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 argument was not that trauma literally lives in bodily tissue independent of the nervous system. It was phenomenological, clinical, and neurobiological all at once: traumatic experiences alter physiology, autonomic responses, perception, and sense of safety in ways that cannot be fully healed through cognition alone.
And if you actually read the new paper carefully, the authors largely acknowledge this. They explicitly note that Van der Kolk discusses “prefrontal-limbic interactions, interoception, embodied cognition,” and draws heavily from Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker framework. In other words, yes, of course, Van der Kolk understands that the nervous system mediates bodily experience.
What the authors are objecting to is not really Van der Kolk’s clinical model, but an increasingly literalized cultural interpretation of it.
And to be fair, that interpretation does exist. Trauma language has increasingly become mixed with social media neuroscience, wellness culture, and overly simplistic biological claims. Somewhere along the way, metaphors that were clinically useful sometimes began getting treated as literal anatomical explanations. The authors are pushing back against the idea that trauma is physically stored in non-innervated tissue independent of the brain and nervous system.
What the New Framework Proposes
Instead, the Frontiers authors propose a predictive-processing framework. In this model, the brain is not a passive recorder of reality but an active prediction machine. After trauma, the brain becomes excessively confident that danger is ongoing. Threat predictions become over-weighted. Hypervigilance, flashbacks, and panic emerge because the nervous system becomes trapped in self-confirming loops: predicting danger, interpreting bodily arousal as proof of danger, and then using that arousal to reinforce the original prediction. The body participates in trauma, the authors write, “but as messenger, not archive.” There’s nothing in Van der Kolk’s work that would disagree with this.
Where the paper becomes genuinely interesting is in its discussion of “metastability,” which refers to the brain’s healthy ability to fluidly move between different network states depending on context. In simpler language: flexibility. A healthy nervous system can shift between vigilance and rest, focus and openness, action and stillness. Trauma narrows that flexibility. The system becomes increasingly organized around threat detection.
Clinically, this is a remarkably resonant description of trauma. Many survivors recognize immediately that trauma is not only fear — it is rigidity. The inability to return to spontaneity, curiosity, creativity, or play. The sense that the nervous system has become stuck in a narrow range of responses organized around danger.
The paper’s most novel — though admittedly still speculative — proposal is that flow states may help restore this lost flexibility. Flow refers to those deeply absorbing states where action and awareness merge: surfing, dancing, climbing, music, athletics, immersive creative work. According to the authors, flow may temporarily increase the brain’s capacity for adaptive reorganization and help restore the flexibility that trauma disrupts.
Importantly, the authors are appropriately cautious about overstating this claim. They acknowledge that the theory remains preliminary and that the core idea — that PTSD specifically involves reduced metastability, which flow can restore — has not yet been directly proven in trauma populations. That kind of transparency is graceful and worth noting.
At the same time, the framework opens up genuinely exciting possibilities for trauma treatment. It may help explain why so many seemingly different interventions can facilitate healing: EMDR, mindfulness, exercise, psychedelic-assisted therapy, somatic approaches, relational safety, movement practices, or creative immersion. These interventions may all, in different ways, help restore flexibility to a nervous system that has become rigidly organized around threat.
In that sense, the paper may ultimately function less as a rejection of embodied trauma work and more as an attempt to refine its underlying mechanisms.
Cancel Culture in Trauma Research
This distinction is important because there is a growing tendency in trauma discourse to frame theoretical refinement as total invalidation. A framework becomes popular. Clinicians and survivors find it useful. Then comes a backlash cycle in which the theory is flattened into its most extreme interpretation and publicly dismissed wholesale.
We are seeing versions of this dynamic play out around several major trauma theories right now, including polyvagal theory. But healthy sciences do not evolve by publicly humiliating earlier frameworks. They evolve by refining them, updating them, and integrating new evidence while preserving what remains clinically useful and experientially true.
The question should not be, “Which trauma theory wins?” The question should be: What helps people heal?
And despite the provocative title, the new paper ultimately lands in a surprisingly integrative place. The authors acknowledge that diverse trauma treatments may work because they restore flexibility and recalibrate rigid predictive systems. In many ways, that idea is not incompatible with the central insight that made The Body Keeps the Score so meaningful to people in the first place: trauma changes how safety, danger, and embodiment are experienced.
The body may not literally “keep the score” in the simplistic way social media sometimes imagines. But traumatic experiences absolutely alter the way the world is lived, anticipated, and felt through the body. And healing — almost always — involves restoring movement where trauma created rigidity. Movement in the nervous system, movement in relationships, movement in meaning-making, and movement in life itself.