The memory of trauma acts like a splinter in the mind — it is the body’s response to the foreign object that becomes the problem rather than the object itself. Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma is still going on. Every new encounter is contaminated by the past in an endless loop.
Simple Picture
ELI5: your body has a smoke alarm. After a fire, the alarm gets stuck on. Now it goes off when you make toast. You cannot reason with the alarm. You cannot explain to it that there is no fire. The alarm does not speak the language of reason. It speaks the language of the body — and the body keeps the score.
Trauma Is Universal
Even emotional withdrawal — not violence, not abuse, but a mother’s emotional absence — can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation. Research at Harvard found that a mother’s emotional withdrawal had the most profound and long-lasting impact — more than hostile or intrusive behavior.
If your caregivers regularly ignore your needs, you learn to anticipate rejection. You cope by blocking out their hostility or neglect and acting as if it does not matter. But the body keeps the score: it remains in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment. This is running-on-empty confirmed by neuroscience — the absence is harder to see and harder to heal than the presence of something bad.
Not only is attention deficit a common symptom of trauma, but so is hyperfocus. They can both be forms of dissociation — an attempt to escape the present moment. Even those who find it easy to “be productive” are not immune.
The Loss of Aliveness
The overall effect of trauma is a loss in the feeling of aliveness, motivation, excitement, and purpose.
Brain scans of chronic PTSD patients show almost no activation in the self-sensing areas. The patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings that accompany and define terror. But those same areas are responsible for the entire range of emotions and sensations that form self-awareness. In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they had also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.
This is depression at the neurological level, dissociation made visible: the departure of mind from body into a fantasy of its own creation. Suppressing core feelings takes a tremendous amount of energy, leaving less for meaningful goals, making you feel bored and shut down. Deadness is a low-intensity form of suffering — and van der Kolk shows exactly how the deadness is manufactured.
Traumatized people lose their sense of purpose because they cannot check in with themselves about what they truly want — as defined by the most basic sensations in their bodies, which are the basis of emotions like desire and passion. focusing is the operational antidote: contacting the body’s pre-verbal knowing. But for the traumatized person, the felt sense itself has been shut down.
Addiction to Trauma
Many traumatized people seek experiences that would repel most of us — even the very experience that traumatized them. They report a vague sense of emptiness and boredom when not angry, under duress, or in danger. Potentially dangerous situations make them feel alive because they have no internal sense of security.
This is desire-vs-love at the neurological level. The wound does not want love — it wants intensity. The inconsistent partner produces the same chemical relief as the war movie that lets veterans tolerate pain 30% longer. The system is calibrated for emergency, and calm reads as emptiness.
The Rational Brain Cannot Fix This
The rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality. When emotional and rational brains are in conflict, the battle plays out in visceral experience — gut, heart, lungs — not in the world of ideas.
Trauma is preverbal. During flashbacks, Broca’s area (the speech center) goes offline while visual and sensory regions light up. The trauma bypasses executive function, making it feel like intuitive truth — the way things are. This is why CBT has limited success with deep trauma: only one in three complete improvement, and most continue to have substantial problems.
This confirms what the-inner-game-of-tennis describes from the performance angle: Self 1 (the rational narrator) cannot fix what Self 2 (the body-mind) holds. And it is why IFS works through the body rather than through argument — meeting the exile where it is stuck, not lecturing it from above.
Van der Kolk identifies three treatment pathways:
- Top down — talking, connecting, processing. Necessary but limited for deep trauma.
- Medicines — shutting down inappropriate alarm reactions. Useful but does not address the cause.
- Bottom up — allowing the body to have experiences that viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse. This includes yoga, EMDR, neurofeedback, theatre, MDMA-assisted therapy.
The bottom-up path is where the real transformation happens. The body learned the trauma. The body must unlearn it.
The Splinter and the Cage
The trauma memory is not stored as coherent narrative but as disorganized fragments of images, sounds, and chaotic physical sensations. Ordinary memory is social and adaptive — it can be reorganized for retelling. Traumatic memory is inflexible, frozen in time, always lonely, humiliating, and alienating.
This is the thorn with neurological precision: the samsara is a blockage, an unfinished energy pattern. The traumatized loop stabilizes around the fragmented memory and resists reorganization. The locally-optimal strategy — organizing life to avoid triggering the fragments — works for its narrow purpose but consumes the energy that would otherwise go toward living.
The kids who act out are at least given time and attention. But the ones who are simply blanked out don’t bother anybody and are left alone to lose their future bit by bit. This is the quiet tragedy: the visible trauma gets treated; the invisible trauma — the emotional withdrawal, the numbness, the child who just goes quiet — is the one that steals a lifetime.
The score the body keeps is also generational — it transmits below the layer where intentions live, which is why the adult child of trauma cannot inoculate their own unborn child through self-awareness alone. The bloodline ends names the specific refusal: declining to produce an inheritor because the marrow-level transmission cannot be un-written by softer words or better parenting. The dragon has seasons regardless of the hero’s intent — the score keeps playing, and only the choice of who hears it remains.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “just talk about your feelings and you’ll heal.”
The midwit take is “trauma is real but overpathologized — most people are resilient.”
The better take is that the body keeps the score whether you acknowledge it or not. Resilience is real, but so is the cost of appearing resilient while your nervous system runs on high alert. The person who “seems fine” may be the one most profoundly affected — because the strategy of seeming fine IS the trauma response, and its effectiveness is what makes it invisible.
Main Payoff
All of us, but especially children, need confidence — confidence that others will know, affirm, and cherish us. Without that we can’t develop a sense of agency that will enable us to assert: “This is what I believe in; this is what I stand for; this is what I will devote myself to.”
As long as we feel safely held in the hearts and minds of the people who love us, we will climb mountains and cross deserts and stay up all night to finish projects. Children and adults will do anything for people they trust and whose opinion they value. Without that holding, imagination collapses, and without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.
References:
- Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma