The core thesis of TBKTS is self-evidently true. Thoughts and emotional experiences can be encoded in the body in self-perpetuating ways that operate outside conscious thought and persist long after the event.
Consider something as simple as a limp that persists after the acute injury has healed. A sharp pain from a sprained ankle quickly teaches the body to discover a new pattern that avoids the pain. They weight different toes. The hips shift. The stride shortens and becomes less symmetrical. People chose different paths on uneven ground. Etc. But once healed, there is no corresponding salient "I'm healed" signal to prompt the body back to a more neutral posture. People will complain of their chronically aching hip, or back. When they try to run, it feels weird. If you try to force them to move in a certain way, they will refuse. Posture and movement planning are highly stylized in a complicated organism like humans, and nobody should be surprised when there are feedback loops and meta-stable attractors there.
I don't need to use loaded words like "trauma" and "therapy" to explain this.
There are simple facts. Thoughts can raise or lower the heart-rate. Bracing the body can restrict breathing. Shallow breathing changes the acidity of the blood which then activates the sympathetic system which changes thinking. Psychologists really do fix many panic attacks by teaching people to consciously manage their breathing. TBKTS takes this to 11.
That said, the many assertions about the specific mechanisms by which "trauma" is encoded in the body, and the paths by which they feed back into current thoughts and feelings are more speculative. Some are at best premature, and at worst absolute bullshit like so much of the psych literature.
The value of the book is in the thesis, not the long argument.
Consider something as simple as a limp that persists after the acute injury has healed. A sharp pain from a sprained ankle quickly teaches the body to discover a new pattern that avoids the pain. They weight different toes. The hips shift. The stride shortens and becomes less symmetrical. People chose different paths on uneven ground. Etc. But once healed, there is no corresponding salient "I'm healed" signal to prompt the body back to a more neutral posture. People will complain of their chronically aching hip, or back. When they try to run, it feels weird. If you try to force them to move in a certain way, they will refuse. Posture and movement planning are highly stylized in a complicated organism like humans, and nobody should be surprised when there are feedback loops and meta-stable attractors there.
I don't need to use loaded words like "trauma" and "therapy" to explain this. There are simple facts. Thoughts can raise or lower the heart-rate. Bracing the body can restrict breathing. Shallow breathing changes the acidity of the blood which then activates the sympathetic system which changes thinking. Psychologists really do fix many panic attacks by teaching people to consciously manage their breathing. TBKTS takes this to 11.
That said, the many assertions about the specific mechanisms by which "trauma" is encoded in the body, and the paths by which they feed back into current thoughts and feelings are more speculative. Some are at best premature, and at worst absolute bullshit like so much of the psych literature.
The value of the book is in the thesis, not the long argument.