The Body Keeps the Score by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Few books in the last decade have done more to shift the public conversation about trauma, pain, and healing than this one. As of early 2026, The Body Keeps the Score has spent 376 weeks — nearly seven years — on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction. Painpsychologycenter That kind of staying power doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a book is telling people something they recognize as true.
What the Book Is About
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world's foremost experts on trauma, spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers' capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. BJGP Life
Drawing on more than thirty years at the forefront of research and clinical practice, van der Kolk shows that the terror and isolation at the core of trauma literally reshape both brain and body — and explores new treatment paths that activate the brain's natural neuroplasticity to rewire disturbed functioning and rebuild the ability to know what you know and feel what you feel. Barnes & Noble
Why It Matters for Chronic Pain
The connection between trauma and chronic pain is one of the most important — and most overlooked — dynamics in the healing journey. Many people living with persistent pain carry unprocessed experiences that the nervous system has never had the chance to resolve. This book helps explain why.
It's also no coincidence that Richard Schwartz, the originator of Internal Family Systems Therapy, called it "a watershed book that will be remembered as tipping the scales within psychiatry and the culture at large toward the recognition of the toll traumatic events and our attempts to deny their impact take on us all." Amazon
Van der Kolk explores innovative treatments — from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga — that offer new paths to recovery, and exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal. BJGP Life
A Note on Nuance
Like all ambitious books covering complex science, The Body Keeps the Score has generated both tremendous praise and some academic debate about specific claims. We recommend it not as a clinical manual, but as a powerful entry point — a compassionate, science-informed framework for understanding how the body holds what the mind cannot always express. Read it with curiosity and openness, and let it be part of a broader conversation.
