The Body Keeps Score — But It Also Keeps Hope

The body keeps the score has changed how we think about trauma and the body, and the contribution was monumental. It has also, almost as a side effect, left a lot of people convinced that the body is a permanent archive, that the marks are indelible. That framing is half a sentence. In this long-form Sacred Talk, Abi Beri says the rest. The body keeps the score, and the body also keeps hope. The same plasticity that took on the trauma is taking on the present moment. The body holds the record, and the body holds the route home. These are not in tension. They are the same proposition, looked at from two sides. Threaded through with clinical clarity, an honouring of the original argument, and an honest account of what hope-in-the-body actually looks like in real work.

Transcript

So welcome everyone. And thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. So unless you live under a rock, You must have come across the phrase, The body keeps the score? In a therapy room or a wellness post or a self-help meme? And you'll know it has changed something fundamental about how we think about trauma and the body. It has also almost as a side effect. Left a lot of people convinced that the body is, In some sense, A permanent archive. That what happened to you is now stored. That the marks are indelible? That you are in your tissues, In your nervous system, In your reflexes. A kind of walking record of everything that has hurt you. And that framing is half true. It's half the needed sink. Because for decades, The body was treated as separate from the story of drama? And the consequences of those were enormous. So I want to honor this before I go any further. But I feel it is half a sentence. And the cultural appetite for the doom half has been bigger than the cultural appetite for the rest. So today I want to say the rest of the sentence. The body keeps the score and the body also keeps hope. The body holds the record and the body holds the root home page. These are not intention. These are the same proposition look from two different sides. So, I want to be precise about the argument the book made because the meme has drifted from the source. So, Van Der Kolk, If I'm pronouncing it correctly, And his colleagues, Working with combat veterans, With survivors of abuse, And with people whose lives had been organized around things that should not have happened, They kept noticing something. The symptoms didn't live in the cognitive part of the brain. They lived in the body. In hyper-arousal, In numbness, In flashbacks that arrived as a sensation, Not as a story. In autonomic patterns that didn't respond to insight. So the argument was that talk therapy alone, Working with the cognitive part of the brain, Was missing where the trauma lived. The argument was that to heal trauma, You had to include the body, Because the body was where the record had been laid down. And it makes perfect sense. The argument was correct. And it opened the door for the likes of Somatic Healing, Somatic Experiencing, SensiMotor, Psychotherapy, EMDR, IFS, And the whole industry of bottom-up drama work. And it legitimized methodologies that had been dismissed as soft and lacking research. And it is genuinely one of the most important reframings of how we work with suffering in the last 50 years, If not more. What it never said, And was never meant to say, Was that the body was a permanent prison. That argument got added later by the algorithm and by a particular wellness industrial register that finds permanent damage is easier to sell than slow repair. Doom is more shareable than process. Always has been. So let me describe what I mean by doom framing, Because once you see it, You see it everywhere. The doom framing tells you that your nervous system has been shaped by what happened, That the patterns are stored, That you're now operating from a wounded baseline, And the healing is, At best, A kind of careful management of an essentially damaged system. And that vocabulary is loaded. Wounded inner child. Traumatized nervous system. Broken attachment. Dysregulated body. Each of those phrases taken on their own are very accurate. But taken together in the register that the wellness internet uses them, They form a story in which the listener is fundamentally compromised. The story has consequences. People who have absorbed the doom shaming tend to come to therapy expecting to spend years excavating damage. They tend to interpret good days as exceptions and bad days as evidence of the underlying patent. They tend to treat their healing as fragile, Easily derailed process that requires constant vigilance. And paradoxically they tend to make slower progress. Because the nervous system listens to the story we tell about it. And a story of essential brokenness is itself a form of sympathetic activation. I am not saying we manifest our own outcomes. I am not saying mindset is everything. I'm saying that there is a specific kind of suffering produced by being told repeatedly with neuroscientific authority that what happened to you is now permanently part of your body. And that suffering is not in the original research. I want to put something on the table that doesn't get said often enough. The body is not primarily an archive. The body is primarily a process. It is continuously every second doing things. Repairing tissue, Repairing cells, Updating its model of the world. Adjusting its baselines in response to current input. The body of one year ago is not the body of today. Most of its cells have been replaced, And the patterns of neural firing have shifted. The autonomic baselines have moved in response to what the system has made sense. Yes, The body holds patterns. Trauma patterns are particularly stubborn ones because they were laid down during high arousal states and the system, Sensibly, Doesn't want to forget what nearly hurt it. But stubbornness is not permanence. Plasticity is not a wellness slogan. It's just a basic feature of how nervous tissue works. So researchers in neuroplasticity have spent decades showing that nervous systems can be rewired, Not back to a hypothetical pre-trauma state, That's not how it works, But into new patterns. The old patterns can become inactive, New connections formed through repeated experience can become the new default. The set point of the autonomic nervous system, Which is the baseline of arousal, The speed at which the system can come back, All of these are responsive to consistent experiences over time. In simple words, It means the body that keeps the score is the same body that can be retrained. I want to acknowledge something, Because I think the field has been a bit cowardly about it. Hope is a harder claim than damage. Damage is easy to evidence. Trauma symptoms are observable, The body's record is real and trackable. You can point at someone's flashbacks, At their hypervigilance, At their startled response, At their dysregulation, And you can show that something happened and something is still there. Hope is more diffuse. The capacity to repair is harder to demonstrate in a single session. The new pattern, The lower baseline, The longer window of tolerance. These emerge over months, Not minutes. Which means anyone selling chains has to talk about a process that the listener cannot directly see. While anyone selling damage can point at the listener's own life. So the wellness internet has been honest in its own way about damage. But it has been less clear, Less honest and less specific about repair. Partly because repair is slower and harder to package. The body keeps the score, Yes, But the body also keeps hope. And the second half of that sentence is no less true than the first. It just doesn't trend very well. Now let me describe what hope side of this actually looks like in clinical experience in the body itself. So, Hope in the body is not optimism. It's definitely not positive thinking. It's a particular kind of micro-movement. A faint forward orientation that you start to notice once you know what you're looking for. It's the way someone who has been collapsed in a freeze response, After months and months of careful slow work, Lifts their gaze and looks at the window. The orientation is extremely small. The neck has now turned a fraction. The eyes have moved. But something in the system has decided momentarily that the world is worth looking at. That is hope. Expressed as a movement of bone and tissue. It's the way someone whose breath has lived high in the chest for decades suddenly takes a breath that goes lower. Almost without noticing in the middle of a session. That diaphragm has released a fraction. The body has decided in that moment that it doesn't need to be braced. That is hope expressed as a movement of Masa. It's the way an arm in a session will lift on its own sometimes, Reaching towards another person. After years of having lived contracted close to the body, Hope has a reach. Hope as a gesture that the body had previously forbidden itself, Suddenly now allowed. These movements are tiny. These movements are also data. They are the body voting in real time for a different configuration than the one it has been holding. And once you start to see them, You understand that the body is not actually committed to the score it kept. The body would prefer given any plausible opportunity to put the score down. So, I want to be careful here, Because if I just leave it at the body wants to heal, I've replaced one cliche with another. Hope in the body requires certain conditions to land. It doesn't appear because we tell ourselves be hopeful. It appears because something in the present moment has been different enough, Safe enough, Consistent enough for the body to risk a small experiment. And those conditions are not optional. They are the whole work. The first condition is consistent enough safety. Not perfect safety. Nobody gets that. A reasonably consistent safety in a relationship, An environment, A body that allows the system to spend more time out of threat than in it. For people whose lives have been spent in unsafe relationships and environments, This often means changing relationships and environments, Which itself is going to be slow work. Second I'd say is regulated company. A nervous system that knows how to be in ventral vagal, In your safe space, In your presence, Regularly. So, Therapy provides this professionally. Some friendships, Some partnerships, Some animals, Some communities provide it informally. Because without it, The system has nothing to imprint on. And the third thing is patience. Willingness to be patient. To work in the body time rather than wellness influencer time. To accept that small movements I described earlier are milestones, Not the headline ones. To stop measuring progress against a standard that was never appropriate. And the fourth, Which is the most underrated, Is the absence of constant re-traumatization. There are bodies that are doing their best to heal in environments that keep injuring them. Hostile workplaces, Chronic financial pressure, Abusive families, Communities that withhold care. Those bodies are not failing, Their environments are. So some of the most important work in healing is recognizing that when the conditions for repair are not present, And doing what can be done to change them. And sometimes changing them is not the option. I want to offer you now something small. Not a fix. Just a demonstration of what hope in the body actually feels like. So you know it when you meet it. So settle wherever you are. Eyes open, Eyes closed, Listening, Receiving, Whatever works for you. Just settle wherever you are. And let your body have whatever support is underneath it. Whatever support is underneath my body, I'm gonna let my body feel that support. Can be anything. The chair, The bed, The car seat, The floor. Now I want you to do one thing and one thing only for now. Turn your head very slowly. Towards something in your environment that is genuinely pleasant. A window. A plant A photograph of someone you love. Maybe a pet if there is one. Don't strain. Just slowly let your head and eyes orient towards something good. And just stay there now. Notice what happens. If anything. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe your breath shifts a fraction. Maybe your shoulders softened. Maybe nothing observable changes. But you find your gaze lingering on the thing slightly longer than expected. That small movement. The orientation towards the good. Is what's called the orienting response. And in the body's language. It's the beginning of hope. The system has decided. For this moment. The world contains something worth looking at. The system has decided for this moment. The world contains something worth looking at. If you do nothing else with this talk, Practice that. Several times a day, Slowly turn towards something good. And don't make it a discipline, Make it a noticing. Over weeks, Months, Days. That practice teaches the body that the world is worth orienting towards. Which in nervous system terms, Is hope being slowly installed as your default. Here is the line I'd like to leave you with if you take nothing else. The body keeps the score because the body is paying attention. The same attention that recorded the harm is recording right now the safety. The same plasticity that took on the trauma is taking on the present moment. The body is not on a one-way trip away from wholeness. The body is on constant negotiation with its environment. And the new inputs are landing, Whether you notice them or not. Which means. . . The work of healing is not the heroic excavation of past damage. It is the consistent provision of present moment safety. Showing up again and again. In conditions that allow the body to take small risks. It is the slow accumulation of evidence. That the world this time is different. It is very slow, Very boring, And it rarely makes for compelling content. But it is what might work. And the body given anything like a fair chance, Will tend towards repair. Now I'll say one thing briefly. I came into this work having absorbed quite a lot of doomshaming without realising. I treated my own nervous system as a project that needed managing. My reactions as evidence of my damage? And my history as something I'd have to compensate indefinitely. It was exhausting and it produced very little change. What started to shift things eventually. Was being in rooms with people who held a different story. Who didn't see me as broken. Who oriented towards the part of me that was still moving, Still alive. And their attention to that part. Not naive optimism. Steady attention. Was what allowed my system slowly to take itself less seriously as a wounded object. I tell you that. Because if the only framing you've had is, You're the damaged one. You may not yet have met anyone who could see your other half. And the other half is real. It's just less promoted. Let me describe what people often report when they start to hold both halves of the sentence together. They make decisions differently. The decision to apply for a job, To say yes to the connection, To take the trip becomes possible because they are no longer waiting to be healed in our first. The body is part of the journey, Not a pre-condition for it. They also forgive themselves more. Bad days are not indictments anymore. The setbacks stop being evidence of essential brokenness. They also relate to their own history differently. Not as a permanent tangerine they have to honour. But as a chapter that shaped them. And that chapter is over. The shape it gave them. Including the difficult parts. Become now open to integration rather than being worshipped, Which is in the end what healing looks like. Not the absence of history, But its incorporation in your life. If this talk has unsettled the doom framing for you, I'm glad. The doom framing was never the whole truth, And a lot of people have suffered under it longer than they need to. So hold both the halves from today. The body keeps the score, The body keeps the hope. Same body, Same plasticity, Same attention to what's happening can go in either direction, Depending on what you put in front of it. So your job is not to fight the body. Your job is to give it conditions in which it can lean towards the second half in its own time. Now for now. Stay where you are for another minute. Look at something good once again. And let your body take for one breath longer than you usually allow. The evidence that this present moment contains something good worth orienting towards. So thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me. Take gentle care. Namaste.