No, Your Body Doesn’t Keep the Score

It’s not just semantics—and it bears repeating. 

YOUR BODY DOESN’T KEEP THE SCORE — and the uncomfortable sensations in your body are not all “trauma.” In fact, that’s a pretty big misunderstanding of trauma’s true nature.

Let’s catch up on the 21st-century science of psychotherapy, shall we? Because there are some popular ideas out there dating to the 1900s that are making it a lot harder for you to tend to your own mental health.

Once Upon a Time…

…Therapy (especially how and why it worked) was a big mystery. Now, therapy is ubiquitous in popular culture, and it’s all over the internet. If you’re looking for it, you’ve probably heard about trauma therapy, somatic therapy, “evidence-based therapy,” and maybe even a verrrrrrrrrrrrrrry famous book that’s about incorporating the body with therapy.

Now, don’t get the wrong idea. I’m certainly not against the methods proposed in that book. I absolutely believe that somatic therapy can be valuable. 

What I don’t believe is the alleged science in that book. I don’t believe in a well-marketed idea known as polyvagal theory, either. 

Why the surge in popularity for these two methods? Ever since Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) rose to prominence for being “evidence-based,” many therapists have been desperate to legitimize their own methods with so-called “science.”

Here’s the Bad News

Unfortunately, the stuff in that book and in polyvagal theory is falsified science. This outdated pseudoscience has sent therapists back to square one: the appearance of scientific illegitimacy. Yikes, right?

That is, unless they know about 21st-century brain science. And we’ll get to that, but first:

Here’s a brief summary of the outdated pseudoscience:

1. You have 3 sub-brains within your brain: a primitive brain, an emotional brain, and a rational brain.
2. There are centers and systems in your brain underlying the psychological things you experience.
3. Your nervous system scans for safety versus danger.
4. Your autonomic nervous system is divided into three branches.
5. Your vagus nerve coordinates a “social engagement system.”
6. Your body keeps the score.   

Now, here’s the 21st-century science—meaning, the most recent and best scientific hypothesis about how the brain and body work. By “best guess,” I mean that this is the hypothesis that is currently best supported by most of the data available to us.

1. Your brain is a single, unified network.
2. ^ That’s a literal statement, not a metaphor.
3. You have a brain because you have a body that moves. 
4. Everything your brain does—including generating your psychological experiences—is to maintain that the body wastes as little energy as possible.
5. Your brain doesn’t scan for anything, much less safety or danger.
6. Your brain is a predictive organ, meaning it is proactively and unceasingly producing what you know as your perceptions, cognitions and emotions.
7. Human physiologists are in complete agreement that the autonomic nervous system has 2 branches, an action (sympathetic) side and a resting (parasympathetic) side. 
8. There is also a consensus among human physiologists that the vagus nerve sends and receives sensorimotor information, just like any other nerve. That’s it. There’s no special “system” of social engagement for it’s coordinating. 
9. Your body doesn’t keep the score, meaning: The body reflects patterns that the brain predicts and generates, based on past experiences. *The brain* keeps the score and the body is *the scorecard.* Just like a scorecard, the body is a present-day reflection of what’s in your past. 

This isn’t a mere question of semantics, as is often suggested by those who want to keep explaining therapy by relying on falsified science and outdated metaphors.

But Leah, Why Should I Care?

If you believe in these stories, you are less likely to realize how much power you have to change your mental health for the better.

If you believe you have to control your primitive and emotional brains via your rational brain, you’ll be stuck in a victim’s mindset. Not to mention the alarming slippery slope of thinking that you’re “irrational:” If you can’t be rational, you’re mentally ill, and if you won’t be rational, you’re a terrible person (probably a narcissist or a sociopath).

Without boring you to death by breaking down every falsehood in detail, I’ll skip to sharing the most reliable hypothesis, according to the current science of emotion and brain function. Then we’ll cover why that matters to your day-to-day mental health—and finally zoom out to what it all says about somatic therapy. 

First and foremost, your brain constructs every moment of your experience in real time—and all before you become aware of it. Your emotions only “happen to you” because you’re creating them.

Depending on your story, this may sound like good or bad news. Either way, it’s the truth. And it means a few things:

1. Before you start facing how your past traumas might be affecting your life here and now, you may need to dial back to the mental health basics of sleep, food, and movement.

2. Before you label yourself as a narcissist or mentally ill, observe your irrational or selfish decisions from the perspective of simple energy function. Then, resolve to start making choices that don’t turn into deeper black holes of self-loathing or nihilism.

3. Before you label how you’re feeling as a “trauma response”—or let anyone else label it as such—seek to understand the economy that your brain is managing. Acknowledge that many of those behaviors make perfect “rational” sense from a perspective of pure energy economics.  

Yes, you’ve had some negative past experiences. You’ve got some automatic body attitudes and energy states that aren’t serving you well in present situations. 

But that’s not a reflection of some primitive or emotional brain. It’s not because your nervous system is always scanning for safety or danger.

What’s Really Going On

Your brain is running on an energy-regulation model that has been built over your entire lifetime. 

Sometimes that model is way out of sync with your current needs. Ditto the stories you tell yourself to make sense of that energy status. 

When you instead look at mental health from an energy perspective, and expose yourself to experiences that update your old model, your life will change overnight (okay that’s an exaggeration, but pretty darn fast, all things considered). 

Somatic therapy exposes you to new physical experiences. Somatic therapy teaches you new ways to observe and manipulate your nervous system through both actions and mindset. 

It exposes you to a person (in the form of a therapist like myself) who’s kind and patient with you while you struggle, practice different behaviors, and arrive at new ways of thinking. 

This kind and patient relationship may itself be an update to your model. Too many people never had someone who taught them about conforming to social reality on their own timeline. 

Most of us had caregivers short on the time and energy needed to be patient while we expressed all of our feelings about life, what was expected of us, and how hard all of that feels.

Constructing the internal model of a kind and patient caregiver is a massive boost to your mental health. No matter how alone and anguished you might be in a future moment, you’ll never feel or be truly alone. 

Still, there’s nothing mystical about somatic therapy or robust mental health. Both are all about how you manage your mental and physical energy, and whether that energy is a good match with your environment.

You can optimize your mental health. And you can have help if you want it. Does the idea of asking for help feel weird, or stupid, or like a bad idea? That’s simply because getting support to improve your emotional life is not a part of your current model. You’ve probably been taught all along to just figure it out yourself. 

But now’s your second chance. It’s your model, for Pete’s sake. You can bring it up to speed any time you want.

If you want my help in doing that, find me at LeahBensonTherapy.com