Back in 2014, Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score hit the shelves—and caused a stir in the body-based therapy community. Finally, there was science to back up the methods we were using in a world where cognitive-behavioral therapy was touted as the only legitimate therapy. I was so excited about it that I pre-ordered the book, and told all my colleagues about it, too.
Fast-forward to 2020, when lockdowns made people feel like they were going crazy. With a whole new group of people desperate to improve their mental health, the book suddenly got more popular than it had ever been.
That same year, I stumbled on a book from 2017, called How Emotions are Made. The science in that book contradicted darn near everything that The Body Keeps the Score said about how the brain works.
I’m not against the methods proposed in The Body Keeps the Score.
Now, let me just pause to clarify something. I’m not against the methods proposed in The Body Keeps the Score. Nor do I have a problem with somatic therapy. Somatic therapy is where it’s at, and I’m fine with many of the methods proposed in the book.
Pseudo, Pseudo, Pseudoscience!
My problem is with the alleged “science” in the book.
Though the book did wonders to thrust the 100-year-old practice of attending to the body during psychotherapy into the public eye, the book also popularized some false pseudoscience
The idea that we have primitive, emotional, and rational sub-brains within our brain has been discredited since the 1970s.
The idea that the amygdala is a “fear center” in our brains has been debunked.
That a limbic “system” is where our emotions live and it can be hijacked: Falsified.
Aaaand, last but not least…
Though it’s catchy as hell, it’s downright scientifically inaccurate to claim that “the body keeps the score.”
Because: The body’s patterns are maintained by THE BRAIN.
In other words, *the brain* keeps the score and the body is the scorecard. Just like a scorecard, the body is a reflection of the past that we can see in the present. Nothing more and nothing less.
Some might argue that the body IS the score—if the score is a reflection of what’s been happening on the field—but it certainly doesn’t keep the score. Come on, a score doesn’t exist without somebody being aware of and keeping track of what’s happening on the field.
Keeping the score means monitoring what’s happening, and noting it. That’s the scorekeeper’s job.
It’s also the job of the brain.
In fact, the core task of any brain is to regulate the organism’s internal milieu by anticipating needs and preparing to satisfy them before they arise. This kind of scorekeeping is called allostasis.
I could be generous and agree that van der Kolk was right when he said the body keeps the score. I could say that what he meant is that the brain’s process of allostasis is “the body keeping the score,” since the brain is part of the body.
But alas, he never mentions allostasis—or anything else in reference to contemporary understanding of brain function—so it’s clear he meant no such thing.
What he did was write a book, from his very authoritative position at Harvard, to explain that the body needs to be brought into therapy for PTSD symptoms. This book came from his realization that body-based therapists had the right idea all along when it comes to solving problems that standard psychiatry had for decades failed to solve.
He did this by laying out a whole bunch of falsified scientific-sounding ideas about brain function to explain why body-based techniques can change PTSD symptoms.
Those explanations are not the actual reasons that these methods work.
They don’t work because you’re quieting the “emotional” part of your brain. They work because you’re building a better model of your body in the world.
This idea of a brain running an internal model of the body in the world comes from the mathematics underlying the free energy principle, or FEP. Psychology addresses these mathematics in terms of predictive processing and active inference, which are also pretty complicated, so that’s why I simply refer to it as “building a better model.”
To Make a Long Story Short…
In a nutshell, successful psychotherapy is the process of building a better model—not of strengthening the rational part of your brain and calming the emotional part.
A better model means that you will possess and select among a greater variety of physical and mental “attitudes/stances” towards things that happen in your life.
After successful psychotherapy, you’ll have a different relationship with—and conceptualization of—yourself in general, and with regard to choices you made in the past made based on earlier models.
But to the point of the value of body-based therapy, building a better model also means practicing. Not just by mental rehearsal, but by literally moving your body in new ways as you recall the stories of your life—or as you simulate entering into an upcoming stressful situation in your life.
Successful psychotherapy requires working with someone who understands not only the frame of classical psychotherapy, but also how to invite the body into that process.
Want to get on the field and practice the plays that will lead your internal “team” to a victorious future?
Give me a call. We’ll talk.
