Criticisms of “the Body Keeps the Score”
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A critical article about 'The Body Keeps the Score' by Bessel van der Kolk sparks debate on the validity of the book's claims and the broader field of trauma studies, with commenters weighing in on the book's merits and the author's criticisms.
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A church might be a bit of a reach. A man of God (not a pastor, unless he is ex military/cop/etc or was in the trades) might be able to advise you, but if you aren't Christian I don't think it'll be super helpful.
Because such claims are so hard to verify and so rhetorically potent, I would be in favor of a rule that claims of having been traumatized cannot be presented as evidence in court.
For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".
>but also any argumentation or evidence that tries to substantiate the claim (including testimony by expert witnesses in my ideal the version of the rule) in legal proceedings.
So you wont also let people substantiate claims? What??
>For example, the rule would not disallow "I was almost killed by the defendant's reckless action" and would not disallow "the defendant's attack put me fear for my life", but it would disallow, "and one of the effects of that experience was psychological trauma".
Have you ever been involved in such a lawsuit, out of curiosity?
The intentional infliction of emotional distress has long been recognized as a tort. You have to substantiate it, of course.
Disallowing testimony about psychological trauma is consistent with criminalizing intentional attempts to cause it -- and in fact the vast majority of attempts to cause psychological trauma are probably covered by existing laws against assault.
(Also, I hope everyone realizes that not all emotional distress is psychological trauma.)
No it's not. IIED is civil law, btw.
>and in fact the vast majority of attempts to cause psychological trauma are probably covered by existing laws against assault.
Tired of hearing legal recommendations from individuals who don't know the basics, such as the difference between civil and criminal law. Or how evidence works.
When it was really the case that the spots that weren't damaged were the ones that actually needed to be armored, because the planes that took damage there didn't come back.
In this case, the data that survived a selection process ("I just recommended this book that dovetails nicely") is the only data considered, when really all of the data needs to be considered.
I'm seeing this as "you're reading the data wrong" or more accurately "you're barking up the wrong tree"
> “The Body Keeps the Score has spent 248 weeks on the New York Times paperback-nonfiction best-seller list and counting. To date, it’s sold 3 million copies and been translated into 37 languages.”
Wow 3 million copies despite being translated into 37 languages? The Game of Thrones finale had 19 million viewers. I don't know anyone who has heard of this book and even if all of the 3 million copies were sold to Americans, only 1 in 11 of them would have heard of it.
Reading is at an all time low in the US, the majority of people who have heard of this book probably haven't read a single sentence of it. It's mostly coming from social media content about the book.
I can't imagine polling everyone I know about a specific book. How does that work?
The other pole is that you cannot control your reactions, but you can try to control the world. This is much easier to fit into a consumerist framework.
On a purely human level though, you should go find some veterans with PTSD and tell them they're just not working hard enough at being stoic.
I can't control what you say, but I can control my reaction to you. That's what stoicism is.
The idea that stoicism even aims to eliminate all negative emotions, or that it blames all of them on the person experiencing them, isn’t really what I’ve found.
It doesn't mean there isn't good in the writings, it's good to take the positive from things, with the hope that it doesn't let in any of the negative unintended.
That part stands out to me though as where it's perspective might not be for the many, but the few.
I do think it’s remarkable that there’s much salvageable at all in it, given the age of the work (though a fair amount of ancient philosophy remains relevant, or at least functions as good reading and exercises along the lines of koans for developing philosophical ways of thinking, an awful lot is effectively obsolete and only of historical interest) and that it came from one of the most powerful people on the planet. It’s not often you get something with much enduring value at all from someone who also happens to be at or near the pinnacle of human hierarchies of their day.
Though, in fairness, he’s mostly repackaging stuff he learned from others, it’s not exactly original thinking in the same way as the chain of works from Socrates-Plato-Aristotle, say.
Still, it’d be like, I dunno, Franklin Roosevelt penning a philosophically-inclined self-help book that was still widely read and referenced beyond the year 3,000 and in languages that didn’t exist when it was written. Pretty distinctive, very few works at all in that class, and almost none from the perspective of someone that highly placed politically, despite a strong bias in general toward works from the rich and powerful being created at all, and surviving. I’d say the only way it’s likely to permanently fade is if/when “western culture”, to perhaps include near-east and Maghreb Muslim culture, fades (there’s so much overlap of the parts people like, with forms of thinking from the East, that I expect it’d have trouble co-existing with them in the same body of thought, as an actively-read item of interest)
I think what the parent is saying is this:
Say you (hyperhello) have PTSD from a fire incident in which your face is completely disfigured. You associated this pain (emotional and physical) with the various people who yelled "FIRE" during the escape. Do you, hyperhello, truly have control over this negative reaction when someone yells "FIRE!" in your face?
Is it your take that every person in therapy for PTSD so wasting their time?
Much of mental trauma is about acknowledging it, and learning to live with it. There is no cure for PTSD, even Ketamine is short acting, not a long term solution, and indeed Ketamine simply helps you sit with the suffering in a different light.
But there are treatments. Last I read exposure therapy and EMDR were the two main ones. I don't think I'd be a big fan of exposure until the reactions have been significantly reduced, but everyone is different. EMDR didn't do much for me, but Internal Family Systems did. CBT is also great for some people.
In each case you should look at which one is easier to control and go for that. Why do you need a universal philosophy? Some things are self control, but some things are circumstances that you can navigate or avoid too.
it's anchoring two points and providing a terrtain for analyzing consumer capitalism.
With this frame in hand we can then ask questions like yours, "are there domains within which it is easier or more enjoyable or has higher personal or collective benefit, to work on the world rather than self?"
The answer is certainly yes; agency is real, and we can work to maximize it.
A convenient way to extend the "model" might be to tack on the "serenity prayer."
To be psychologically healthy, we need to listen to our emotions and process them in a healthy way.
The answer is not to shut down our emotions, or to blindly give in to them, but rather to understand where they're coming from and process them accordingly.
Stoicism treats the (negative) passions as necessarily grounded in false beliefs.
Whereas modern psychology treats our negative emotions as valuable messages that something is affecting our well-being and needs to be addressed.
Stoicism treats negative emotions as errors. Something to be reasoned away, i.e. suppressed. Modern psychology tells us not to reason away but rather to feel fully, to accept, to process and therefore integrate and grow.
Stoicism doesn’t tell you to repress feelings. It tells you to examine them, to look at the beliefs behind them. If the belief is false (“this event ruins my life”), you correct it; if it’s true, you accept the feeling without letting it take over.
The Stoics called destructive emotions “passions,” but they also recognized healthy ones, like rational joy, caution, and goodwill. The goal isn’t emotional numbness, it’s clarity and alignment with reason and nature.
So, far from emotional blindness, Stoicism actually inspired the same kind of introspection that modern psychology promotes, just with a different vocabulary.
I would encourage you to read about CBT’s history and it’s influence on more modern psychology techniques. It’s likely that you are representing the Stoicism you commonly read about these days, on reddit, youtube and even on some books that take some liberties on translating it or do a bad job of it (it’s hard…). Most modern sources absolutely suck. A good translation from the original greek sources of Epictetus is very hard to come by.
What I'm talking about is traditional psychodynamic therapy that is about integration and growth. Not about changing behavioral patterns merely on the surface via cognitive reframing. When you actually allow yourself to integrate and process your emotions, the kind of mental work that stoicism and CBT focus on becomes unnecessary for most people. (CBT techniques can be helpful as a kind as urgent emergency measures, but not as a long-term solution.)
I know you seem to think I've gotten my ideas from Reddit. I can assure you, I've studied this stuff extensively both from the psychology and therapeutic sides of the literature. I've even written, critiquing Seneca's On Anger. I'm not operating from some pop understanding here. What disappoints me is the modern popularity of stoicism within certain circles today, because it actually contains some very harmful ideas.
But when you write:
> they seek to agree with what is correct, disagree with what is incorrect
That's the repression part -- the "disagree with what is incorrect". Emotions are not correct or incorrect, they simply are. They are valuable and need to be processed and integrated. If you don't, if you simply conclude that a passion is "incorrect", that is repression. So no, it's not "categorically false".
I hope the discussion has been helpful, whether to you or others here. I've seen stoic philosophy do harm to people, which is why I want people to be aware of how it does not align with current thought on psychological health.
It's proactive introspection. Stoicism can provide freedom because you can be master of yourself.
Not to say that epigenetic effects aren't real.
Ie the idea has to be convincing enough to spread from person to person as a meme but also have enough armchair level depth to pass the bullshit filters of most reasonable people- ie popularity wins over truth
Most people do not have the intellectual curiosity or time to deeply verify these claims - but inevitably these fads die as they appear..
Clearly this is one example
The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.
Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.
They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)
I haven't listened to Maintenance Phase because it isn't really a topic that I'm all that interested in.
If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is down".
Which is uncomfortably pragmatic. Many people can go weeks while only directly interacting with a handful of Internet-based services, most of which are presented as apps.
I'm waiting for the day that the lines blur even further and people start saying "my Apple doesn't work" when AWS goes down and 1/3 of their iPhone apps stop working. Or the day that ISPs stop acting as carriers and the Internet truly factions.
Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge available to very few human beings that are difficult to disprove is where the challenge lies.
anyways, more on topic with TFA, of course lots of people are looking for excuses for why they aren't what they want to be, and it sounds like this book flips the causation, so that people can say e.g. "I was perfectly healthy until I went through some difficult stuff and now I'm disabled" rather than much more sober but accurate "I was born with some relative weaknesses that make things more difficult for me than others." It looks like he keeps trying to claim that bad experiences leave reliably measurable marks in some way but it simply never holds to the claimed reliability under scrutiny.
Of course, knowing exactly what specific "weaknesses" one actually has compared to a statistical average is the hard part, and jumping to conclusions in that area is just as much playing with fire.
Someone could write a book about "bad experiences give you bad memories, which can bring down your mood when you remember them and demotivate you", but everyone already knows that, and leaving it at that doesn't give the reader the feeling of understanding why they feel less than whole.
One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.
Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.
In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment?useskin...
Don't forget the red flag of "Makes me feel better about myself or my situation." Especially if it implies one's superiority over others.
I've often had the experience of reading an article and thinking, "This says people with quality X are, against common sense, actually better at Y. Hey, I have quality X! Aw, rats. This is probably bunk and I'm too flattered to see the errors."
Beside the burden of knowledge and understanding, there is an even higher burden of bringing your knowledge to the laypeople, which is the most thankless, dangerous and tedious undertaking possible.
Yet it is also the most noble, as it drives civilization forward.
In many cases it's insurmountable.
This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.
This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.
My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.
Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.
It's a soft science, it is what it is.
now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"
Dave Asprey made the claim according to the article not the author of the book. The only evidence I see in the article linking the claim to the book is at the end:
> Where then could Dave have gotten this idea that he has trauma from an experience he couldn’t possibly remember? Probably Bessel van der Kolk.
Which is pretty much nothing.
The article does not go into why I should care what Dave Asprey thinks or does not think on trauma. For all I know it is a cherry picked example of a bad opinion disconnected from the book and typical scientific opinion.
I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.
Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.
We don't have the technology to collect the necessary data to be able to test hypotheses for psychiatric and psychological phenomenoms, and even many other non brain related medical claims about the human body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Seems pretty reasonable to take claims about unverifiable subjects with a grain of salt.
It's the equivalent of basing nutrition science on a Pew poll where people self-report their favorite food.
Sure, it's useful to know people's general preferences sometimes, but for science that data is junk.
However, if you were unlucky enough to suffer with a completely debilitating mental illness, and all you have to treat it are a series of therapies that appear to work for some people, would you not try them?
Trauma therapies like EMDR and CBT can save or transform your life. Maybe they work no better than crystal healing or prayers for some people, but if your life was derailed I bet you would try anything...
Would I have to give up on my scepticism to do so? Why?
If I was in distress, and if there was no well-proven treatment available, I'd probably have a go provided the therapy wasn't actually a scam or actively harmful. I'd probably even attempt to engage with it honestly and openly.
But I'd temper my expectations based on the lack of reproducable evidence.
I mean people would even try those with enough distress. And to be fair a lot of surprising innovation comes from people trying those! But of course mostly they're a scam or actively harmful.
Also, falsifiability is broadly rejected as solution to the demarcation problem.
I honestly think a lack of grounding in philosophy of science leads people to draw the line between science and pseudo-science based on nothing but vibes. For example, I've seen people reject mainstream psychiatry as totally pseudoscience and then endorse evolutionary psychology, a field with a huge bullshit issue.
Both of those have huge bullshit issues, that is the problem with such sciences you have to pick your poison and that guy just picked another than you prefer. Big things like stereotype threat turned out to just be bullshit, but you still see people believing in it since they want to believe in the idea rather than whats actually real.
Edit: Also almost everyone resorts to evolutionary psychology arguments when it suits them, such as why so many eats themselves fat etc.
Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.
https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/
The problem is that too many people believe you can do research on one group of people, and generalize that universally to all humans, when in fact, the variation in every population of humans is wide enough that you can't say for certain that a given treatment will work for a given set of symptoms—not because the treatments are bad, but because there are differences both in the causes of the same symptoms, and in the workings of the body & brain, between different people.
This doesn't make psychology/psychiatry/psychopharmacology a "soft science"; it just makes it a science that is still in its infancy. Once we have a better understanding of both the various underlying neurological/physical (and, for some, even gastrointestinal, given recent research showing that gut microbiota can affect the mood and brain) causes of various psychological symptoms, and the physical and neurological variations between people, it will be much easier to see, for instance, "ah, we shouldn't use Lorazepam for this patient, because their anxiety is caused by this which is much better treated by CBT and CBD, rather than that which Lorazepam directly addresses".
It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience".
You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science.
There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.
The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines.
However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.
That said, this article is just as bad as the book.
Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body.
Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.
I encourage folks to get more massages if they doubt that there's any causal relationship between these phenomena.
I was curious about this accusation, so I read a bit about the scandal. [0]
It seems you are actually talking about Joseph Spinazzola, the executive director of Van der Kolk's trauma center, who was fired for sexual misconduct while Van der Kolk was on sabbatical. Van der Kolk was fired two months later, not for sexual misconduct, but for denigrating and bullying employees.
[0] https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2018/03/07/allegation...
Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.”
The relevant parts are good.
I have my issues with van der Kolk’s work (I would personally not recommend The Body Keeps The Score to most people), but this is sloppy embarrassing clickbait.
what does this mean?
not finding something doesn’t seem any more or less convincing…
Open the paper and look for it's methodology.
People should be very sceptical of any psychological findings that are younger than about 30 years and ideally you want to have seen several replications and done with greater size, rigour and controls. Anything younger than this and certainly anything that hasn't yet been firmly replicated is on balance of probability going to turn out to be wrong or fraud.
What they are not good at is all the rest: explaining what causes those symptoms in the first place, and how to treat them in the second place. And this isn't something that has changed in the past 30 yrs.
This phenomenon is also not exclusive to soft sciences. Humans (especially domain experts) just really really hate admitting "we don't know."
This article, and others, are riddled with rhetorical bullshit. E.g., someone on Instagram said that their emotionally distant father caused trauma, so “emotional distance” is added into the causes of trauma, and this is used to diminish the power of “trauma” itself.
This is exactly as illuminating as a neurotypical arguing whether Tylenol or vaccines cause more Autism. The author’s only skin in the game is being provocative.
Are you suggesting that only people afflicted with a condition should have the right to research it and look for its causes?
I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution. Somatic experiences might help them.
To be honest, reading the book was more helpful than critiquing whether or not my testosterone levels were too low as a 11-year-old, or if I had elevated inflammation because of my diet. Perhaps I'm biased.
I agree. Like diets, whatever works for you is the "right" answer. At lot of psychological theory can be thought of as just a model to help you make changes regardless of the physical validity of the model.
The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.
For some people, this is true. Identifying and addressing trauma is helpful.
Many conditions can occur without a traumatic root or trigger, though. For people trying to understand and improve their condition, falling into one of these trauma books sends them down a path of trying to force their problem to fit the trauma mold so they can use the trauma tools.
I've written on HN before about how one of the more famous trauma influencers and frequent podcast guests does this (I'm not going to name him because it triggers reactive downvotes and attacks from his fans and I don't want to debate that): He starts searching for "trauma" in his patients' past to use as a starting point for therapy. If he can't find anything he goes back further and further, until arriving at birth. Birth, he claims, is a deeply traumatic experience that can cause issues later in life like relationship problems, attention issues at work, and so on. In this way, everyone who has ever existed now qualifies for trauma therapy because everyone was born, and therefore everyone has trauma that might explain all of their problems in this world.
The conflict of interest is obvious: Once they get a taste of book sales, podcast appearances, or social media fame it becomes against their best interests to narrowly define their practice to classic textbook trauma. So to maximize their appeal, they redefine trauma to be something much simpler such that everyone qualifies (to buy their book). This does a disservice to people with PTSD and really dilutes the concept of these psychiatric terms.
You could replace trauma here and start describing most self books or even some business or leadership books. At least some I have read over the last 35 years.
I bet that social media, influence culture, etc makes it easier to reach a wider audience so the problem is larger or maybe just more obvious and definitely speeds up and feedback loop that seems to bottom out to rent seeking in some cases.
I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.
For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.
I specifically wanted to touch on the cycle of trauma & ADHD that's discussed in the article.
> That is, the ADHD leads to very negative experiences. Having had negative experiences (trauma) doesn’t lead to ADHD.
I think integrating traumatic experiences can have a lot of benefits to people, especially in the absence of easy fixes - as far as I know there's not really a smoking gun for ADHD, or borderline, etc. I'd argue the causality matters a bit less here. I say this even though I genuinely hated the fatalistic nature of the Body Keeps the Score, but I think Everett is a bit too quick to discard that the mind is relevant at all. I'd love to be proven wrong.
At least for myself, I've noticed increased well-being / reduced trauma responses when I avoid relationships that cause me a lot of stress, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly. But my baseline disposition is still there, and it's hard to untangle whether or not that's from trauma or from my body.
Everett argues that it's probably just my body (low T / high inflammation / too sensitive?) and I don't think that's very actionable. I'd argue that mind-body link goes in both directions, but that's purely anecdotal.
I also really liked softwaredoug's take on Adverse Childhood Experiences in the thread above.
No it isn't. You might have interpreted it that way, but there's no such assertion. Quite the opposite in fact: the book details therapies like yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback, and somatic experiencing; each demonstrating body to mind causality.
Every book doesn't have to be for everyone universally. It's kind of binary to where we might not catch ourselves thinking that way.
It could work for a specific group of people who might have an outsized positive experience and review of it.
a) the traditional view, you have some unknown illness, it's incurable, could have happened to anyone, bad luck.
b) people are reporting anecdotally that old horrible memories can lead to physical symptoms years later, and revisiting those memories and coming to terms with them can make the physical symptoms resolve completely in minutes. Maybe there's something scientific to that and maybe there isn't, but here are some of the ways people try it: ..
They're all quite confident, though.
As I read this I kept thinking that it seemed too skeptical to be rationally critical. Which isn't necessarily an improvement over the book.
My intuition (I know, that isn't better than the book or this post) is that there's truth in both places, and we'd ultimately land somewhere in the middle if we had access to the truth.
This touches on the nature vs nurture problem, wherein there never seems to be a clear victor and the answer seems to be that both play a role depending on what you're measuring. It's also very difficult to say how the chicken and egg scenario unravels, since we don't know what's the chicken and what's the egg, so to speak. The author seems to think they know—confidently as you mentioned—but it's abundantly murky to me.
I suppose we need confident people pushing in all directions to help us look more deeply in places and ways we otherwise might not. But wow, it gets tiring to see such unapologetic bias in scientific contexts. I admittedly stopped reading just passed the half way point and should probably keep most of my opinions about it to myself.
I'm not familiar with the field's research, but how much of the discussed perspective is linked to this book or the paper it is named for? If removing the book would not leave any supporters for the perspective, then skepticism is in fact the rational conclusion.
This is more-or-less Russell's teapot.
Example slop: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ajgq!,w_1456,c_limit...
What the research _actually_ suggests is something more like a combination of those pictures. Except that the scientific research isn't framed in terms of "bad behavior". So that alone should give you a clue about where this blog post is coming from.
That image alone exposes the worldview of the person who wrote this, something like this:
~some people are good quality, some people are bad quality. if you're born as a bad quality person, it's something like bad luck / your fault for falling into bad behavior, no wonder you're struggling. you need to work harder but it might just be that you're a dud.~
>> umm... akshually its your fault your daddy beats you
Or maybe just me?
It's certainly cruel.
This is pretty much that "the child has bad vibes" tweet except serious.
- My diet (Mediterranean), with absolutely zero processed foods.
- Sleep (red light on evenings, no screens 1 hour before sleep).
- Daily exercise (lifting and 30 minutes of zone 5 cardio weekly).
My appreciation for life has skyrocketed, I don't feel like I'm being oppressed by life, and my depression symptoms are gone. I used to think the root cause of it all was a pretty rough childhood. It turns out, it's just 'crap in, crap out.' It has been jarring to me that my inner experience and mental health could so drastically change in such a short amount of time.
So yeah, it's anecdotal, but I'm pretty inclined to agree with this article.
I workout vigorously 3-4 times a week, try to avoid the regular bad stuff with diet, etc. It doesn't stop the adrenaline dump from being in an abusive relationship for a number of years when there's a minor problem, and it doesn't stop me from randomly having my brain completely shut down when I (unfortunately) remember some aspects of my childhood.
What has helped it CBT and time. The book in mention helped me understand why I feel the way I do, and that deeply rooted trauma (PTSD) exists as a misprogramming of your brain by a traumatic experience that is not "surface level" to trivially identify, and your brain is an excellent helper in compartmentalizing this for your own survival. Whether the information is wrong or right isn't what I care about. It's that it simply provided me a framework from which I could approach the problems I previously didn't really understand and led me on a journey of self discovery and bumpy healing I wouldn't have done otherwise. An inaccurate model is infinitely better than no model.
The author of the substack does an excellent job at taking something that we barely understand (psychology has a lot of problems of reproducibility) and generalizing it into a bullshit youtube short tier soundbite of an article with less information than the book he claims is nonsense. Reading his other article for reference I would be suspect of the author's credibility in any aspect of science other than the dangers of inhaling your own farts.
I especially the call back to another article of his that suggests that just loading up on exogenous testosterone is positively correlated with less PTSD. Funny enough I have had above-average testosterone through most of my life and yet I still managed to get a mild-to-medium form of PTSD.
AFAICT, this is a pop psychology book that tries to make some interesting topics digestible to a mass audience. Topics that are mostly speculative to begin with, and don't have concrete evidence in any direction.
For example, the entire field of epigenetics has been argued to be pseudoscience, and yet there has been some interesting research around it. Related to the topic of stress specifically, and how effects have been observed across generations[1].
Clearly, more research is needed, but to dismiss it as quackery outright wouldn't be helpful. Many ideas that were initially perceived as outlandish eventually lead to a better understanding of the world. Scientific progress depends on people willing to go beyond the boundaries of conventional knowledge, often at the expense of their reputation.
This reminds me of the uproar in archeology circles about the work of Graham Hancock. He presents himself as a journalist and author, and certainly not an archeologist or scientist, who simply raises some interesting questions about the past. His work is often dismissed as pseudoscientific quackery, which is funny to me since he never claims it to be scientific at all. It is edutainment content for a mass audience interested in these topics, nothing more than that.
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10177343/
And yes, Graham Hancock's theories are also pseudoscience, and branding it as "edutainment" doesn't make that any better (if anything, it's worse because it implies deliberately targeting an audience that can't tell the difference!).
Having been involved in the publishing of psychology research I have zero faith in the systems ability to properly control for bullshit.
Trauma informed muppets like Kolk and Gabor Mate are running around spouting absolute bullshit and it’s hurting people, imagine being raised by a parent who read and believed this bullshit, worse still they’ve been to talks by flops like Gabor Mate and are balls deep in whatever viral self help podcast meme is trending…let them
Kolk wrote the article the body keeps the score in 1994 at the height of the memory wars, he spent the next 20 years undeterred, developing and spreading his bullshit and now nearly 30 years later it’s still being talked about and propagated.
https://greyfaction.org/resources/grey-faction-reports/alleg...
But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.
I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.
[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-no...
Psychology and other social sciences are too multi-variate to speculate on, and the HRB exists so that we don't commit atrocities in the name of properly isolating variables as we poke at the black box we call the human mind. You're never going to get anything right, but we should definitely be referencing surveys of studies instead of single studies. So there's at least one point there for appropriate rigor. Not getting the interpretation of those studies right definitely seems unethical, but so does all of the misconduct stuff Van Der Kolk has been mired in.
It's a disingenuous argument to say that your body doesn't change from a traumatic experience, or that stress doesn't express itself through the body sometimes. It's also problematic to say that because it happens to you doesn't mean you can't work through it and learn to manage it or even control it. What I gleaned from the book is that if I have a physical sensation that I can map to stress or a past experience of trauma, I can understand it, label it, and grow from it.
...But it's also good to know the author of the book was wildly mis-citing things
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