[HN Gopher] Criticisms of "The Body Keeps the Score"
___________________________________________________________________
Criticisms of "The Body Keeps the Score"
Author : adityaathalye
Score : 171 points
Date : 2025-10-22 18:49 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (josepheverettwil.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (josepheverettwil.substack.com)
| bobbyprograms wrote:
| Haha yeah my wife used to use that always as a nice way to
| explain why she should be able to punish me at all times for all
| my "failures". Lol
| all2 wrote:
| Oof. I'm seeing lots of issues packed into this. You need good
| counseling. Not marriage counseling (that's a scam in most
| cases), but individual counseling. Even just a bro to talk to
| while you turn wrenches or heft iron. Just find a guy who is
| older than you, married, and well adjusted and talk to him. I
| can make some recommendations on where to find men like this,
| if you would like.
| bobbyprograms wrote:
| Heck yeah honestly
| hollerith wrote:
| Psychological trauma is one of the more complicated aspects of
| the human condition.
|
| 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.
| freejazz wrote:
| Do you ever litigate torts? Being 'traumatized' is not a legal
| claim to which simply stating 'I was traumatized' serves as any
| evidence, so I'm not sure what it is you think you'd be sparing
| the world. It is obviously the case that anyone could testify
| regarding the facts of what happened that caused what they
| believed to be trauma, but I'm not sure where you got the idea
| that people simply say "I was traumatized" and then win a civil
| case or send someone to jail.
| hollerith wrote:
| The rule I propose would disallow not only unsubstantiated
| claims, 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.
|
| 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".
| freejazz wrote:
| Where do courts allow unsubstantiated claims?
|
| >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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Funny, I just recommended Antifragile by Nassim Taleb to my book
| club, and of course, that idea is pretty much the perfect foil to
| this.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| airplane_with_red_dots.jpg
| waldothedog wrote:
| I get the ref, but not the link to anti-fragile or NNT. Help
| me out?
| Benanov wrote:
| As we know or a quick STFW will educate - the "airplane
| with red dots" refers to the idea that the planes that came
| back had damage indicated on them with red dots and so the
| initial idea was that the designers of the planes needed to
| armor those spots...
|
| 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"
| hrimfaxi wrote:
| > Chances are, you've heard of The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel
| van der Kolk. At 79,898 reviews, the book has more reviews on
| Amazon than the first book of A Game of Thrones.
|
| > "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.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| That's funny because I swear almost every woman in my life has
| read it or at least knows enough to reference it. Even women
| who are from different walks of life and don't know eachother.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| There are ~130 million US households, so if each copy were
| bought by a unique household and all 3 million copies were
| sold in the US, that would mean ~97.5% of US households don't
| have a copy. Maybe there's some huge multiplier on borrowing
| from libraries? Personally I've never heard of it, but it
| seems like it's pretty far outside of my bubble of interests.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Then a hundred Instagram and TikTok influencers make videos
| about the book.
|
| 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.
| justin66 wrote:
| > I don't know anyone who has heard of this book
|
| I can't imagine polling everyone I know about a specific book.
| How does that work?
| jerlam wrote:
| Also, why would the number of Amazon reviews be a valid metric
| for popularity? Game of Thrones came out almost 30 years ago.
| People who bought and read the book probably didn't buy it from
| Amazon and aren't going to write a review for it now.
| hyperhello wrote:
| Stoicism is the pole that you cannot control the world, but you
| can control your reactions to it. It's hard 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.
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| A DNA molecule without an environment is just a glob of atoms.
| Information flows in both directions.
|
| 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.
| mobilene wrote:
| Thank you.
| hyperhello wrote:
| I never told any veterans to work harder at being stoic, nor
| did I imply anyone should. That's part of a reaction you had
| to what I said.
|
| I can't control what you say, but I can control my reaction
| to you. That's what stoicism is.
| Muromec wrote:
| It's a good framework to survive in authoritarian country
| and maybe even a good one to promote as a dictator. You can
| in fact very often change what other people think, say and
| do.
| walkabout wrote:
| Stoicism specifies that one needs right acts, in addition
| to right thoughts. It's far less passive than e.g.
| Russell (though I love Russell, and I even love _The
| History of Western Philosophy_ in which he levels these
| criticisms, while many others seem to dismiss it)
| describes it, though treating it as purely an internal-
| mindset thing is certainly _easier_ and I think a lot of
| people in-fact only apply those parts.
| walkabout wrote:
| Notably, Aurelius (at least--I'm less well-read on
| Epictetus and others) allows that there are _automatic_
| reactions that we can't, realistically, control. It's the
| unintentional, but controllable, _maintenance_ of negative
| feelings that Stoics aim to consciously tamp down, mostly
| by breaking the habit of falling into those patterns of
| thinking in the first place. I think triggered feelings and
| reactions due to PTSD would tend to fall under the former,
| though surely a stoic approach might help reduce ongoing
| harm from those, as it does with more mundane things like
| being angry at other drivers on the highway. I mean,
| _something_ in one's attitudes and ways of thinking must be
| able help, and if not, guess we better stop bothering with
| therapy, so it's not outlandish that stoic practice might
| improve even that kind of problem, though it may not be the
| right tool to attack the root of it.
|
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Aurelius' writings are interesting - I am struck by how
| many people try to relate to an emperor trying to stay
| grounded.
|
| 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.
| walkabout wrote:
| I mean, a bunch of his book is stoic epistemology,
| physics, and metaphysics, all of which is of dubious
| value. Anyone reading him is definitely going to be
| picking-and-choosing what they pay attention to, almost
| nobody today is going to go all-in on the entire edifice
| of the stoic system of philosophy, and nearly all readers
| are likely to disregard half or more of his book--as far
| as the pop-cultural life of the book, these large
| portions of it are practically invisible for a reason.
|
| 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)
| mbesto wrote:
| > but I can control my reaction to you. That's what
| stoicism is.
|
| 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?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Is it your take that PTSD symptoms cannot be improved through
| any action of the individual?
|
| Is it your take that every person in therapy for PTSD so
| wasting their time?
| monkeynotes wrote:
| What if PTSD therapy focusses on accepting things you can't
| control and sitting with the pain? That's how I work
| through anxiety, and depression. I know it will never be
| gone, I don't try and set expectations to live without
| anxiety, I just try and sit with it, and accept it.
|
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> There is no cure for PTSD...
|
| 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.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Why are these presented as exclusive poles?
|
| 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.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| It's not being offered as a dialectic model of reality,
|
| 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."
| burnished wrote:
| Choosing to navigate or avoid negative stimulus is a choice
| you make about your behavior.
| DaveZale wrote:
| https://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html
|
| It's proactive introspection. Stoicism can provide freedom
| because you can be master of yourself.
|
| Not to say that epigenetic effects aren't real.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Stoicism is also another name for emotional repression and even
| developing a sense of emotional blindness.
|
| 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.
| anechouapechou wrote:
| This is a very common misconception. Stoics (at least in the
| classical sense, which is what I study) seek to classify
| their emotions as either positive or as passions. And through
| the analysis of their own opinions, using logic and the
| concept of aligning with nature and the common good, they
| seek to agree with what is correct, disagree with what is
| incorrect, and suspend judgment on that which is not evident.
| A person can only be good or bad through actions that are
| their own responsibility; therefore, things outside of their
| own responsibility (such as a Stoic's son dying) cannot make
| them either good or bad, but rather their reaction to the
| event can. The interpretation that if a Stoic suffers when
| experiencing the death of their own son, they are being a bad
| Stoic is actually completely incorrect. They will only be a
| bad Stoic if, from this event, they allow themselves to be
| carried away by the suffering that is natural to every person
| who has a natural affection, and start to have opinions and
| actions contrary to nature.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm going to push back on the idea that it's a
| misconception.
|
| 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.
| anechouapechou wrote:
| Modern psychology (CBT) is built on a Stoic idea: "It's
| not things that upset us, but our opinions about things."
|
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Modern psychology is not CBT. In fact, CBT is widely
| criticized by psychologists as treating symptoms rather
| than causes. It's a favorite of health plans because it's
| short and cheap, not because it's best at helping people
| long-term. Some of the criticisms of Stoicism are also
| criticisms of CBT.
|
| 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.
| anechouapechou wrote:
| There is no central, certified, Stoicism source. I have
| read a little bit of Seneca's work, and it wasn't for me.
| Just realize that there are many authors, and even
| considering the generality of the most famous ones,
| saying that Stoicism preaches repressing emotions is just
| categorically false. I'm not interested in going in
| circles here though. Thank you for the discussion!
| yrcyrc wrote:
| Read it a few years back and found some answers. Generational
| trauma does exists I believe. As for the article I think it
| claimed the whole theory was BS without much backing arguments
| nearbuy wrote:
| The article goes through and refutes 25(!) claims from the
| book. I'm not sure how many more backing arguments you could
| possibly want from a blog post.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It's safe to assume any grand claims linking specific behavior
| and the brain are bullshit. Humans don't have the technology yet
| to make the necessary observations.
| rusk wrote:
| F-MRI
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| F-MRIs are not going to give you enough data to cleanly
| determine cause and effect. I'm sure there is lots of good
| data for researchers, but I don't think it's going to be
| easily package-able into these kind of pop psychology books.
| AIorNot wrote:
| What I've found is that the nature of viral movements
| (bestselling books, pseudoscience claims, self help, programming
| movements, architectures, social media phenomena etc) is that the
| truth or proof for the underlying claim of the viral movement is
| not important only its widespread virality and ability to spread
|
| 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
| kouru225 wrote:
| Thomas Kuhn would say that the exact same thing happens in
| science literature.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is
| controversial/surprising _and_ targeted at laypeople, it is
| almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.
|
| 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.
| walkabout wrote:
| One of a couple varieties of books covered by the _If Books
| Could Kill_ podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That
| Explains Many Things type.
|
| They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the
| very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among
| crowds like HN)
| mm263 wrote:
| Michael Hobbes, host of IBCK is guilty of those inaccuracies
| too. Here's him being fact checked regarding claims in the
| Maintenance Phase podcast:
| https://spurioussemicolon.substack.com/
| walkabout wrote:
| Yeah, I've seen those criticisms before and been convinced-
| enough that it's contributed to my not bothering with that
| podcast. IBCK has been accurate enough when they've covered
| books I'm familiar with that I'm less worried about that
| being a problem with that show (though I'm sure they do
| sometimes get things wrong)
| hathawsh wrote:
| I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking
| for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example,
| yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical
| things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it
| on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that
| information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople,
| but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues.
| So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more
| accurate.
| Daishiman wrote:
| The statement "most of the internet seems to be down" is
| somewhat easy to verify without too much research.
|
| Complex statements requiring lots of specialist knowledge
| available to very few human beings that are difficult to
| disprove is where the challenge lies.
| hnuser123456 wrote:
| So many things are actually concentrated on the "cloud"
| providers now that significant chunks of "the internet" can
| all go down at the same time for everyone in a way that was
| supposed to be impossible with the many-fault-tolerant
| mindset the internet was originally engineered with.
| Laypeople don't need to understand any technical topics to
| understand "a bunch of websites/apps broke for everyone on
| Sunday". Some are even noting that this is happing more often
| and affecting more apps at once.
|
| 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.
| hooch wrote:
| Actually the internet was not down at all. It was perfectly
| up.
| scubbo wrote:
| Synecdoche
| parliament32 wrote:
| But it's not really true, is it? "The Internet", as in the
| network, was doing just fine. A large number of services that
| chose to build their business on the back of another were
| down, of course, but "a lot of the internet is down" is
| different than "a lot of websites are down".
|
| If, say, Level 3 and Tata and Telia had a simultaneous
| outage, that would qualify for "a lot of the internet is
| down".
| antisthenes wrote:
| Now you understand where the "Wise man under the mountain"
| trope comes from.
|
| 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.
| triMichael wrote:
| I agree, and one place I've observed this is in quantum
| physics. The double slit experiment is an experiment where you
| shine light through two slits, and instead of the expected two
| bands, it makes a wave-like interference pattern. This single
| experiment changed how we view all of physics. However, nearly
| every source targeted at laypeople claims that there is a
| variation where you can put a detector on one of the slits and
| it will show two bands. This is false.
|
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| What sucks is when the information wasn't necessarily
| misleading, but still overwhelmingly misleads people.
| vharuck wrote:
| >I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is
| controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is
| almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.
|
| 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."
| dlcarrier wrote:
| There's a book about that:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53317475-the-quick-fix
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| > Book falls apart
|
| 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.
| luqtas wrote:
| we have trouble defining and detecting when someone is in a
| flow state. or what parts of the brain are involved in grit.
| heck we are even tipping the begginings on how chronic pain is
| processed in our brain. if some drug has a greater validity
| than a placebo, then it's something
|
| 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"
| blobbers wrote:
| Usually if you have to add 'science' to a term its not science.
| jdiff wrote:
| We do that incredibly often just to refer to only one part of
| an incredibly broad concept of "science." Sometimes they get
| unique terms like "physics" or "chemistry," but not always.
| This is not a rule that can accurately be applied to all
| terms matching the pattern "____ science."
| ternaryoperator wrote:
| Wait...so you're saying computer science isn't science? /s
| AmbroseBierce wrote:
| There is also a strong likelihood that psychiatric findings get
| outdated quickly given the rapid evolution of culture, tech,
| communication and society in general, just 30 years ago
| internet was just for a few nerds and tech enthusiasts, just 3
| years ago you couldn't make the computer realistically pretend
| to be your lover over chat messages, the landscape in which
| psychology has to exist that has little to do with it is so
| ever changing that maybe it was always bit silly to expect it
| to be a hard science.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to
| criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100%
| true.
|
| 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.
| gr__or wrote:
| I'd say the article makes a pretty explicit case for why the
| general thesis of the book does not hold, which makes your
| comment stand out as comparatively superficial whataboutism
| throw4847285 wrote:
| There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on
| an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense
| because it's all bullshit."
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Science involves doing experiments, collecting data, and
| testing hypotheses, i.e. claims are falsifiable.
|
| 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.
| antisthenes wrote:
| I only skimmed the wikipedia article, but it seems like it
| is missing emphasis on the biggest problem in soft sciences
| like psychology - the fact that a huge chunk of their data
| comes from self-reporting by subjects.
|
| 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.
| josh-sematic wrote:
| Self-reported data is subjective, but when the very thing
| you are studying is the self-reported subjective
| experiences of people then it is actually the only data
| you should care about. Yes "I don't feel depressed
| anymore" is a subjective statement but so is "I feel
| depressed, can you help me?" That specific example is a
| caricature of course, the data are usually much more
| specific than "do you feel depressed?"
| jimnotgym wrote:
| It is fine to be a sceptic.
|
| 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...
| the_sleaze_ wrote:
| All models are wrong. Some are useful.
| mbesto wrote:
| > My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is
| impervious to criticism.
|
| 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.
| danaris wrote:
| It's not a soft science.
|
| 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 ".
| the_af wrote:
| I think the critique is fundamentally different from saying
| "it's soft science".
|
| 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.
| DuperPower wrote:
| soft science you say but the person better not commit suicide
| or starts working soon and gets better soon. The problem with
| psiquiatra is that there is the real biological diagnosis, the
| pseudo diagnosis (neurotic version of the biological og
| diagnosis), the intentional fake diagnosis and the not
| intentional but still fake diagnosis, thats why DSM is not for
| regular people even if they can read the words the real
| clinical meaning is almost always different from what non
| clinical people think It is
| int_19h wrote:
| It might be a soft science but there's still a difference
| between that and pseudoscience, and "recovered memories" are
| pretty firmly in the latter bucket.
|
| https://greyfaction.org/wiki/bessel-van-der-kolk/
| hiddencost wrote:
| Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual
| misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as a
| hero.
|
| 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.
| frereubu wrote:
| Can you give a source for the claim of "extensive sexual
| misconduct"? I've seen allegations of bullying, which is
| clearly bad enough, but nothing sexual.
| nicklaf wrote:
| > Van der Kolk lost his job due to pretty extensive sexual
| misconduct, so I think he's a pretty poor person to hold up as
| a hero.
|
| 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...
| cwmoore wrote:
| "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."
|
| The relevant parts are good.
| lazerwalker wrote:
| This person takes specific claims from the book and tries to
| dispute them, while ignoring that the book's number one big-
| picture idea of "trauma is unprocessed emotions and memories
| physically stored in the body" remains the conceptual grounding
| for all modern non-cognitive trauma processing methods like EMDR
| (which are clearly effective, even as we do not fully understand
| e.g. the neurological mechanism by which the adaptive information
| processing network functions). He then points you to an older
| article of his that is behind a paywall.
|
| 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.
| int_19h wrote:
| I wouldn't say that EMDR is "clearly effective". The studies on
| it are all over the place so at best it's contentious.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Agreed. I recently started a very physical job after decades of
| laptop work. Your personality changes quick, anxiety levels etc,
| as your body adapts. This is at 54 after 3 decades as an IC
| writing software. Lifestyle is by far the biggest driver, the
| body's record is read-write memory rather than write-once.
| bendigedig wrote:
| Your one piece of anecdata is not proof of anything at the
| population level.
|
| Please stop with the fallacy that what appears to be true for
| you is also true for everyone else.
|
| edit: I weep for the ignorance present here. I may be done with
| HN.
| cwmoore wrote:
| Population level proof is, at best, a model which fails every
| minority, including individuals. Which is arguably still
| useful, but only a different fallacy.
| bendigedig wrote:
| Yeah, but then the comment was making sweepingly
| generalised statements based off personal experiences.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I doubt we agree on what the word lifestyle means.
| cwmoore wrote:
| GP got a different job and had an experience? What are you
| weeping for?
| cshimmin wrote:
| Was this after you and two zany friends made a scheme to divert
| a fraction of a penny from each of your employer's transactions
| into a bank account that you control? And then you gave it all
| back but the building burned down and Milton made off with the
| cash?
| eastbound wrote:
| Took a gap year at 26, farming. I'm not surprised that I got
| superlean. But for the first time since I was 13, I didn't eat
| my words. My stress went down, but I could finally spell out
| words with full vowels (I usually just say the consonants). I'm
| also generally low self-esteem, low recognition, low hope, and
| for a short time I was easily dating, hopeful and it was easy
| to take strong decisions.
| rsyring wrote:
| What job did you switch to? Are you happy with the change?
| riazrizvi wrote:
| Server in a busy restaurant- and it's more about basing my
| future on dual incomes for better financial stability, as
| well as lifestyle. I don't need evening time at home anymore,
| I'm done chasing the fantasy relationship.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| citing a paper that says it found "no evidence" of something
| always seems weak to me in terms of refuting something, I also
| found no evidence by doing nothing, how do I know the thing you
| checked or the context in which it was checked is any better than
| my doing nothing?
|
| not finding something doesn't seem any more or less convincing...
| andai wrote:
| I think it's called "absence of evidence is not evidence of
| absence" ?
| esafak wrote:
| It is, though. What it is _not_ , is _proof_ of absence.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| I claim I am god. Pretty much everyone who knows me suggested
| there's no evidence of me being god. Would you say not finding
| that I'm god doesn't seem any more or less convincing?
| maxbond wrote:
| > [H]ow do I know the thing you checked or the context in which
| it was checked is any better than my doing nothing?
|
| Open the paper and look for it's methodology.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Most of psychology doesn't survive past 20 years, the moment
| someone tries to replicate the results it fails. A lot of the
| fraud that is happening in medical science at the moment is in
| Psychology, their methods are unsound and they build entire
| diseases on foundations made of sand. They repeatedly get caught
| misrepresenting referenced papers by reviewers but the journals
| fail to enforce integrity and scientific principles.
|
| 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.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Psychology (and psychiatry) is good enough at finding patterns
| in the symptoms patients go through, and grouping them into so-
| called disorders. It's not perfect, but it's a useful tool.
|
| 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."
| taeric wrote:
| I am grateful that I had not, in fact, heard of this book. I
| would like to say I would have rejected the idea, but I'm not
| certain. And yeah, these criticisms are pretty solid.
| sonofhans wrote:
| Consider the source -- the author appears to believe that trauma
| itself doesn't truly exist, is not based on physical phenomena or
| experiences, and is largely a sales idea manufactured by the
| therapy industry.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Are the claims of lack of supporting data false? They seem
| pretty specific and easy to verify.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > 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?
| amyamyamy2 wrote:
| I really disliked The Body Keeps the Score. But at the same time,
| I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized
| to make sense of their experiences.
|
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| This is an interesting point.
|
| 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.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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.
|
| 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.
| wrs wrote:
| Indeed, if it works for you, great. What's at issue here is
| whether you put the book that worked for you in the "science"
| section or the "fiction" section of the bookstore.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people
| who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.
|
| 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.
| biomcgary wrote:
| The mind-body link is too important to get the causality wrong
| and The Body Keeps Score is an ideology where the causality
| only goes one way.
|
| 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.
| amyamyamy2 wrote:
| I'm glad to hear how well this worked for your cousin! I
| don't eat breakfast often enough.
|
| 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.
| Schmerika wrote:
| > The Body Keeps [the] Score is an ideology where the
| causality only goes one way.
|
| 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.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Regardless of what you think of all this, you gotta appreciate
| the book title "The Body Does Not Keep the Score".
| empath75 wrote:
| This blogger is a self-help youtuber hawking testosterone
| treatments and he's a Jordan Peterson acolyte that believes that
| DMT let's you speak with aliens.
| superb-owl wrote:
| Probably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is
| bullshit.
|
| 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...
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| How is this article any better?
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a pretty good takedown. It seems that most pop psych
| these days is around trying to convert people to an external
| locus of control. It isn't "your fault". I can see why that's
| appealing to many, though it actually seems somewhat unappealing
| to me. I'd prefer to believe I have greater control over my own
| experience of the world. Even if I don't, I think acting as if I
| do allows me to bias on the side that's beneficial to me.
| claytonwramsey wrote:
| I wasn't very impressed by the reporting quality in this article,
| but it seems as though there are some other reviewers of the book
| were much more thorough in their critique. Emi Nietfeld writing
| for Mother Jones has more detail and actually contacted some
| experts for comment:
| https://www.motherjones.com/media/2024/12/trauma-body-keeps-...
| neom wrote:
| From my understanding of some of the most recent research, the
| body probably does "keep score" - but how that happens and who is
| predisposed to how much "scoring", it very poorly understood:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11449801/ /
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02785... /
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23768722/
| fragmede wrote:
| There's a lot of ad hominem it throws around, which doesn't
| really bolster the argument. It's a catchy headline but it all
| depends on who you know and what you talk to them about. There
| are a lot of fucked up, mal-adjusted people out there, and I
| should know, Because I'm one of them. But enough about me, nobody
| has a good sampling of the human experience. There are 8 billion
| humans alive, and there's no way to get a representational
| sampling of them in order to have an unbiased view of what humans
| are like. There's especially no way, because you're trapped in
| your own human body, which bases your experience of other people.
| Backpacking as a 21 year old woman is way different than
| backpacking as a 50 year old man. So the question is, has the
| book helped more per than it's harmed? I don't know. There are
| certainly people who read it and drew the wrong conclusions, but
| there are people who have used it to go on to lead healthy
| productive fulfilling lives. To reduce the entire work down into
| a single word, bullshit, is reductive to the point of
| uselessness. Of course that's the headline and the entire article
| doesn't won't fit up there. The article's author goes into much
| more detail but even if you don't like the work, calling it
| bullshit needs to engage more with what level of bullshittery it
| is and isn't for the review to come across as anything more than
| an highly motivated takedown because someone in the author's life
| used it against them.
| dacox wrote:
| There is a podcast, Memory Hole, about the recovered memory
| movement. There is a lengthy section about this book and the
| people behind it (not positive)
| mef51 wrote:
| Trauma to me means there are ways of responding to painful
| experiences that can keep you in that painful state for a very
| long time, and/or make things worse. I recognize that simple fact
| from my own experiences. In that lens, its helpful to reflect on
| your responses to painful experiences to stop them from
| developing into long term traumas. Maybe that's why this book, or
| at least the title, seems to resonate with people. (I haven't
| read it)
|
| ...But it's also good to know the author of the book was wildly
| mis-citing things
| ergonaught wrote:
| The book has a lot of flaws. The trauma industry that's grown up
| around it and similar work has a lot of flaws. The post has a lot
| of flaws.
|
| They're all quite confident, though.
| binoct wrote:
| Best comment by far. The post suffers from making good points
| about the lack of rigor and narrative nature of the book, but
| then does exactly the same thing to claim the opposite
| conclusion the book makes.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| I agree.
|
| 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.
| blurbleblurble wrote:
| The book might have some flaws but this article is flat out
| reactionary drivel.
|
| 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.~_
| languagehacker wrote:
| I thought The Body Keeps The Score was interesting and
| informative. I made sure to look up counterarguments afterwards,
| because there were definitely parts that I wasn't so keen on.
|
| 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.
| anechouapechou wrote:
| Anecdotal, but recently I've done a complete 180 on:
|
| - 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.
| stuffn wrote:
| The gut-brain axis is highly influential in _normal_ every day
| depression. It makes sense why you _think_ this works for you.
|
| 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.
| theothertimcook wrote:
| Kolk was involved in the "memory wars" and repressed memory drama
| back in the day where people started therapy then suddenly
| remembered historical abuse by caregivers that in many cases
| never actually happened (this is a massive simplification DYOR)
|
| 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...
| imiric wrote:
| Meh. I haven't read any of the books the article talks about, but
| IMO dismissing their entire premise is more unhelpful than any
| pseudoscientific claim they make.
|
| 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/
| int_19h wrote:
| It tries to make the _author 's pet theory_ digestible to a
| mass audience. The problem is that the author's pet theory is
| pseudoscience.
|
| 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!).
| yosito wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this!
|
| I read The Body Keeps the Score about 10 years ago after
| experiencing a particularly traumatic event. I had been searching
| for answers at the time for how to heal from the event, and
| someone recommended the book to me.
|
| I had distilled my memory of the book into the intuitive idea
| represented by the title that the body remembers what happens to
| it which of course there is _some_ truth to. So my first reaction
| to the headline was a bit defensive, "of course it's not
| bullshit!"
|
| But I had forgotten how much emphasis was put on there being
| significant lasting changes from events that we couldn't even
| remember.
|
| > The idea that trauma causes long-lasting damage to the brain
| and or body is central to van der Kolk's thesis.
|
| > his narrative paints this hopeless picture of trauma victims as
| being people who most aspects of their lives are "dictated by the
| imprint of the past."
|
| And now I remember that when I read the book originally looking
| for answers to my own traumas, it left me feeling hopeless,
| overwhelmed and permanently damaged from what I had gone through.
| I remember thinking that the high stress I was going through at
| the time was going to leave me permanently struggling with issues
| like high cortisol and inability to function normally. Absolutely
| NOT the message I needed at the time.
|
| Ten years on, my brain is normal and healthy, and I don't have
| any perceptible problems with cortisol or PTSD-like symptoms. I'm
| living a healthy, normal life, and not walking around with a
| heavy trauma score in my body.
|
| That's not to say that trauma from my past didn't play a role in
| making me who I am today, or that I don't still carry some
| memories of the difficult events. But I've found my brain to be
| very plastic and to heal and rewrite itself quite well. And all
| of the measurable markers of brain health, stress hormones, etc
| are fully back to normal, healthy ranges.
|
| That's just my anecdote, and I also appreciated the thorough
| scientific analysis in this article!
| softwaredoug wrote:
| This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-
| skeptic, which doesn't seem to agree with mainstream science
| (setting aside Body Keeps the Score)
|
| > That is, trauma doesn't lead to dysfunction or abnormal brain
| function, physiology or hormonal regulation. Rather, an unhealthy
| person may be more susceptible to trauma.
|
| What has been documented about Adverse Childhood Experiences
| doesn't agree with this. There is copious evidence that the
| presence of ACEs, independent of other factors, leads to poor
| health outcomes [1]
|
| It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future
| trauma [2]
|
| There's also data indicating CPTSD, PTSD, and Borderline are
| distinct disorders [3]
|
| 1 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8882933/
| https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
|
| 2 - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5858954/
|
| 3 - https://www.psychiatrypodcast.com/psychiatry-
| psychotherapy-p...
| taeric wrote:
| I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that
| you can make events worse by telling people that they are
| forever scarred from them? That is, yes, some trauma sticks
| with you. History shows people are also very resilient at
| moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't
| devastated when we ultimately do lose some family.
|
| Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much
| grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor
| should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very
| personal and hard to really know what experience someone will
| have until they have it.
| marcelr wrote:
| more information is better if it's also provided with the
| context of how to heal.
|
| > History shows people are also very resilient at moving on
| from trauma
|
| i'm extremely skeptical that people move on
|
| they suppress, they survive, but without deep understanding
| its impossible to say move on
|
| you can be ignorant and survive, or face reality and climb
| the deeply uphill battle of real growth.
|
| of course you can be paralyzed by it, but no one is
| advocating for that as treatment
| taeric wrote:
| I mean... depends on the trauma? Do you consider it
| traumatic to lose a pet? What is the difference between
| survival and moving on? What sort of growth would you
| expect there?
| zdragnar wrote:
| It really depends on the person.
|
| I know someone who grew up in rough neighborhoods, has been
| in fights, been stabbed, divorced alcoholic father and drug
| using mother, and yet got a master's degree, a fulfilling
| career, marriage and family.
|
| I know someone else who happened to be in a bank when it
| was robbed, and has spent years struggling to hold a steady
| job because the anxiety developed from the experience has
| persisted. Later divorced and become a poster child for
| making bad decisions.
|
| The latter has gone to therapy, the former didn't. Small
| sample size, don't draw any conclusions other than everyone
| is different, and beware anyone proclaiming universal
| truths in psychology.
| kulahan wrote:
| People who face reality and climb towards real growth are
| _also_ suppressing their negative emotions, surviving, and
| moving on. Children are specifically different from adults
| _because_ they don 't have any emotional regulation. They
| just live fully in whatever emotion smacks them in the gut.
|
| Just because you've got a scar doesn't mean it's bad, nor
| does it mean you haven't moved on if you haven't spent 6
| months staring at the healing process. Some people heal
| quicker, some heal better, some heal slower, some heal
| worse. Like pretty much everything in biology, it's
| something of a spectrum.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _History shows people are also very resilient at moving on
| from trauma._
|
| That's the "classical" mindset that modern empirical studies
| are refuting.
|
| Actually, no, people are often not very resilient at all in
| moving on from trauma. They suffer greatly, they traumatize
| others, and it affects their health.
| taeric wrote:
| On this, then, I would generally have a hard time agreeing.
| I'd be comfortable with the idea that not everyone is very
| resilient. I'd expect that. If the claim, then, is that
| there is an absurdly high variance there, I'd agree.
|
| But I'm also growingly sympathetic to the idea that telling
| people they are, in fact, traumatized, is not healthy.
| People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are told.
| Especially from authority.
| Schmerika wrote:
| > People are, as a rule, susceptible to what they are
| told.
|
| Research shows that suggestibility is actually moderately
| correlated with trauma.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| No expert, and fully expect to be flamed, but we are now
| living in a society that has discouraged "sucking it up" or
| "burying your emotions" for 30 years. It not really
| possible to study, at macro level, the impact of that
| thinking.
|
| A lot of people just want to be a victim. They want to be
| special. They want sympathy.
| itsnowandnever wrote:
| who has discouraged "sucking it up"? what systemic
| policies have changed to accommodate this? as far as I
| can tell, someone can explain how they're the victim to
| anyone and everyone they come across and no one will
| care. I can't see how anyone emotionally or materially
| benefits from saying they're a victim. they may want
| sympathy but they will not get it.
|
| that said, I don't live in a coastal city where there
| might be more accommodations for such things. where I
| live, people are generally on their own to find the means
| to survive. but, in line with the theme of the post, I'm
| fairly certain people here have a lower life expectancy
| and generally lower health than people in places where
| there is a more robust support network. in which case,
| the body must, in fact, keep the score.
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger" - maybe
| sometimes if you're an adult. But not childhood
| trauma...that makes you weaker almost every time, and you
| take that weakness with you and spread it around.
| chermi wrote:
| Ehh, kind of. But at the same time, EMDR works. So revisiting
| it in a very particular way can help.
|
| However, I concede that there's kind of a hammer and nail
| problem in therapy. They learn about how much trauma and
| childhood experience effects a person and tend to laser focus
| on that because they feel confident doing so. I think there's
| a certain unhealthines to spending too much time dwelling on
| the past. Up to some level it's ok, but there should be at
| least equal focus on the present, future, and _agency_ +self-
| confidence+self-discovery. Whereas a typical client would not
| be unreasonable to feel more like a victim given the focus on
| past experiences and traumas, which naturally reinforces a
| past-oriented victim mindset. Meanwhile, what most people
| need is a sense of being able to make things better now and
| work toward a better future, and practical tools to do so
| (agency).
|
| Of course, for severe cases, you should probably focus on
| dealing with the trauma and get the client to a more stable
| state before taking off the coddling gloves.
| jasonfarnon wrote:
| None of these seems to be making a causal claim, did I miss
| something? The linked article is saying causation runs in the
| opposite direction.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The only studies we have are long term longitudinal. IE this
| one:
|
| > After adjustment for confounding, there were statistically
| significant positive associations for people reporting four
| or more ACEs relative to those reporting no ACEs, and this
| was true for all chronic diseases except hypertension.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8462987
|
| A twin study would be about as close as we could get to a
| randomized control trial:
|
| https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/.
| ..
|
| I'm willing to use the term "cause" here, given the copious
| amount of studies controlling for other confounders. That's
| the best we can do given there's no ethical way to run a
| randomized control trial.
| teekert wrote:
| I'm a scientist. I haven't read "the body keeps the score". It
| sounds like pseudoscience.
|
| But, I do recognize the importance of models. Our brains are
| complex, lacking the capacity to comprehend everything, we make
| models. Models are incomplete (by definition) and often false.
| But can still be very useful. Or very useful to some. Where
| useful means: help someone lead a more fulfilling, better life.
|
| So I try not to judge. Even though I try to seek truth. To be a
| scientist. I know there are useful models out there.
| nostrademons wrote:
| So I had a therapist give me EMDR about 5 years ago for little-T
| trauma. I have no idea whether EMDR is scientifically back or not
| or whether trauma is overdiagnosed, I just know it worked for me.
|
| But what she said about the therapy (since I always want to know
| how everything works) is that trauma is basically emotional
| memory. Y'know how you might have a visual memory about how a
| certain place looked like when you visited, or sensual memory of
| how a favorite food tasted, or muscle memory for how to ride a
| bike, or cognitive memory of how to solve a math problem? The
| same thing happens with emotions - they get stored away in the
| brain's memory centers and can intrude on your present at some
| later time.
|
| But emotion, by definition, is "that which causes motion". So if
| you have a bunch of traumatic memories (oftentimes not even with
| visual or cognitive components - mine didn't have them), _those
| emotions continue to influence how you behave for years
| afterwards_. That's what memory is.
|
| And the point of EMDR is that for some unknown reason, the act of
| focusing your eyes across the parts of your visual field
| controlled by different hemispheres forces those emotional
| memories back into consciousness, where you can then recast and
| retrigger them based on present-day experience. It literally is
| implanting false memories - that's the point - but you _want_
| false memory of the event because the true emotional memory is no
| longer serving you well in the present.
| neom wrote:
| I've had pretty brutal body pain my whole adult life, I saw a
| lot of different flavours of skelatalmuscular therapy type
| folks over the years, you name it, I've had it. Around 6/7
| years ago I was under a lot of stress with work, some
| particularly intense interpersonal business stuff to work
| through and my body pain was at an all time high. I booked an
| appointment at a random chiropractor near my office first thing
| in the morning the next day, the guy went to adjust me and then
| told me that I needed acupuncture first. I told him no because
| every time I have acupuncture I sob uncontrollably, not from
| pain, just from reasons I didn't understand, but that the
| person usually had to stop. He said exactly, I need acupuncture
| first. He took me to another room in his office, lights out,
| and stuck some needles in me, no crying, he said he needed to
| get me crying, moved needles around, found a spot, emotions
| exploded, crying. He moved the needle, more crying, deeper,
| deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the
| needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry
| but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to
| die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes
| while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything
| started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think
| again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy
| who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my
| hip. A bunch of muscles I didn't even know existed let go, and
| that was the best adjustment I've ever had by a mile. It was
| actually this experience that lead me to reading the body keeps
| score (Connie Zweig is good also if this kinda stuff interests
| you).
|
| (Edit: someone emailed so for posterity, It was Steven Schram E
| 28th St NYC, no clue if he's still there it was some time ago.)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. And yes, once you experience something
| like that, you don't even need scientific evidence that the
| body keeps the score -- you've experienced it. You know it
| the same way you know the sky is blue.
|
| And that's what's frustrating when people want to invalidate
| the whole thing. They just don't know -- they haven't
| experienced anything like it. But they act like they do know.
|
| Now obviously, scientific validation of these things is
| important to better understand causes, mechanisms, and
| healing methods.
|
| But when people claim that the body doesn't store trauma as
| muscular tension, it's just frustrating because it feels like
| willful ignorance. Whether they don't know the stories of
| millions of people like yourself, or choose not to believe
| them.
| kouru225 wrote:
| I haven't read the book, but I'm almost always suspicious of
| criticism targeted at books like this. Let's say I write a
| textbook about biology and I write the sentence:
|
| "The Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell"
|
| Technically what I'm saying is wrong. What the mitochondria does
| is so vast and confusing that no sentence like that can ever
| encompass its role. In fact, even using the word "role" is
| questionable because it presumes that the mitochondria's sole
| function is to work as a team with other organelles/biological
| structures when in fact biology doesn't really care about some
| abstract idea like "team." All language is derived from analogy,
| and all analogies are insufficient to describe reality. In fact,
| mathematicians now agree that even math is an insufficient
| language. It can't fully describe the territory. It can only make
| maps of it, and all maps are only useful because they are
| compressed and packaged versions of the territory. The question
| is just, "how much compression is useful?"
|
| We live in a world where science communication is so atrophied
| that the flat earth, and creationist theories are still in
| circulation. Scientists have dramatically failed to market their
| ideas to the masses, despite the fact that these ideas are
| inherently compelling. To me, the reason why they've failed seems
| obvious: because they're so busy tearing down science
| communicators that none of them can ever get a real hold on the
| public. And why? Because the books they write are at compression
| level that the scientists arbitrarily deem irresponsible.
|
| This guy wrote a compelling story about the barrier between
| mind/body. To do that, he must have distributed a viral package
| of psychological terminology and concepts. It was then
| distributed to and consumed by millions of people. In all
| likelihood, the fact that they were excited by this book probably
| led them to read other books like it. They probably encountered
| conflicting ideas, questioned them, and looked them up. They
| probably have a much rounder understanding of these ideas now
| than they did when they first read them.
|
| Now this other guy writes a story and all it says is "yo that
| dude was wrong." How helpful! How useful! And let's be 100%
| clear: the person writing this isn't communicating the absolute
| truth. They're also compressing their ideas. In 100 years, I bet
| you any psychologist that reads both books will shake their head
| and point out all the flaws in their analogies. Meanwhile, the
| cycle continues: the scientists tear each other down and the
| masses continue sacrificing innocent children to appease the
| blood god.
| greygoo222 wrote:
| The Body Keeps the Score is bullshit, but this Substack is even
| more bullshit. The author criticizes Bessel van der Kolk for
| failing to prove causation, and then writes this gibberish:
|
| "In the textbook Evolutionary Psychology, the authors explain
| that a particular hunter gatherer population isn't as susceptible
| to PTSD despite being exposed to similarly tragic events. They
| argue that part of the physiological changes that come along with
| PTSD are increased inflammation in the body. Thus, the
| inflammatory nature of a standard western diet may make some
| people more susceptible to PTSD."
|
| "A 2020 study on Turkana warriors in Kenya found them to be much
| less likely to develop PTSD-related symptoms compared to US
| combat vets despite also experiencing gruesome acts in a war
| zone."
|
| Where is the proof that diet causes PTSD?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There is nothing funnier about HN than the constant insistence
| that "The mainstream media is bad and lying to you" while
| voting random Substack and Medium writers with _zero experience
| or training or authority_ to the front page.
|
| That goes together nicely with everyone on HN insisting that HN
| commenters are "special" and "different" from people on the
| rest of the internet. I guess because we are more likely to
| like the color orange?
|
| Most people insist they are above average drivers.
| int_19h wrote:
| You're not wrong, but "The Body keeps the Score" is hardly
| mainstream science either.
| nearbuy wrote:
| He's relaying what the textbook he cited claimed. You'll have
| to check the textbook for their sources. Getting into the weeds
| about different theories for why various hunter-gatherer
| societies have lower rates of PTSD is rather off-topic for this
| blog post. They're just trying to raise a few counter-examples
| to trauma causing this dysfunction and suggest that unhealthy
| people or people with abnormal brain scans may be more
| susceptible to trauma. This would invalidate many of the
| arguments in The Body Keeps the Score.
| vlan0 wrote:
| I can see why someone might have that opinion. I think the author
| hasn't met himself yet. As one can only meet and understand
| another as deeply as they have met themselves. I do wonder if he
| would gain more awareness of his self after a couple 7g mushroom
| runs.
| incomingpain wrote:
| I love the book; I found it immensely useful personally for
| trauma.
|
| I have discussed the book with various medical authorities. Not a
| single one disagreed or was negative towards it.
| int_19h wrote:
| > I have discussed the book with various medical authorities.
| Not a single one disagreed or was negative towards it.
|
| That is indicative of cherry picking the authorities you chose
| to discuss it with, since the problems with this book and the
| theories behind it are both well-known and well-documented.
| Start here:
|
| https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10497315231206754
| pvillano wrote:
| Pop-trauma allows people to continue to believe "dreams can be
| achieved through hard work" while not blaming themselves for not
| achieving their dreams.
|
| The reason I'm not living the dream could be that it's
| impossible, or I haven't tried hard enough. I don't want to
| believe either of those. I'd rather believe that something
| happened to me in my past that rewired my brain to stifle my full
| potential. Then I could still hope to someday achieve my dreams,
| while not doing anything to progress towards them.
|
| It's not popular because it's right. It's popular because it's
| so, so appealing.
| kulahan wrote:
| Kind of a silly ending to the article.
|
| >I think Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Mate's heavy handed trauma
| narrative is [bad]
|
| followed immediately by
|
| >However if they 'treat' their trauma with things like yoga,
| meditation, psychedelics and have some benefits, it's very likely
| they would have had the benefits regardless of whether they
| viewed it as some sort of trauma treatment or not.
|
| I suppose the author has never heard of placebo effects? Talk
| about a heavy-handed narrative.
|
| Author also seems to be skeptical of the idea that stress and
| inflammation can be a major cause of disease in the body. I might
| just be reading into things, but if that's an accurate assessment
| on my part, it's wildly inaccurate.
| shawndrost wrote:
| This article is a midwit dismissal; it may contain valid
| corrections but it is ignorant on the core topic at hand. This is
| a shame, because it is extremely interesting and under-reported
| topic!
|
| The core thesis of the book (per Claude) is: "Traumatic
| experiences become encoded in the body's nervous system, muscles,
| and organs, not just in conscious memory."
|
| The perfect exposition of the concept is downthread, in a comment
| by 'neom, which I will excerpt: "[The acupuncturist] moved the
| needle, [I did] more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept
| moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out
| of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be
| scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone
| in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean,
| awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I
| slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that
| was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I
| was a kid, moving his hand off my hip." (Thank you for sharing,
| neom.)
|
| I've had two similar experiences myself in the last year. I
| haven't read the book and don't know how this subject shows up in
| the scientific literature, but the proprioceptive experience
| leaves zero room for doubt about what is happening.
|
| People say lots of dumb and wrong things about trauma. Maybe the
| book contains some of that, but its titular observation is
| fascinating, true, and maybe even useful!
|
| I'll close with a related theory of mine, also derived through
| proprioception: one of the functions of the full-body sob is to
| reorganize muscular patterns which share an origin with (are
| identical to?) the emotional origin of the tears.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| From the article: _confusing the chicken for the egg is the same
| reason Gabor Mate's view that trauma causes ADHD is mistaken._
|
| I have an opinion in this area.
|
| I worked out a theory about trauma and ADHD. It is that they
| cohabitate (or operate in) the same area. I suspect they each
| serve to stunt learning by negatively impacting the reward
| mechanism that cements learning.
|
| The above notions flow from my considerations of my own abuse,
| neglect and cognizance issues. I have some confidence that they
| explain much of my long term learning issues.
|
| Explanation
|
| I have always experienced ADHD as a brain fog that obscures and
| distorts the details involved in natural learning. During
| childhood, I required a methodical and rigorous study of the same
| mundane details that my peers absorbed trivially. When my peers
| felt reinforcing joy in learning, I felt exhaustion and
| frustration as I raced to catch up to them. Eventually I could
| mimic their understanding - but by then they had grown further.
|
| During the catching up, I learned a lot of details and had
| moments where my reward would kick in. But it was for
| trivialities - for things I achieved that most children learn w/o
| notice. My positive expressions here could be confusing and
| discomforting to peers and others and I learned to suppress those
| feelings.
|
| Regarding abuse and neglect. They pushed the reward system out,
| much more directly. I learned to bury responsive joy when I
| received abuse in response. I abandoned responsive joy when it
| lead to nothing (instead of needed, nurturing reinforcement).
|
| I will note here that children do not do well when given adult-
| sized burdens of internalizing emotional systems that, in healthy
| environments, are openly and freely expressed. Emotional misfires
| are the predictable result of poor containment.
|
| By adolescence, my reward system was reliably - 1) not there when
| I needed it and 2) often overly-present at unhelpful times. I
| mistrusted of one of the best parts of being human. For me, abuse
| and ADHD were two persistent vectors toward a transformative
| outcome, a broken reward system.
|
| For an epilogue, Adderall has been a late stage, happy-ish
| outcome to this story. Every day, I _reliably_ get a period of
| trivially-triggered reward. Into this, I can feed experiences and
| receive learning and understanding. It is _much_ better than no
| payout at all. I am distressed by the many interests (DEA,pols)
| who regularly attack and want to take this away from me
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