New Research Is Turning Trauma Theory Upside Down: The Body Doesn’t Keep the Score?

Pay attention to this one. Something BIG just shifted in the trauma world. A provocative new opinion piece, published in a leading peer-reviewed neuroscience journal, is challenging one of the most beloved and widely-read trauma books of the last decade. And the ripples are already spreading.

Before I get into it, let me be clear about what this is and is not – without getting too in the weeds. 

This is not a clinical trial. It is a formal theoretical argument, written by four of the most credentialed researchers in the field and published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. 

Look at it as the scientific community’s way of saying: we need to rethink this. It is the opening move in what is shaping up to be a significant shift in the field of trauma brain research and how we understand the way the mind processes pain.

And it’s not a fringe idea. One of the co-authors is Karl Friston, widely considered one of the most influential neuroscientists alive. When someone of his standing puts his name on a challenge to a cultural phenomenon, people in the field pay attention.

The piece is titled, pointedly: “The body does not keep the score.”

A little background on this shift in trauma brain research

In 2014, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score, a book suggesting that trauma alters the nervous system and becomes physically lodged in the body – in the muscles, the tissues, the fascia.

Hence, talk therapy – sitting across from a therapist and analyzing what happened to you won’t be enough, because the body is holding it. It’s not in the thinking brain.

But the team of researchers working out of the Flow Research Collective is now presenting a new wave of trauma brain research that challenges the underlying biology. Their core claim cuts straight to it: trauma does not accumulate in your tissues, as Bessel van der Kolk believes. It rewires the brain to keep predicting danger, even when there is none.

So if it’s not in the body, what or where is it?

First, Bessel van der Kolk was right about something important: trauma is not a head problem. It lives deeper than that – that part still holds up.

But here’s the basic idea of the new theory:

Your brain is constantly making predictions. It’s always forecasting what is about to happen, based on past experience. Now in a healthy brain, those predictions are flexible… new information comes in, the brain updates, and you move on.

However, when trauma occurs, especially early in life, that prediction system gets stuck. The brain assigns too much weight to signs of danger. It starts seeing threat everywhere. It misreads ordinary physical sensations… a racing heart, a tight chest, as proof that something bad is about to happen.

And the brain gets locked into that single way of responding. It can’t easily move between different mental states, like shifting from alert to calm, from anxious to relaxed, from guarded to open. It gets stuck on one setting, and that setting is threat, like a door that only opens one way.

We can think of it as the flip side of neuroplasticity, where a flexible brain can rewire itself, update its patterns, and adapt. But a brain locked in trauma, as this groundbreaking trauma brain research suggests, has lost that capacity, at least temporarily. It’s stuck in a single channel, and that channel is, for example, fear or self-doubt.

So these scientists are saying that trauma is not embedded in your muscles, or your fascia, or your tissues (the way Bessel van der Kolk’s model suggests). Rather, it’s a pattern your brain learned. 

Trauma does not live in the body, they argue. It visits there, sending signals that a frightened brain cannot stop interpreting as threat.

What this means for body-based healing

What changes is not what you do. What changes is why it works. 

Under the old model, somatic and physical practices were believed to be releasing trauma stored in the tissues… muscles, fascia, and organs. Massage, breathwork, movement, touch, acupuncture – all of it can still support trauma recovery.

In the end, the team is not saying body-based work is wrong. They are saying Bessel van der Kolk’s explanation for why it works may be wrong.

Here is a simple example. A bodyworker finds a tight or painful spot while working on you. Something emotional surfaces. Under the old model, that happened because the trauma was hiding there. Under this new model, it happened because the physical sensation sent a signal the brain had to interpret, and in that moment of interpretation, something shifted.

Then the brain has to figure out what that sensation means. And in that moment of figuring it out, emotional material can surface.

The healing is happening in the brain’s interpretation of the body, not in the body itself. And that distinction opens up a whole new range of possible interventions, including flow states, that simply did not fit the old trauma storage model.

What is a flow state?

Flow is that state of complete absorption in a challenging activity, where the thinking mind goes quiet, time collapses, and you are just fully, completely present. Musicians know it. Athletes know it. Dean Potter, the extreme wingsuit flier I wrote about recently, was chasing it at 100 miles per hour. Anyone who has ever lost themselves in something demanding and meaningful has touched it.

During flow, the alarm system in the brain quiets. The brain stops bracing for the worst. The constant low-level scan for danger switches off, and in that stillness, the brain gets to experience something it may have lost access to: that it has the capacity to respond rather than just react, that life is not something to be survived, but something to be lived

The researchers put it plainly: flow may help by teaching the nervous system, experientially, that it can shift states. That it is not stuck. They believe that flow states may be one of the most powerful interventions for trauma recovery we have.

What this means for the work we do together

If you’ve gotten this far, I want to share with you that the Emotional Liberation method has always worked at exactly this intersection, and then some. We engage the thinking mind, the body, and the psychospiritual terrain that Western science has no real framework for yet, drawing on yogic wisdom that has understood the emotional body for thousands of years, and we do it in a specific sequence.

We begin with educating the thinking brain (cognitive) in  understanding our difficult emotions – what they are, where they come from, and what they have been trying to do. This intellectual foundation allows us to go deeper into expressive movement, breath, and Kundalini-rooted kriyas that activate the emotional body directly.

When we do the active, expressive practices in my emotional release work, we are creating the conditions for the brain’s rigid prediction system to become flexible… to loosen and to discover, firsthand, that the emotion can be met, moved through, and released.

That is what freedom from difficult emotions actually looks like.

Come experience it firsthand

If you want to experience (or continue to experience) what this shift feels like, my next Elevation Ceremony is coming up. It’s free, it’s live online, and it is exactly the kind of practice this research is pointing toward. Come find out what it feels like when the prediction system starts to change.

For details and to register, click here.

With Love,

Becca

P.S. If you’ve been thinking, “I wish there were a place to actually work with what’s going on inside me,”  this is it. This a one of my signature events that curates a space to meet your emotions head-on (cannabis optional, self-honesty mandatory).

P.S.S. One more thing worth noting: the new theory I’m talking about is not a final verdict. The researchers themselves acknowledge that the direct neuroscientific evidence still needs to be built, and there is already pushback emerging from other scientists who agree with parts of the argument but not all of it. The debate, in other words, is just getting started.