressively scientistic — reducing human beings into detached objects to be measured rather than lived realities to be encountered. The body often became secondary to cognition, information processing, distorted thoughts, and neurotransmitters. Van der Kolk’s work helped rebalance that conversation. His core........

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