Why a Little Nuance Helps in Trauma Healing

Key points

Public debates about The Body Keeps the Score often swing between praise and total condemnation.

Some critiques of the book are valid, but these issues do not negate the entire body of work.

Metaphors like the “lizard brain” can be scientifically imperfect and still clinically useful.

Discarding frameworks can harm trauma survivors; a nuanced, updated approach serves the field far better.

Every few months, a new wave of critique sweeps through the trauma world, calling out guru culture, pseudoscience, and the tendency of some bestselling books to overreach. Recently, a widely circulated essay argued that The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is both scientifically flawed and fundamentally harmful. Predictably, this set off a familiar cycle of tweets, TikToks, an