Hey {{ first_name | Reader }},
Two years in.
You have journalled, breathed, shaken, tapped and lain on a table while somebody pressed under your ribs and asked what came up.
You are no better.
You said so out loud, and you were told the trauma sits “deeper than anyone thought”, and that “healing is not linear.”
I want to talk about these sentences, because a paper published in April explains why it can never be wrong.
The paper is Kotler, Mannino, Fox and Friston (2026), in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. Karl Friston is one of the most cited neuroscientists working today.
Let’s set your expectations first: Frontiers files it as an Opinion article. Read it as an argument rather than a result. But the headline is pointed - ‘The Body Does Not Keep The Score’. And the implication is that we have been getting trauma healing wrong, as the body cannot store trauma.
The argument starts with plumbing. Muscle, fascia and connective tissue have no mechanism for storing an experience or trauma. What persists after trauma is a prediction error. Essentially, your brain runs a continuous guess about what happens next and checks it against signals coming up from your body: heart rate, breath, gut, muscle tension.
After trauma, it starts weighing its danger predictions too heavily. A racing heart stops reading as arousal and starts reading as proof the threat has returned. In this loop, the body is a messenger rather than an archive.
Now listen to their description of what happens to a person’s attention. Threat expectations come to dominate the search for sensory evidence of danger, and ordinary interoceptive noise gets read as confirmation instead of noise. They call the result circular inference. The brain predicts pain, senses arousal and takes the arousal as proof the pain is still there.
Think about what that does in a therapy session.
“Get out of your head.”
“Stop analysing.”
“Drop into the body and notice what is present.”
You will, of course, notice something. There is always a tight chest, a held jaw, a knot under the sternum, a flutter that arrives the moment you go looking for it. Listen hard enough, and it delivers, because attention is the thing that raises the weighting of a signal. You will always find trauma symptoms even when they are not there.
This leaves you with a theory no outcome can touch. Feel worse, and the emotional material is surfacing. Feel nothing, and you are dissociated from your body. Improve, and the trauma release worked. Fail to improve for two years, and you’re told it is buried deeper than we thought, or that healing is not linear, and you are being impatient with a slow process. Question any of it, and that is your defences talking.
Every branch confirms the model of traditional therapy. This goes some way to explaining why we have more people in treatment for mental health issues than ever, and mental health statistics continue to get worse. AKA ‘The Treatment Prevalance Paradox’.
So who is this being sold to?
Most people who live through something genuinely traumatic do not develop chronic post-traumatic dysfunction. Galatzer-Levy, Huang and Bonanno reviewed 54 studies that tracked people over time after potentially traumatic events.
The most common pattern by a wide margin was steady, low distress throughout, averaging around 65.7%. The chronic pattern, the one that looks like textbook PTSD, averaged around 10.6% (Galatzer-Levy, Huang and Bonanno, 2018). Those are separate averages across the studies that found each pattern, not slices of one pie, so nobody should stack them.
Recovery is the ordinary outcome.
Chronic dysfunction is the exception.
That roughly one in ten is who I want protected here.
Chronic post-traumatic dysfunction is serious; it responds to proper clinical treatment, and none of what follows is aimed at the people within that 10%.
We’re left with a very large group being told that the reason they feel flat, anxious, stuck or exhausted is stored trauma. Yet the base rate says most of them do not have any. So we have people saying trauma healing is so hard; that’s why we have the Treatment Prevalence Paradox. When in fact, people are not getting better after they enter treatment because they are treating a condition they don’t have.
So how did the category get so big? Nick Haslam named the process in 2016 as “Concept Creep.”
Sven Speerforck and colleagues caught Concept Creep working in a lab. Participants judged which statements described mental illness. As the researchers reduced how often obviously severe symptoms appeared, those same participants began classifying milder, more ambiguous statements as mental illness (Speerforck et al., 2024). Shrink the supply of clear cases and the definition grows to refill it.
My read, and tell me if I have this wrong, {{ first_name | Reader }}, is we took an explanation built for the one in ten and sold it to everybody. But we weren't done yet. Then, we built an industry on a mechanism that does not exist. Someone with an ordinary hard life and an ordinary low mood gets told the answer is lodged deep in their tissue. They spend two years and several thousand pounds looking for it.
Three groups pay that bill.
The people who never had trauma and lost years to treatment for a condition they do not have.
The people who do have it, whose need is now harder to hear over everybody else’s.
Thirdly, when someone gets told they have trauma, they go looking for someone to pin the blame for it on. And most commonly that is parents.
If the problem is a prediction weighted too heavily, the fix is evidence against that prediction, delivered again and again, in a body that stays safe while it happens.
Exposure does that.
Breathwork does that.
Exercise, cold water and skilled therapy do that.
What they do not do is drain anything out of you. And better yet, you do not need a buried injury for any of them to help.
My upcoming book is almost ready to hit shelves, and is built on this very argument and research. It should be out at the end of next month, and you can sign up for the waitlist here.
Hold steady,
Richard
New Podcast Episode
I was featured on the Embodiment Coaching Podcast discussing breathwork, where the hype is fair and where it falls down.
P.S. The Friston paper is open access and readable in twenty minutes. Click here to read it for yourself.
And if you have spent money on somatic trauma work and it genuinely helped you, hit reply and tell me about it. I would rather hear that than not.
References
Galatzer-Levy, I.R., Huang, S.H. and Bonanno, G.A. (2018) ‘Trajectories of resilience and dysfunction following potential trauma: a review and statistical evaluation’, Clinical Psychology Review, 63, pp. 41–55. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2018.05.008
Haslam, N. (2016) ‘Concept creep: psychology’s expanding concepts of harm and pathology’, Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418
Haslam, N. (2022) ‘The Body Keeps the Score: how a bestselling book helps us understand trauma, but inflates the definition of it’, The Conversation. Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-body-keeps-the-score-how-a-bestselling-book-helps-us-understand-trauma-but-inflates-the-definition-of-it-184735 (Accessed: 16 August 2026).
Kotler, S., Mannino, M., Fox, G. and Friston, K. (2026) ‘The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability’, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 20, 1812957. doi: 10.3389/fnsys.2026.1812957
Ormel, J., Hollon, S.D., Kessler, R.C., Cuijpers, P. and Monroe, S.M. (2022) ‘More treatment but no less depression: the treatment-prevalence paradox’, Clinical Psychology Review, 91, 102111. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2021.102111
Speerforck, S., Jürgensen, V., Göbel, M., Meyer, N. and Schomerus, G. (2024) ‘“Concept creep” in perceptions of mental illness: an experimental examination of prevalence-induced concept change’, European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience. doi: 10.1007/s00406-023-01737-0
Van der Kolk, B.A. (2014) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Viking