The Body Keeps The Score

The opening anecdote of The Body Keeps the Score features Tom, a Vietnam veteran who watched his friends die in an ambush. The next day, he went into a frenzy, killing children, shooting a farmer, and raping a woman. Bessel van der Kolk, the author, presents Tom sympathetically, focusing on his shame and difficulty feeling affection for his wife. The book never offers a single statement of sympathy for the Vietnamese woman. This is the first of many vignettes in a book that has become a cultural phenomenon, spending 248 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and being endorsed by Oprah. But according to the podcast If Books Could Kill, the text itself is riddled with factual errors, debunked science, and a deeply troubling subtext.

The Good Premise and the Bad Science

The hosts acknowledge that the book’s core premise is valuable and was a necessary corrective in the field of psychology. The idea that trauma has physical symptoms—affecting sleep, the immune system, and the body in ways that don’t feel like “trauma”—was healing for many readers. The book also popularized the concept of complex PTSD, moving beyond the old model that required a single, discrete traumatic event. Furthermore, the book’s epilogue explicitly addresses structural drivers of trauma, calling out poverty, mass incarceration, and the lack of universal healthcare.