Have you heard someone say online or in casual conversation, when responding to someone’s struggles, “well, the body keeps the score”?
For many people, this phrase is a useful way to name the physical toll stress and trauma can take when the body is in “fight or flight” mode.
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.
This idea of repressed memories has a long and controversial history. Here’s why we’re worried it’s making a comeback.
The memory wars
During the 1990s, the idea of repressed memories sparked a major scientific dispute known as the “memory wars”. Clinicians and memory researchers disagreed over whether traumatic events could be completely inaccessible to conscious memory, only to be recovered later in therapy.
The core idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, was that traumatic experiences are so overwhelming that the mind unconsciously represses them as a defence mechanism, removing them from conscious awareness while they continue to produce psychological symptoms.
After more than a decade of research raising serious doubts about repression as a reliable mechanism, many believed this debate had been settled.
Yet the idea of repressed memories is returning.
Today, the claim is not only that traumatic memories can be repressed, but that the body stores them. These repressed, stored memories are said to re-emerge later through physical symptoms.
The Body Keeps the Score suggests healing requires “releasing” or “integrating” these hidden memories of trauma through a variety of alternative, often non-evidence-based therapies, such as yoga, pyschedelic-assisted therapy and guided imagery.
Traumatic experiences are further described as disrupting the nervous system in lasting ways – even beyond a person’s conscious awareness or memory of what happened. This argument has shifted public perceptions of trauma.
Trauma and the body
The kind of memory research we do does not deny trauma, nor that it can affect the body. The concern is specifically about how this relates to memory.
There is broad scientific agreement that stress, often associated with traumatic experiences, can alter hormone levels such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, which can then impact other systems of the body. This can elevate blood pressure, affect libido, and influence how safe or unsafe the world feels on a bodily level.
For some people, trauma can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which involves physical symptoms such as nausea, panic attacks, difficulty breathing, trouble sleeping, and feeling exhausted from constantly being “on guard”.
Read more:
What do people mean when they say their nervous system is overloaded or needs a reset?
How memory works
Memory doesn’t work like a recording device we can simply “play back”.
Decades of research show that autobiographical memory is reconstructed each time an event is recalled. This means the context we’re in – including new information, our emotions, and other people’s expectations – can influence what we remember. This may distort or alter our memories.
Suggestive therapy techniques – for example, hypnosis or guided imagery, where patients enter a highly suggestible state – are especially prone to implanting false memories.
Major professional organisations, such as the American Psychological Association and the British Psychological Society have repeatedly warned that these therapeutic techniques designed to recover supposedly buried memories can create false memories.
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Everyone seems to be talking about trauma. Do we know more about it? Or has the meaning changed? In this five-part series, we explore the shifting definition of trauma, why talking about it doesn’t always help, and what else can work.
Alternative therapies
The Body Keeps the Score promotes a broad range of therapies for trauma as alternatives to more established PTSD treatments, including yoga and psychodrama, which is the use of roleplay to re-enact the traumatic experience.
Some of these approaches may be helpful for some people. There is no harm in doing yoga if you have PTSD and feel it helps to reduce stress.
However, problems arise when these techniques are claimed to be able to help people “access repressed memories”.
This idea can be exploited. Recent ads on social media suggest nightmares or trouble sleeping could be due to extensive trauma you don’t remember. A quick quiz will deliver your test results and redirect you to a “trauma-informed” online coaching program that you pay for.
What about psychedelics and MDMA?
More recently, van der Kolk and others have turned attention to psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Substances such as MDMA and psilocybin have shown promise in tightly controlled research settings. They appear to influence brain pathways, though the mechanisms are not yet fully understood.
From a memory perspective, psychedelics raise specific concerns. Research suggests psychedelics can affect memory in some worrying ways.
They make people more suggestible, meaning they are more likely to accept ideas or stories as true, even when they come from an outside source. They also create a powerful feeling that what people experience is deeply and certainly real.
This is a risky combination, because a person could come away with a false memory they feel convinced has happened.
Early qualitative reports already describe cases in which apparent memories of trauma emerged during psychedelic therapy, with uncertainty about their accuracy.
Recent US research found the vast majority of people endorse belief in repressed memories and the idea that “the body keeps the score”. This research is currently being replicated in Australia, with preliminary findings suggesting these beliefs may be even more widespread over here.
