On one hand, I'm happy to see this article go viral. I've been writing about the dangers of trauma culture for years. Some of the "mind-body" science is shaky, but worse, it has fueled a widespread mentality of victimhood. I've watched friends and colleagues lose themselves in a kind of diagnosis-as-identity. In my view, Gabor Maté is a far more harmful offender than van der Kolk.

But on the other hand, as a practitioner of somatic psychotherapy, a guy who leads retreats that go deep into this terrain, and a longtime meditator, it's just obvious that the body stores unconscious material. It's why, on long Vipassana retreats—days of continuous body-scanning—people sometimes have real psychological crises. They're tapping into things they didn’t know were there.

In psychedelic contexts, I’ve watched people encounter hyper-intelligent entities who help them locate material in the body, then violently purge what they’d call intergenerational trauma, with all the woo you can imagine, yet they come out the other side different people. I’ve also guided dozens of clients in somatic therapy, many of whom had stalled out in traditional therapy or coaching, as they unwind old material with genuinely life-altering results. And the changes last. You can feel the difference. The science likely just hasn’t caught up yet.

So if you find yourself on either extreme of this debate—that (a) The Body Keeps the Score is total bullshit, or (b) the body is the source of all trauma that must be investigated and unwound—I’d gently suggest you haven’t looked deeply enough into your own experience. If you’re in camp (a), sit still for long enough with sincere inquiry, and you’ll find material in the body. If you’re in camp (b), go deeper still, and even those stories begin to dissolve.

The truth, like usual, lives somewhere in the middle.