Body Keeps the Score

The Body Keeps the Score is the beautiful and suggestive title of a book published in 2014 by a Dutch professor of psychiatry at Boston University called Bessel van der Kolk. The book has proved immensely significant because it emphasizes an idea that has for too long escapes psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Van der Kolk stresses that people who are suffering emotionally are unlikely to do so just in their minds. Crucially, their symptoms almost always show up in their bodies and the way they sit or breathe. And how they hold their shoulders in their sleep patterns, in their digestion process, in the way they treat their spots, and in their attitude to excercise. Taking the body more seriously opens up new avenues for both the diagnosis and treatment of emotional unwellness, instead of simply seeing a person as a disembodied mind which must talk its way to a cure. A therapist is advised to see the body as a kind of score sheet of the emotional experiences that its owner has been through. A score sheet that should be read and attended to as carefully as many mental account.