He found that when trauma survivors are reminded of their experience, a region of the brain called the —the smoke detector for threat—goes into overdrive. Meanwhile, Broca’s area , the part of the brain responsible for speech, effectively shuts down. This was a neurobiological explanation for the common clinical observation that survivors "go speechless" under duress. They cannot articulate their experience because the part of the brain needed to form coherent narrative is offline.
It was the 1970s and 80s, and the United States was still reeling from the Vietnam War. The VA system was flooded with young men suffering from what was then poorly understood. Officially, "Post-Vietnam Syndrome" was not yet the well-defined diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which would only appear in the DSM-III in 1980. Van der Kolk was on the front lines. He saw veterans who would explode in rage at a loud noise, who numbed themselves with alcohol and heroin, who were trapped in a perpetual present where the jungle was always just around the corner.
His work has fundamentally changed clinical practice. It is now common for trauma therapists to ask, "What do you notice in your body right now?" alongside "What are you thinking?" Somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and other body-focused modalities have moved from the fringe to the mainstream. bessel van der kolk
The trauma world was split. Many colleagues and former patients defended him passionately, arguing that his intensity was part of his genius and that the accusations were a pretext for a long-simmering institutional rebellion against his dominance. Others saw the dismissal as a necessary reckoning, arguing that a man who preached the importance of safety and relational attunement was failing to provide it to his own staff.
Van der Kolk’s name is now synonymous with a paradigm shift. His 2014 magnum opus, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma , spent over 150 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, a nearly unprecedented feat for a dense, academic work on psychiatry. It became a touchstone for therapists, social workers, veterans, survivors of abuse, and anyone who has ever felt that their past was holding their present hostage. But to understand the phenomenon of van der Kolk, one must understand the journey that led him to write that book—a journey marked by brilliant insight, bitter institutional battles, and a willingness to embrace the unorthodox. Born in 1948 in postwar Amsterdam, van der Kolk grew up in a country still scarred by Nazi occupation. While he did not experience the Holocaust directly, the pervasive atmosphere of loss and resilience in Dutch society may have seeded his early fascination with how human beings endure and are shaped by catastrophe. He studied medicine and psychiatry in Chicago and then at Harvard, where he began his long affiliation with the Boston Veterans Administration (VA) hospital. He found that when trauma survivors are reminded
His impact has spilled far beyond the clinic. Survivors of childhood abuse, sexual assault, and racial violence have found validation in his pages. The book has become a foundational text for understanding the link between trauma and addiction, chronic pain, and autoimmune disorders. It has even influenced social justice movements, providing a framework for understanding "collective trauma" and intergenerational transmission of pain.
This led to his most famous, and most radical, formulation: Traumatic memories are not stored as linear stories with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, they are stored as visceral sensations, as muscle tension, as a churning gut, as a racing heart, as a frozen posture. A sexual abuse survivor might feel fine intellectually while talking about the event, but her body will react to a man’s aftershave with a surge of cortisol and a feeling of suffocation. The body, van der Kolk argued, remembers what the mind has tried to forget. The Therapeutic Heresies: Beyond the Couch and the Pill If the body keeps the score, then the talking cure is insufficient. This conclusion made van der Kolk a heretic in the world of traditional psychoanalysis and, later, in the world of evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). He didn’t reject these modalities, but he argued they needed to be supplemented by bottom-up treatments that directly address the body’s learned responses. They cannot articulate their experience because the part
More controversially, van der Kolk focused on the , a region that monitors the body’s internal state (interoception). He argued that trauma fundamentally alters the relationship between the mind and the body. Survivors often feel disembodied, numb, or disconnected from their physical sensations. They might be unable to feel comfort, or they might experience ordinary touch as a threat.