The Strawman Keeps the Score

The latest viral journal article and the case against a trauma theory no one actually holds

The algorithm loves a strawman argument.

They generate outrage. Outrage generates clicks. Clicks generate revenue. It’s part and parcel of social media that conveniently helps fill the coffers of Zuckerberg et. al.

The latest example arrived a few weeks ago in the trauma world, when a new journal article was published with the provocative title: “The Body Does Not Keep the Score.”

The internet promptly lost its mind.

It wasn’t because of anything the paper actually says, but because of what the title says. The controversy is largely built on a false bifurcation, a debate that doesn’t meaningfully exist among trauma researchers and clinicians. The power is in the headline, not the content. That’s unfortunate because the paper itself raises some important points.

My first reaction was immediate:

Shit. Not this again.

The title worked on me, too.

Without that title, the paper would likely have landed in relative obscurity. There’s no groundbreaking scientific discovery. There is no revolutionary new finding buried in its pages. Yet millions of people suddenly heard about it because the title was perfectly calibrated for the social media—designed in algorithmic heaven where the strawman keeps the score.

The formula is simple: The body keeps the score. No, it doesn’t.

This generates instant polarization, instant engagement, and instant virality. The irony is that the paper itself isn’t nearly as divisive as its title suggests.

The Body Keeps the Score Was Always a Metaphor

Part of the confusion stems from how people interpret the title of Bessel van der Kolk’s enormously influential 2014 book, The Body Keeps the Score.

The phrase was never intended to be taken literally.

Van der Kolk wasn’t arguing that trauma is physically stored in muscles, fascia, or tissues like some kind of toxic residue waiting to be released. And neither are any serious trauma therapists. His work argued something scientifically defensible: trauma profoundly affects the brain, nervous system, endocrine system, immune system, and bodily experience.

In other words, trauma affects the whole person. But right up front in the first paragraph, the authors of the new paper write that the phrase the body keeps the score is “implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh…”¹ Even a cursory read through van der Kolk’s book highlights the inaccuracy—laziness even—of this statement.

The book title served as a corrective to decades of approaches that treated trauma primarily as a cognitive phenomenon. It highlighted something many survivors already knew: you cannot simply think your way out of trauma. Over the past decade, the phrase evolved from a metaphor into a book title, then from a book title into a cultural axiom.

The Debate Nobody Was Having

The new paper seems aimed at those who claim trauma is literally stored in the body. I share the authors’ concerns about that language. But here’s the problem: no respected trauma researchers or clinicians were ever making that claim in the first place.

The authors appear to be arguing against a position that exists mostly on the fringes of social media, wellness culture, and oversimplified trauma discourse. That’s worth correcting. But it isn’t a refutation of trauma science.

In fact, much of the paper actually supports what many trauma researchers have been saying all along. The brain is part of the body. Predictive processing—the idea that the brain constantly generates expectations based on prior experience—is already a well-established framework in neuroscience.

Traumatic experiences shape those predictions. They influence perception, emotion, physiology, attention, memory, and behavior. That sounds remarkably similar to what many people have meant by “the body keeps the score.”

Healing Is Not Excavation

One of the ideas in the paper is its rejection of the notion that healing requires digging out some hidden traumatic residue. As therapist Pierre Bouchard puts it, “Trauma is not stored in the body, but it is encountered in the body.” That’s a helpful frame.

Elsewhere, Bouchard writes, “We were handed the metaphor ‘the body keeps the score’ and something in us sniffed it and said, ‘yes—there’s something wrong in me and I can get it out, and then I’ll be okay.’”

That captures an unfortunate misunderstanding that has emerged in some corners of trauma culture. Healing is not the extraction of a buried object. Healing is not excavation.

Trauma therapy is not about locating something lodged within tissue or sinew and removing it. It is about helping the nervous system, brain, and mind develop new patterns of prediction, safety, regulation, connection, and meaning. It's about re-patterning what was organized around threat.

It is about regulating dysregulated survival responses.

It is about reconsolidating traumatic memories through evidence-based interventions.

It is about expanding flexibility where rigidity once existed.

It is about undoing aloneness.

A Sensational Title Hiding an Important Conversation

The tragedy is that much of this nuance gets lost beneath the headline. Without the title, few people would be talking about the paper. With the title, almost nobody is talking about what the paper actually says. Instead, we’re arguing over a metaphor, despite the fact the paper emphasizes some very important neuroscience.

“The body keeps the score” was never meant as a literal statement. It was a powerful and catchy shorthand for a complex psychobiological reality. The metaphor helped millions of people understand that trauma is not merely a problem of thought, but something that affects the whole organism. That remains true.

The new paper offers useful clarifications. It challenges simplistic notions of trauma being “stored” in the body. It encourages more precise language. It highlights predictive processing and the brain’s remarkable capacity for adaptation. Those are worthwhile contributions.

What it doesn’t do is overturn decades of trauma research. Nor does it meaningfully refute the central insights that made van der Kolk’s research, and The Body Keeps the Score, so influential in the first place.

Science advances through refinement. If we want a better understanding of trauma and its treatment, the goal should be to test claims rigorously, discard what doesn’t hold up, and strengthen what does, not to knock down oversimplified versions of arguments that few serious practitioners and researchers are actually making.

The conversation deserves more precision, more nuance, and more curiosity. In other words: more science, less strawman.

1. Kotler S, Mannino M, Fox G and Friston K (2026) The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Front. Syst. Neurosci. 20:1812957. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957