Criticisms of "The Body Keeps the Score"

I think there is a bit of a crowd that is pushing the idea that you can make events worse by telling people that they are forever scarred from them? That is, yes, some trauma sticks with you. History shows people are also very resilient at moving on from trauma. Kind of have to be, so that we aren't devastated when we ultimately do lose some family.

Would be like saying you should hammer people on how much grieve they must be feeling because they lost a dog. Now, nor should you also scold people for feeling said grief. It is very personal and hard to really know what experience someone will have until they have it.

None of these seems to be making a causal claim, did I miss something? The linked article is saying causation runs in the opposite direction.

The mind-body link is too important to get the causality wrong and The Body Keeps Score is an ideology where the causality only goes one way.

I have a cousin that had frequent, overwhelming anxiety attacks. She started eating breakfast consistently and the anxiety disappeared at the same time. Anxiety is strongly linked to gut activity, so the temporal correlation is a smoking gun, even if not dispositive.

For her, "understanding past trauma" was irrelevant to the solution.

>> I also think that for a traumatized person, it probably doesn't make that much of a difference whether or not their body is different because of the trauma, or they're traumatized because of their body - they are experiencing these reactions and trauma responses, and they're looking for a solution.

I agree. Like diets, whatever works for you is the "right" answer. At lot of psychological theory can be thought of as just a model to help you make changes regardless of the physical validity of the model.

> But at the same time, I think it's probably useful for people who have been traumatized to make sense of their experiences.

The problem I'm seeing more and more is that these pop culture trauma books are targeted at the widest audience possible. These authors push trauma as the explanation for everything, so people seeking self-help read these books and assume that trauma must be at the root of the problem they're seeking.

For some people, this is true. Identifying and addressing trauma is helpful.

Many conditions can occur without a traumatic root or trigger, though. For people trying to understand and improve their condition, falling into one of these trauma books sends them down a path of trying to force their problem to fit the trauma mold so they can use the trauma tools.

I've written on HN before about how one of the more famous trauma influencers and frequent podcast guests does this (I'm not going to name him because it triggers reactive downvotes and attacks from his fans and I don't want to debate that): He starts searching for "trauma" in his patients' past to use as a starting point for therapy. If he can't find anything he goes back further and further, until arriving at birth. Birth, he claims, is a deeply traumatic experience that can cause issues later in life like relationship problems, attention issues at work, and so on. In this way, everyone who has ever existed now qualifies for trauma therapy because everyone was born, and therefore everyone has trauma that might explain all of their problems in this world.

The conflict of interest is obvious: Once they get a taste of book sales, podcast appearances, or social media fame it becomes against their best interests to narrowly define their practice to classic textbook trauma. So to maximize their appeal, they redefine trauma to be something much simpler such that everyone qualifies (to buy their book). This does a disservice to people with PTSD and really dilutes the concept of these psychiatric terms.

This is an interesting point.

Every book doesn't have to be for everyone universally. It's kind of binary to where we might not catch ourselves thinking that way.

It could work for a specific group of people who might have an outsized positive experience and review of it.

There is also a strong likelihood that psychiatric findings get outdated quickly given the rapid evolution of culture, tech, communication and society in general, just 30 years ago internet was just for a few nerds and tech enthusiasts, just 3 years ago you couldn't make the computer realistically pretend to be your lover over chat messages, the landscape in which psychology has to exist that has little to do with it is so ever changing that maybe it was always bit silly to expect it to be a hard science.

we have trouble defining and detecting when someone is in a flow state. or what parts of the brain are involved in grit. heck we are even tipping the begginings on how chronic pain is processed in our brain. if some drug has a greater validity than a placebo, then it's something

now a guy claiming direct correlation with trauma based on what you went through for some seconds/minutes right after you born? feels like some Freud and their charlatans type of shit not "soft science"

> My claim: there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism.

Which makes these books all the more dangerous because the authors are overly confident about their conclusions and hence the attraction (which leads to book sales). When the unexplainable suddenly becomes explainable, the money rolls in.

soft science you say but the person better not commit suicide or starts working soon and gets better soon. The problem with psiquiatra is that there is the real biological diagnosis, the pseudo diagnosis (neurotic versión of the biological og diagnosis), the intentional fake diagnosis and the not intentional but still fake diagnosis, thats why DSM is not for regular people even if they can read the words the real clinical meaning is almost always different from what non clinical people think It is

I think the critique is fundamentally different from saying "it's soft science".

It's saying "it's bad research, misquoting experts and references, drawing sloppy conclusions aimed at a lay audience".

You can do psychology and psychiatry better than that, even if acknowledging they are not hard science.

There's no excuse for being sloppy or outright fraudulent.

> there is no psychiatric body of work that is impervious to criticism. Not a single piece of psychological science is 100% true.

The scientific process is rarely perfect and levels of average levels of rigour vary between disciplines.

However, there are quite significantly varying levels of quality and rigour in psychological studies. Your criticism seems framed to ignore this and groups the charlatans in with the actuap scientists.

There is always somebody, especially on HN, who will comment on an article debunking pop psychology, "Well that makes sense because it's all bullshit."

I understand there is a bias towards the hard sciences here (which is somewhat odd, because the vast majority of commenters here do not practice any hard science). But I think there is extra skepticism of psychiatry and psychology (which get lumped together), and I wonder why that might be.

Well, I have a theory, but it relies on psychology and it isn't very charitable.

I'd say the article makes a pretty explicit case for why the general thesis of the book does not hold, which makes your comment stand out as comparatively superficial whataboutism

I've had pretty brutal body pain my whole adult life, I saw a lot of different flavours of skelatalmuscular therapy type folks over the years, you name it, I've had it. Around 6/7 years ago I was under a lot of stress with work, some particularly intense interpersonal business stuff to work through and my body pain was at an all time high. I booked an appointment at a chiropractor near my office first thing in the morning the next day, the guy went to adjust me and then told me that I needed acupuncture first. I told him no because every time I have acupuncture I sob uncontrollably, not from pain, just from reasons I didn't understand, but that the person usually had to stop. He said exactly, I need acupuncture first. He took me to another room in his office, lights out, and stuck some needles in me, no crying, he said he needed to get me crying, moved needles around, found a spot, emotions exploded, crying. He moved the needle, more crying, deeper, deeper crying, he kept moving the needle till I thought all the needles would burst out of me from how deeply I wanted to cry but he told me not to be scared and I thought I was going to die. Anyway, he left me alone in that room for about 35 minutes while I wailed, I mean, awkwardly wailed. After everything started to calm inside me, I slowly started to be able to think again, and the thought that was there was the memory of the guy who sexually abused me when I was a kid, moving his hand off my hip. A bunch of muscles I didn't even know existed let go, and that was the best adjustment I've ever had by a mile. It was actually this experience that lead me to reading the body keeps score (Connie Zweig is good also if this kinda stuff interests you).

(Edit: someone emailed so for posterity, It was Steven Schram E 28th St NYC, no clue if he's still there it was some time ago.)

One of a couple varieties of books covered by the If Books Could Kill podcast is this category, the Surprising Truth That Explains Many Things type.

They do indeed seem to almost always be bullshit, including the very-popular ones (and including ones that get popular among crowds like HN)

I think you're headed in a helpful direction, but I'm looking for ways to narrow the phenomenon a little more. For example, yesterday I heard from my mom, who is not into technical things, that a lot of the Internet was down. She had heard it on the news. I didn't believe it at first because that information was surprising and clearly targeted at laypeople, but soon I learned it was true: AWS us-east-1 had major issues. So my doubt was unfounded. I'd like my doubts to be more accurate.

There's a book about that: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53317475-the-quick-fix

I agree, and one place I've observed this is in quantum physics. The double slit experiment is an experiment where you shine light through two slits, and instead of the expected two bands, it makes a wave-like interference pattern. This single experiment changed how we view all of physics. However, nearly every source targeted at laypeople claims that there is a variation where you can put a detector on one of the slits and it will show two bands. This is false.

One clue is that these claims never detail on what this "detector" is. There are various types of detectors, and instead of showing a two band pattern they show a single slit interference pattern. By not giving specifics, the claim becomes much harder to disprove. This may not be malicious though, as the source of the faulty claim is likely the miscommunication of a thought experiment proposed by Einstein. Einstein proved by thought experiment that any detector couldn't show an interference pattern, which is easily twisted into the incorrect claim that it does show the two band pattern that people initially expected.

Even with all that, it's simply hard to refute. Like you said, it requires rigorous technical arguments, specifically as the faulty claim didn't specify what kind of detector they use. So the layperson has to choose between <some detector makes shape you'd expect> and <multiple complex existing detectors makes different shape>.

In the end, to a layperson, it wouldn't even seem to be all that important. And yet, almost all of the misunderstandings people have about quantum physics come from this one faulty claim. This claim makes it seem like some objects have quantum behavior, and some don't, and that you can change an object from quantum to non-quantum by detecting it. When in reality, all objects have quantum behavior, we just don't usually notice it.

>I've been playing with the hypothesis that if information is controversial/surprising and targeted at laypeople, it is almost guaranteed to be misleading or outright false.

Don't forget the red flag of "Makes me feel better about myself or my situation." Especially if it implies one's superiority over others.

I've often had the experience of reading an article and thinking, "This says people with quality X are, against common sense, actually better at Y. Hey, I have quality X! Aw, rats. This is probably bunk and I'm too flattered to see the errors."

What sucks is when the information wasn't necessarily misleading, but still overwhelmingly misleads people.

Now you understand where the "Wise man under the mountain" trope comes from.

Beside the burden of knowledge and understanding, there is an even higher burden of bringing your knowledge to the laypeople, which is the most thankless, dangerous and tedious undertaking possible.

Yet it is also the most noble, as it drives civilization forward.

In many cases it's insurmountable.

Was this after you and two zany friends made a scheme to divert a fraction of a penny from each of your employer's transactions into a bank account that you control? And then you gave it all back but the building burned down and Milton made off with the cash?

What job did you switch to? Are you happy with the change?

Took a gap year at 26, farming. I’m not surprised that I got superlean. But for the first time since I was 13, I didn’t eat my words. My stress went down, but I could finally spell out words with full vowels (I usually just say the consonants). I’m also generally low self-esteem, low recognition, low hope, and for a short time I was easily dating, hopeful and it was easy to take strong decisions.

Your one piece of anecdata is not proof of anything at the population level.

Please stop with the fallacy that what appears to be true for you is also true for everyone else.

edit: I weep for the ignorance present here. I may be done with HN.

Best comment by far. The post suffers from making good points about the lack of rigor and narrative nature of the book, but then does exactly the same thing to claim the opposite conclusion the book makes.

I agree.

As I read this I kept thinking that it seemed too skeptical to be rationally critical. Which isn't necessarily an improvement over the book.

My intuition (I know, that isn't better than the book or this post) is that there's truth in both places, and we'd ultimately land somewhere in the middle if we had access to the truth.

This touches on the nature vs nurture problem, wherein there never seems to be a clear victor and the answer seems to be that both play a role depending on what you're measuring. It's also very difficult to say how the chicken and egg scenario unravels, since we don't know what's the chicken and what's the egg, so to speak. The author seems to think they know—confidently as you mentioned—but it's abundantly murky to me.

I suppose we need confident people pushing in all directions to help us look more deeply in places and ways we otherwise might not. But wow, it gets tiring to see such unapologetic bias in scientific contexts. I admittedly stopped reading just passed the half way point and should probably keep most of my opinions about it to myself.