The Body Keeps the Score

Psychology

First published: 2014
Print length: 443 pagesViking, 2014

Description

Bessel van der Kolk examines trauma as an experience that persists not only in memory but in the brain, body, relationships, and capacity to feel safe. Drawing on decades of work with survivors alongside scientific research, he explains how traumatic stress can impair pleasure, engagement, trust, and self-control long after immediate danger has passed. The book also surveys paths toward recovery, including neurofeedback, meditation, sports, drama, and yoga, asking how different practices can restore a sense of agency and connection. Throughout, relationships remain central: they can reinforce fear and isolation or create conditions for healing. The account joins clinical observation with an expansive inquiry into how people live with—and begin to recover from—overwhelming experience.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Descriptive · Direct · Journalistic

Pace

Measured

Tone

Earnest · Hopeful · Intimate · Reflective

Structure

Argumentative

Focus

Ideas · Information · Relationships

Emotional intensity

5 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

IsolationMemoryMental healthTransformationTrauma

About Bessel van der Kolk

Bessel van der Kolk is a Dutch-American psychiatrist, researcher, and educator whose work since the 1970s has focused on post-traumatic stress. His writing combines clinical case histories with summaries of scientific research, moving between individual experience and broader accounts of how trauma may affect memory, the body, relationships, and a person’s sense of safety. In The Body Keeps the Score, he develops this approach through survivor accounts and an extensive survey of treatments, including neurofeedback, meditation, drama, sports, and yoga. The book presents recovery as a process of restoring agency and connection, though scientists have criticized some of its claims about trauma, memory, brain function, and development as pseudoscientific or as distortions of cited research.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Viking
Language: English
ISBN: 9780670785933

Keep your books and notes in Collected for iPhone.

Apple Books is a service mark of Apple Inc. iPhone is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.