Does the Body Really Keep the Score?
- Kym Burls
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
When I first began exploring breathwork and somatic work, The Body Keeps the Score was one of those books being mentioned everywhere.
Bessel van der Kolk's work has become enormously influential in the trauma and somatic worlds, and so has the idea contained within its title. The body remembers. The body holds trauma. Experiences that haven't been processed remain somewhere within us.
Over time, some of those ideas have been taken much further. Anger gets stored in the hips. Grief lives in the chest. Trauma is held in the fascia. Tightness, pain or numbness in a particular part of the body can be interpreted as evidence that an unresolved experience is sitting there waiting to be accessed and released.
Then, in April 2026, an article appeared in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience with the provocative title: The Body Does Not Keep the Score.
The paper appeared to challenge something I'd been introduced to early in my training, something that I felt was fundamental to working with the body.
Except, when I started questioning both sides of the argument, neither side, when taken literally, was helpful.
What came out of this for me wasn’t whether the body does or doesn't keep the score, but what do we actually mean when we say that it does?
TL;DR
Trauma isn't literally stored in body parts
Experience can shape the whole system
Bodily sensations can become part of learned patterns
Somatic work doesn't require a “stored trauma” explanation
When a metaphor becomes anatomy
There is something appealing about the idea that the body holds our life's experiences.
We feel stress in our shoulders. Anxiety can tighten the chest or turn the stomach. Embarrassment can make the face flush. Fear can change our breathing before we've consciously made sense of what frightened us.
Our language reflects this. We talk about heartbreak, gut feelings, being sick with worry or carrying the weight of something on our shoulders.
And it isn’t imaginary. Emotional experience involves the entire organism; brain activity, breathing, heart rate, muscle tone, hormones, immune activity, attention, memory and our perception of what's happening inside us.
The problem is when a metaphor becomes an explanation of anatomy.
Feeling grief in your chest doesn't mean that grief is stored there. Feeling anger while somebody works around your hips doesn't tell us that anger has been living inside the tissue. Finding an area of your body difficult to feel or connect with doesn't establish that trauma has been buried there.
The experience can be real. The explanation can still be wrong.
This is especially relevant in somatic work because our own expectations (and stories) can influence how we make sense of what we feel. Research has also linked PTSD with changes in how bodily signals are noticed and understood, including becoming more watchful of internal sensations or more likely to interpret them as threatening (1,2).
That doesn't mean one particular sensation has one particular meaning, or that our interpretation of it is necessarily correct.
(Side note: This is why as a practitioner it’s important to leave space between what someone experiences and what we tell them that experience represents, and why when facilitating Somatic Breathwork I prefer to offer what fellow breathworker Kasper van der Meulen calls a “buffet of maybes” — possible interpretations to explore rather than a definitive explanation of what their experience means.)
What the new paper actually says
Despite the controversy and conversation it generated, The Body Does Not Keep the Score wasn't some new experimental study disproving the idea that the body stores trauma.
It was openly published as an opinion article!
The authors argue that trauma may be better understood through learning, prediction and the way previous experience shapes present responses. Rather than something being physically stored, they propose that patterns of threat can become deeply ingrained and harder for the brain to update (3).
The authors are also less critical of van der Kolk than the title might suggest. Their argument, in their own words, is “less an outright refutation” than an updated reframing.
And some of what they propose is still theoretical. The authors acknowledge that one of the central ideas in their model, that PTSD involves a loss of flexibility in the way brain networks move between different states, has not yet been directly tested in people with PTSD (3).
Rather than settling the discussion, the paper simply offered another way of thinking about trauma.
So what does keep the score?
This is where the storage metaphor becomes more useful if we stop searching for a physical location.
Something can happen to us years ago and still influence what happens inside us today.
A particular situation, sensation, expression, smell, sound or interaction can become associated with danger. Beliefs about ourselves and other people can change. We can become more alert to certain cues or begin avoiding situations connected with what happened. Bodily sensations themselves can become associated with threat.
Research into PTSD shows that learning and memory are part of these ongoing patterns, including differences in how threatening experiences are learned, remembered and later updated (4).
Our awareness of what's happening inside the body adds another piece.
This is known as interoception: our ability to both sense and make sense of things like heartbeat, breathing, gut sensations, temperature, pain and muscle tension.
Research has repeatedly linked PTSD with changes in this internal sensing process. For some people bodily signals can become harder to notice. For others they become difficult to ignore, or ordinary sensations begin to carry a stronger sense of threat (2,5). Research into fear learning also suggests that bodily sensations themselves can become connected with previous experiences of threat and influence how future situations are interpreted (6).
That helps explain why “the body remembers” can feel so accurate without requiring memory to be physically stored in muscle or fascia.
What we feel inside affects how we experience what's happening around us. Previous experience affects how we interpret what we feel. What we do next changes the information coming back in.
Rather than an archive of what has happened to us, I've started to think of the body as a living map of what we’ve learned to expect, notice and respond to.
A response that once made complete sense can continue in different circumstances. A sensation associated with danger can still feel threatening when there is no immediate threat. Avoiding something can bring relief while also making it harder to discover that the situation is now different. An old belief can shape how a new experience is understood.
We don't need an emotion to be physically located inside our tissues to explain why something from our past can still feel very present.
There’s still plenty we don't understand about exactly how these processes interact within us.
Why the body can still be a powerful way in
If trauma isn't literally stored in the body then, why does working with the body sometimes bring up such powerful experiences?
Research into body and movement-based approaches for PTSD is still developing. Studies have found encouraging results, including reductions in PTSD symptoms, depression and sleep difficulties, but the quality of the research varies and good long-term studies are still limited (7).
During my Biodynamic Breathwork training, there was an area of my body I was initially very hesitant to have other people work with; my abdomen.
I have a history of body dysmorphia and disordered eating, and becoming aware of, and releasing tension in the belly through bodywork gave me another way of understanding some of that history, and the thoughts, beliefs and triggers connected with it.
Physically working with that area helped me psychologically shift some of those patterns.
I don't interpret that experience as body dysmorphia having been stored in my abdomen, or a piece of my past having been trapped in my belly waiting to be found and released.
My body gave me an access point.
So if an emotion becomes present while working with a particular area of the body, rather than assuming “this emotion was stored here”, a more useful question for me is:
“What becomes available when I pay attention here?”
An emotion, memory or association becoming available through that attention doesn't tell us where it was stored or why it appeared there. We can still explore whatever comes up without needing a definitive explanation for it.
Where “release” becomes a problem
The storage metaphor becomes problematic when it shapes what we believe healing is supposed to look like.
If trauma is viewed as something trapped inside the body, getting it out feels intuitive. Shaking means trauma is leaving. Tears mean grief has been released. Screaming means anger has finally escaped. Before long, the intensity of the response becomes a measure of how much healing has taken place (which is total B.S. BTW).
I've seen people shake, cry, laugh and experience enormous relief during breathwork. I've experienced some of those things myself.
A powerful emotional release may be valuable. But how much someone shakes, cries or screams doesn't indicate how much has actually changed.
What happens afterward is more important.
Can something previously avoided now be approached? Has a belief shifted? Can someone stay present with something that previously felt overwhelming? Do they respond differently when an old pattern appears again?
Importantly, none of that requires a belief that trauma was stored in the body and then released.
The opposite mistake
Rejecting the idea of stored trauma shouldn’t mean treating the body as largely irrelevant, or assuming our psychological life happens above the neck.
There isn’t a dividing line where the brain ends and the rest of our experience begins.
We're a whole human organism that’s learned from what happened to it.
Which brings me back to the phrase the body keeps the score.
Provided we treat it as a metaphor rather than anatomy, I think it’s helpful.
Our past experiences can become part of how we meet the present moment.
That doesn't mean grief lives in the chest, anger is trapped in the hips or trauma waits inside the fascia until the right technique releases it.
It means our experiences can shape what we expect, what we notice and how we respond, including physical responses like changes in our breathing, heart rate or muscle tension, sometimes long after the original experience has passed.
For me, that's enough for the body to “keep the score” without needing to believe the score is physically stored anywhere.
References
Tsur, N. & Talmon, A. (2023). Post-Traumatic Orientation to Bodily Signals: A Systematic Literature Review. Trauma, Violence, & Abuse.
Leech, K., Stapleton, P. & Patching, A. (2024). A roadmap to understanding interoceptive awareness and post-traumatic stress disorder: a scoping review. Frontiers in Psychiatry.
Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G. & Friston, K. (2026). The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
Sep, M. S. C., Geuze, E. & Joëls, M. (2023). Impaired learning, memory, and extinction in posttraumatic stress disorder: translational meta-analysis of clinical and preclinical studies. Translational Psychiatry.
Fani, N., Fulton, T. & Botzanowski, B. (2025). The Neurophysiology of Interoceptive Disruptions in Trauma-Exposed Populations. Current Topics in Behavioral Neurosciences.
Joshi, S. A., Aupperle, R. L. & Khalsa, S. S. (2023). Interoception in Fear Learning and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. FOCUS.
van de Kamp, M. M. et al. (2023). Body- and movement-oriented interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Traumatic Stress.
---------
