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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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.
> 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.
This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.
This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You have physical symptoms - joint pain, back pain, racing heart beat, chest pain, panic attacks, dizziness, heart palpitations, or etc. Which one of these is more about "your fault" and which gives you more control?
a) the traditional view, you have some unknown illness, it's incurable, could have happened to anyone, bad luck.
b) people are reporting anecdotally that old horrible memories can lead to physical symptoms years later, and revisiting those memories and coming to terms with them can make the physical symptoms resolve completely in minutes. Maybe there's something scientific to that and maybe there isn't, but here are some of the ways people try it: ..
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 63.7 ms ] threadBecause 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.
> “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.
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.
Ie the idea has to be convincing enough to spread from person to person as a meme but also have enough armchair level depth to pass the bullshit filters of most reasonable people- ie popularity wins over truth
Most people do not have the intellectual curiosity or time to deeply verify these claims - but inevitably these fads die as they appear..
Clearly this is one example
The only way to convincingly make the case for new information is with pretty rigorous technical arguments, which is fundamentally at odds with a lay audience. If someone has those rigorous technical arguments, they'd be making them in journals to a technical audience, and the results would slowly become consensus.
Obvi there are counter-examples, but as a general rule I think this is far more true than not. Which is why if you learn from Forbes that someone is close to cracking AGI, you can almost outright assume this is untrue.
This is my general perspective with history books - most mass market history books simplify the complexity dramatically. You have to get into books with piles of citations before the complexity & nuance level starts to approximate something perhaps like a correct take.
This gets more and more painful the more 'hot' the topic is.
My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.
Drugs work but often don't. Therapies work but often don't. Alice's research falls apart under Bob's scrutiny.
It's a soft science, it is what it is.
That said, this article is just as bad as the book.
Of course there are massive and complex feedback loops between the brain and the body.
Trying to distill it to only one thing in one direction is kinda absurd.
I encourage folks to get more massages if they doubt that there's any causal relationship between these phenomena.
I 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.
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.
not finding something doesn’t seem any more or less convincing…
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.
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.
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...
a) the traditional view, you have some unknown illness, it's incurable, could have happened to anyone, bad luck.
b) people are reporting anecdotally that old horrible memories can lead to physical symptoms years later, and revisiting those memories and coming to terms with them can make the physical symptoms resolve completely in minutes. Maybe there's something scientific to that and maybe there isn't, but here are some of the ways people try it: ..