I keep the score… actually
I did my usual breath-work session this morning. I did it, almost hesitantly as I’d only mentioned to my husband this morning that, I was having a less desirable reaction to it lately. Like I was festering on loose ends by the end of each session. But I did it anyway and during this mornings session. something became very clear.
Toward the end of my session, a thought popped in around the recent articles I’d seen around Bessle Van der Kolk’s book, ‘The Body keeps the score. I was suddenly thinking about how many of us very hurt people turned it into a cultural identity. And if you’re on Instagram and and suffered from any kind of trauma, it’s likely you e seen the content about releasing stored trauma with x,y,z.
The Body Keeps the Score helped popularise something important though, I don’t doubt that at all, trauma isn’t “just in your head,” and it can live in the nervous system, in threat responses, in the body itself, in many ways.
And that mattered. It still does.
But as much as we try not to, it’s easy to absorb a idea like that and just… become it.
And honestly? Sometimes it’s a great excuse not to change. If the score is already written in your body, if the damage is already done, then what exactly are you supposed to do with that?
Get another massage? Do more yoga? Get one of those crazy painful looking jaw releases, or have another flipping ice bath?
As it turns out, newer research is starting to push back. A 2025 evidence review looked at over a hundred claims from the book and found many weren’t strongly supported by current science, which is important. More recently a 2026 neuroscience paper went further, arguing that the body doesn’t literally store trauma like a fixed record, it’s not so deeply engrained like we have been led to believe, that the brain and nervous system are constantly predicting, interpreting and updating sensation based on context, memory and meaning.
However, Ole Bessel Van der Kolk wasn’t entirely wrong. Trauma can and does affect the body. But the popular takeaway you’ll be told, is that it’s permanently written into you as an unchangeable scorecard written on a tablet with a hammer and chisel, this is just too simplistic. Almost too easy. And it can become harmful when people start seeing themselves as permanently damaged. As I have.
Which is what I felt this morning as tension physically left my body. Not for good I’ll have you know, but at least for a few hours. The realisation that knowing that meant I thought, I couldn’t change some things, no matter how hard I try.
I think many of us hear these ideas, and internalise something like: what happened to me is now permanently embedded within me. That the abuses done upon the body become so engrained that what is done cannot truly be undone. That our nervous systems become lifelong evidence of what we survived.
I have carried guilt and heaviness around that idea for a long time, as though I wasn’t doing enough. As though my body had become a permanent record of the harms others had inflicted upon it. As though healing meant endlessly managing damage.
This whole idea has been a point of contention in my psyche, self, what ever, because my mind knows, we have done so much to work through these harms. But my belief in my mind, knows very well, I am not my body, nor the things done to it. But the part of me that struggles sometimes, that younger version of me, may still tighten in fear, ache with grief, brace against memory, react long after an experience has passed. Thats how my nervous system has adapted for survival. And that is real.
But beyond those responses, there is still a self interpreting what the sensations mean. A consciousness assigning identity to pain. A mind deciding whether suffering becomes a life sentence, a story, a wound, wisdom or something eventually released.
But in this realisation I realise that remembrance is not identity. I know that, because when I look back at my life, I sometimes can’t believe that’s what I’ve been through, like that almost wasn’t me. I’m no longer the little girl who hurt like that, but I can remember her.
I think we become prisoners of our own suffering when we over-identify with the pain itself. When we begin monitoring ourselves through the lens of harms done, we begin treating every trigger or contraction as proof we are altered and that it will live within us, in dark corners and hard to find places forever.
The body score becomes identity.
Our work through the things that happened to us isn’t about erasing every imprint as though we’ve been permanently contaminated by those experiences.
But maybe it’s about reclaiming authorship over the meaning of those experiences.
The body may feel things. Or not.
But I am the one who keeps the score.
Read more on the research here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/systems-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957/full
