The Body Does Not Keep Score: A New and Hopeful Way for Therapeutic Recovery and Healing | #386

From Pain to Possibility · Aug 13, 2026 · 27m

In this episode, I explore a recent paper published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience titled "The Body Does Not Keep Score: Trauma, Predictive Coding, and the Restoration of Metastability." I break down how this research challenges Bessel van der Kolk's famous metaphor that the body "stores" trauma, offering instead a neuroscience lens focused on prediction error and brain flexibility. Rather than viewing trauma as something physically trapped in fascia or muscle, we look at how the brain becomes rigidly fixed in predicting danger—and what it actually takes to update those predictions.

I…