Does the body really ‘keep the score’ after trauma? How the debunked idea of ‘repressed memories’ is making a comeback

Have you heard someone say online or in casual conversation, when responding to someone’s struggles, “well, the body keeps the score”…. The everyday use of this phrase also demonstrates the extraordinary reach of the 2014 non-fiction book that popularised it, The Body Keeps the Score by Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. But as the idea has spread, it’s also been simplified. In fact, this book – which has spent almost six years on The New York Times bestseller list – goes beyond arguing that trauma affects the body. It rests on a far more contentious claim: that traumatic memories live in the body, inaccessible to conscious memory.