Since its 2014 release, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk has become one of the most influential and widely read books on trauma. It has sold more than 3 million copies and spent eight years on the New York Times bestseller list. It’s been read and recommended by mental health professionals, trauma survivors, and many others who found the content helped make sense of their experiences and relationships.
It’s not hard to see why. Van der Kolk validates the reality that trauma significantly affects the body, arguing it reshapes the brain by imprinting on a person’s nervous system and causing physiological responses that persist even when the person is no longer experiencing or consciously thinking about the trauma.
In some ways, Van der Kolk’s work was a reaction to a real failure to understand trauma. This failure existed in the broader culture and, by extension, within the church. The previous cultural pattern of minimizing trauma or suggesting it can be resolved through purely spiritual means was deeply painful and dismissive. Trauma isn’t primarily a spiritual problem. It’s the whole-person response to real harm.
Where Van der Kolk’s work has helped us recognize the complexity of trauma, we can be grateful. We are embodied souls, and our bodies do matter. Good care engages the whole person. Helping someone find calm in her body and relief from overwhelming stress is a meaningful way of honoring the body God gave her.
Yet, as a new study suggests, Van der Kolk’s body-focused view doesn’t capture the complexity of the human experience with trauma. His framing risks a rebranded reductionism—one that locates trauma so firmly in the body that the mind and heart become bystanders rather than participants in both the wound and the healing.
More Complex Picture
A recent article published by the scientific journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience addresses the potential reductionism in Van der Kolk’s framework. This isn’t the first critique of his work—others have raised concerns about his misinterpretations of research or conclusions drawn more strongly than the evidence supports. But this more recent study does more than critique Van der Kolk’s conclusions; it overturns them by placing active cognitive and interpretive processes at the center of the trauma response.
Van der Kolk’s body-focused view doesn’t capture the complexity of the human experience with trauma.
Rather than suggesting trauma is stored in the body largely independently of the rest of the person, the article proposes a computer-model analogy. The brain’s processing of trauma leads to erroneous predictions about present and future events, which in turn trigger the body’s stress response even when no real danger exists.
The authors suggest that heightened bodily reactions and hypervigilance result from subconscious predictions about danger shaped by past traumatic experiences. From this perspective, trauma contributes to cognitive rigidity and an ongoing assumption of threat, leaving individuals stuck in threat-focused patterns. Thus, the body is reacting to the mind’s assessment, not in spite of it.
In short, the article argues that active mental processes are integral to the trauma response—a view that affirms greater human complexity than Van der Kolk’s more reductionistic model. Recognizing that bodily stress responses exist in relationship with mental processes also helps explain why varied interventions can be effective for those struggling with post-traumatic stress. Contrary to Van der Kolk’s conclusions, substantial evidence supports both mind-based and body-based interventions—which makes sense if we understand them as interconnected and mutually influential.
Significance of Spiritual Realities
One area secular research rarely addresses is the role of the spiritual in human struggle. As Christian believers, we can appreciate how the recent Frontiers article highlights the interconnectedness of the mind and the body, while also recognizing that even this model is limited in its lack of attention to a person’s heart and spiritual condition.
A biblical anthropology tells us that what’s happening in the heart—the biblical center of a person—affects the mind and body. But this relationship isn’t one-directional. The thoughts we think also affect the heart and body. And what’s happening in the body affects the heart and mind. Scripture neither ignores the body nor presents it as disconnected from the rest of the person.
Scripture neither ignores the body nor presents it as disconnected from the rest of the person.
Being a Christian doesn’t prevent trauma or eliminate body-mind responses to it. But recognizing that God created us with an interconnected body, mind, and heart informs how we understand trauma’s effects on a person and how we seek to help.
Here are three practical implications of a biblical anthropology as it relates to trauma:
1. For helpers, a biblically holistic perspective guards against overspecializing. A person with physical trauma-response symptoms may benefit not only from body-based care but also from careful attention to the interpretive patterns and beliefs shaping her sense of threat and safety.
2. For trauma survivors, know that while your body responses are real, you aren’t at the mercy of your nervous system. Your mind’s interpretation and your heart’s orientation are also part of the picture, which means you have more agency than a purely body-based framework might suggest. This isn’t a call to think or believe your way out of trauma but an affirmation that your whole self—including your mind and faith—can be a resource.
3. For the church, the corrective to Van der Kolk’s approach isn’t to swing back toward purely spiritual responses to trauma. This new study should encourage us to engage with the complexity of how people experience trauma. Encouraging someone to pursue body-based care is entirely consistent with also walking with him in spiritual formation. These aren’t competing solutions.
In light of the beautifully complex way we’re created, we should affirm that trauma can affect the body, mind, and heart—and that intervening in any one of these areas helps reshape the others. Grounding our hearts in the reality of God’s grace (Eph. 2:8; 2 Cor. 12:9), his presence with us in suffering (Ps. 34:18), and our hope of a better home with him in eternity (2 Cor. 4:16–18) meaningfully reorients us amid deeply painful and wounding events.
Grounding our identity in who God says we are, and our hope in what he has secured, doesn’t bypass the body’s responses but intervenes at the source. As believers, we honor God by caring for the mind and body while also affirming that the spiritual realities of the gospel have profound implications for those who have experienced trauma.
