The body still matters

Here’s what’s actually happened, and what it means for you.

What the new paper says

In April 2026, a paper was published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience by Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox, and Karl Friston. Friston is one of the most influential neuroscientists working today, so when his name appears on something, the field tends to pay attention. The paper’s title is deliberately provocative: “The Body Does Not Keep the Score.”

Social media being social media, the headline has been the bit that travels. Within days, posts appeared declaring that everything we thought we knew about trauma, PTSD and C-PTSD was wrong, that somatic therapy was pointless, and that years of trauma understanding had been “cancelled.”

That isn’t what the paper says. Far from it.

The authors themselves describe their argument as “less an outright refutation of van der Kolk than an updated reframing.” What they’re doing is something far more useful, and far less destabilising, than the headlines suggest.

What Bessel van der Kolk actually argued

When The Body Keeps the Score was published in 2014, it landed with such force because it gave language to something people with PTSD and C-PTSD already knew: trauma is not simply a thought problem. It shows up as a racing heart, a tight chest, hypervigilance, exhaustion, the inability to feel safe in your own skin. For decades before, psychology had drifted toward treating people as collections of distorted thoughts to be corrected. Van Der Kolk helped rebalance that conversation, reminding clinicians and researchers that the body is part of trauma, and part of healing.

His underlying argument, drawing on neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio, was that traumatic experiences change physiology, autonomic responses, perception, and the felt sense of safety in ways that cannot be reached by talk and cognition alone. The brain and nervous system were always part of his framework. Even the new paper’s authors acknowledge this, noting that the book “explicitly and commendably discusses prefrontal-limbic interactions, interoception, embodied cognition.”

Where the new paper takes a different view

This is where the nuance matters.

Over the past decade, the phrase “the body keeps the score” has taken on a life of its own. It has appeared on TikTok captions, Instagram carousels, t-shirts, and across wellness culture. That kind of reach is rare for any clinical idea, and it speaks to how deeply Van Der Kolk’s work resonated with people who had been told for years that their trauma was a thinking problem.

As ideas travel that far, they take on different shapes for different people. For many, “the body keeps the score” has come to mean something quite specific: that trauma is physically lodged in muscle tissue or particular organs, and can be unlocked or released through particular techniques. The science underlying that specific claim remains contested, and it’s worth holding the metaphor a little more loosely than it’s sometimes held. The new paper proposes a different way of describing what’s happening, where the brain and body are part of a single connected system rather than separate places where trauma is stored.

It’s worth saying clearly. The paper isn’t pushing back on Van Der Kolk’s clinical understanding, which has always been more sophisticated than the shorthand suggests. It’s pushing back on what happens to a powerful metaphor when it becomes a cultural slogan. That’s a very different thing. Arguably, the metaphor only travelled so far because it captured something so true about embodied experience.

What the authors propose instead is that trauma is best understood as a disorder of prediction.

Trauma as “stuck prediction”

The brain is not a passive recorder of what’s happening around you. It’s constantly making predictions about what’s safe, what’s dangerous, what’s about to happen next. And it updates those predictions when new information arrives. This is called predictive processing, and it’s one of the most well-established frameworks in modern neuroscience.

After trauma, and especially with PTSD and C-PTSD, the brain becomes excessively confident that danger is ongoing. It assigns enormous weight to threat predictions. Bodily sensations that might otherwise be neutral, like a racing heart or a tight chest, get interpreted as evidence that danger is still present. The brain treats those sensations as ‘proof’, predicts more danger, and the body responds with more of the same sensations. The loop feeds itself.

This is what hypervigilance and panic actually are at a mechanistic level. The body is still very much involved, but as the authors of the paper put it, “as messenger, not archive.”

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it describes what so many people with PTSD and C-PTSD already feel. A sense that the nervous system has become stuck, narrow, organised entirely around threat. Less able to access curiosity, play, spontaneity, or rest. The authors of the new paper call this loss of flexibility a collapse of metastability, which is the brain’s healthy ability to shift fluidly between different states depending on context.

Trauma narrows that range. Healing widens it again.

We asked Heather Mason, founder of The Minded Institute and a leading voice in trauma-informed yoga therapy, for her perspective on what this new framework offers – and where it may need further nuance. Heather has spent over two decades working at the intersection of yoga therapy, neuroscience, and mental health, and her training programmes are used by clinicians and yoga therapists across the UK and beyond.

Heather told us: “Reading van der Kolk’s broader body of work makes clear that he was never describing trauma as a sentient injury residing in tissue with emotional memory of its own, and this paper helpfully brings that elucidation to a wider audience. The paper also introduces more of the trauma field to the well-established concept of predictive processing, offering a mechanistic framework that helps explain why body-based and somatic approaches work and reaffirms the body as a crucial component of both trauma and recovery. That said, without broader context, the concept of prediction error risks being understood as a transient, if commonly occurring, phenomenon. In severe and complex presentations, survival-oriented threat responses can become deeply encoded in subcortical structures such as the periaqueductal grey, which organises freeze and defensive responses at a level below conscious prediction. These patterns are slower to update than cortical learning and help explain why recovery can feel so profoundly difficult for many people. The science informing best practice is still developing, and progress is best made by building an integrative model rather than necessarily treating new frameworks as overturning what already has both clinical merit and solid neuroscientific grounding.“

In other words, Heather is pointing out that the most severe trauma responses are encoded in deep, ancient parts of the brain that update much more slowly than the predictive systems the new paper focuses on. That doesn’t undo the new framework, but it helps explain why recovery can be so hard, and why no single explanation captures everything.

Where the embodied therapies fit in

This is the part that should reassure anyone worried that EMDR, somatic experiencing, trauma-informed yoga, breathwork, or other body-based approaches have just been invalidated. They haven’t. Not even slightly.

In fact, the new framework helps explain why these approaches work, even when they look completely different from one another on the surface. EMDR, mindfulness, exercise, somatic approaches, relational safety, creative immersion, movement practices, trauma-sensitive yoga. The authors suggest all of these may work because they help restore flexibility to a nervous system that has become rigidly organised around threat.

Heather Mason notes that the picture is even richer than the paper sets out: “The cerebellum is very much playing a part here as well. Its role in predictive processing is pretty profound, especially in interpersonal situations – where, for example, someone has attachment trauma.“

That’s a particularly important point for people living with C-PTSD, where so much of the trauma is often relational. The predictive processing framework isn’t just about what the brain expects from the world. It’s also about what the nervous system has learned to expect from other people.

Across the trauma field, there are many practices that work in similar ways – gentle, repeatable interventions that help people regulate their nervous systems, regardless of how the practitioner explains the mechanism. The new science is offering a different explanation for why these approaches help, not telling anyone to stop. Whether we describe what’s happening as “releasing stored trauma,” “updating the brain’s predictions,” or both, the lived experience of healing remains the same: the body becomes a place you can live in again, rather than somewhere an alarm is always going off.

We don’t yet fully understand how trauma works in the body. What we do know is that body-based approaches help people heal and manage symptoms. Yoga, somatic experiencing, breathwork, bodywork, EMDR, and many others have supported people through trauma recovery for decades, and the evidence for that isn’t in question. The mechanism, the exact biological story of what’s happening when these practices work, is still being worked out. Some practitioners describe it as releasing trauma held in tissue. Others describe it as calming the nervous system. The new paper proposes it’s the brain updating its predictions. These are different attempts to explain the same thing, which is that the body is involved in trauma and in healing from it. 

The flow states idea

One of the most genuinely exciting parts of the new paper is its discussion of flow states.

Flow is that deeply absorbing state where action and awareness merge. It’s what people sometimes experience while surfing, dancing, climbing, making music, immersed in creative work, gardening, or walking in nature. The authors suggest that flow may help restore the very flexibility that trauma disrupts. During flow, the brain’s networks become more adaptive, more variable, more able to reorganise themselves.

The authors are admirably honest that this is still a developing area. They explicitly acknowledge that their specific claim, that PTSD involves reduced metastability and that flow restores it, has not yet been directly tested in PTSD populations. 

But the broader idea has real intuitive resonance. Recovery involves the return of movement. Movement in the nervous system. Movement in relationships. Movement in meaning-making. Movement in life itself.

What this actually means for you

If you have PTSD or C-PTSD, here is what you can take from all of this.

Your symptoms are real. Whatever theoretical framework anyone uses to describe trauma, the racing heart, the flashbacks, the hypervigilance, the dissociation, the exhaustion, none of that is invalidated by this paper. If anything, the new model takes those experiences even more seriously by explaining them mechanistically.

Your healing is real. Somatic therapies, EMDR, trauma-informed yoga, breathwork, bodywork, or any other body based approaches have not been “debunked.” The new framework actually helps explain why these approaches help. 

The body still matters. The body still matters. The authors of the new paper are not saying the body is irrelevant to trauma. They’re proposing that the body is part of a loop with the brain, rather than a separate vault where trauma is stored. That’s a refinement of how we describe the mechanism, not a dismissal of the body’s role in trauma or healing.

Bessel van der Kolk’s contribution still stands. His central insight, that trauma changes physiology, that healing cannot happen through thinking alone, that safety and embodiment matter, is foundational and remains so. His work has helped millions of people, including many in our own community, finally feel understood. The new paper proposes a refinement of mechanism, not a replacement of his clinical wisdom. 

Healing is about flexibility. Whatever helps your nervous system widen its range, whether that’s professional trauma therapy, movement, connection, creativity, time in nature, or moments of deep absorption, is working with the grain of what the science now suggests.

A note on how science actually progresses

There’s a growing tendency, especially online, to treat any refinement of a popular idea as a total takedown. A theory becomes well-known. People find it helpful. Then comes a backlash, and the theory is flattened into its most extreme version and dismissed entirely.

That isn’t how good science works. Good science refines, updates, integrates new evidence, and keeps what remains clinically useful. The question is never “which trauma theory wins?” The question is “what helps people heal?”

By that measure, the new paper and The Body Keeps the Score aren’t really in opposition. They’re both pointing toward the same thing. Trauma is not a moral failing. It’s not a thought problem. It isn’t something you can simply reason your way out of. And healing is possible, especially when we work with the whole person, body and brain together.

If you’ve been feeling shaken by what you’ve seen online this week, we hope this helps you put the ground back under your feet. The science is evolving, as good science should. But the truth that brought you to seek support in the first place, that your trauma is real, and that your body matters, has not changed at all.