Does the Body Really Keep the Score?A Therapist's Response to the 2026 Friston Paper on Trauma

Talking Past Each Other: Notes on the Latest Trauma Paper

A few weeks ago a paper landed in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience designed to provoke. The full title was "The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability." The provocation is a direct challenge to Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score - the book that has shaped how we talk about trauma for over a decade.

Contrary to what some believe, I no longer spend my days with my head buried in research articles, so I came across the paper the same way most people will have done - through posts on social media. Unlike most though, I felt the need to go beneath the headlines. So I read it. Then I read it again, and as I did so, my initial frustration started to settle, but then rose again. Not because the science is wrong. The frustration is that the paper refutes the literal, social-media notion that trauma is a physical substance trapped inside bodily tissues rather than the reality of the argument.

What Van der Kolk Actually Said About Trauma and the Body

Van der Kolk never said trauma is stored in the fascia. What he actually argues is something far more precise - that trauma alters the autonomic nervous system. It rewires the way the survival brain takes over from the thinking brain when triggered. The body becomes a participant in a dysregulated loop - not a vault or an archive, but a system that has lost its capacity to return to balance.

Of course the paper's authors know this - after all, one of the authors, Karl Friston, is one of the most cited neuroscientists alive. In fact, they acknowledge, in the middle of the paper, that van der Kolk does engage directly with the brain science - the inter-relationship between the thinking brain and the emotional brain, the way we sense what is happening inside our own bodies, and the role of the nervous system in shaping our emotional experience. So why the title? Why frame the disagreement as "storage versus prediction" when, on close reading, the disagreement has nothing to do with storage at all?

Why the Pop-Science Headline Does Damage

This is where the pop-science instinct does damage. A title designed to go viral gets clipped, shared, screenshotted, and used by people who have read neither the book nor the article. Within hours of publication, social posts began declaring that science had "debunked" van der Kolk. To be clear, that's not what the paper says, but it is what the headline implies - and headlines travel further than nuance.

Two Frameworks, One Conclusion

Here is what I'm left with reflecting on both texts. The two frameworks reach the same conclusion through different doors. Kotler and colleagues argue that trauma is a disorder of prediction - the brain locks into hypervigilance, constantly anticipating threat based on past experience, and interprets ordinary sensations as proof of ongoing danger.

Van der Kolk argues that trauma dysregulates the nervous system. The survival brain overrides the rational mind and makes top-down thinking impossible in moments of activation.

Both are saying the same thing using different vocabularies. Both are saying you cannot talk a frightened nervous system out of its fear.

Both are saying healing requires a bottom-up approach - working through the body rather than the thinking mind. The somatic, the relational, and the experiential. Yoga. EMDR. Breathwork. Walking. Cold water. Drumming. Movement. The things that work online, on the fell or by the river, are the things that introduce new sensory data to a brain that has stopped trusting its own predictions. Call it "updating priors." Call it "discharging arousal." The mechanism is the same.

Restoring Flexibility: What the Paper Gets Right

What I find most useful in the paper is the idea that a healthy nervous system is one that can fluidly switch between states, and trauma is what happens when that flexibility collapses. The researchers call this metastability. That's worth remembering because it encapsulates something I see in the men I work with - the rigidity, the narrow band of tolerable feeling, the inability to soften without falling apart. Restoring flexibility is, I think, the work.

Where the paper goes further than van der Kolk, and where it adds real value, is in the discussion of flow states - moments of deep absorption when we lose track of time and self. The argument that activities producing this kind of absorption - surfing, hiking, music, art - may restore flexibility not by releasing what is stored but by giving the nervous system new evidence that arousal and safety can coexist. That is a useful idea. It's also what I see happening when a man stands in cold water for the first time and laughs.

Why Framing Matters in Trauma Recovery

So why have I gone to all the effort of writing this? Because how we frame trauma matters. The paper's authors had an opportunity to say: van der Kolk got the symptoms right, here is a more precise account of the mechanism, here is where our frameworks meet, here is what changes in practice. Instead they led with a headline that pits one approach against another and lets social media do the rest.

The men who walk into therapy carrying decades of unprocessed weight don't need another fight about whether the body or the brain is in charge. They need both. They need to be met by somebody who understands how the brain predicts and updates its sense of safety, and a practice that meets the body where it is. The argument that one of these matters more than the other has never served a single client.

What do you think? How do you respond to the headline?

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