Something has shifted in the conversation around somatic trauma work. The frameworks that many therapists — and millions of readers — have found genuinely illuminating are under serious academic scrutiny. Polyvagal theory has been challenged by neuroanatomists. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score has faced pointed criticism from researchers who argue its evidence base is thinner than its cultural reach implies. These are not fringe critiques. They deserve a considered response.
This is mine.
What the critics are actually saying
The critique of polyvagal theory, developed by neuroscientist Stephen Porges, centres on specific neuroanatomical claims. In early 2026, a group of 39 researchers in psychophysiology, autonomic neuroscience and comparative physiology published a formal evaluation arguing that several core biological claims of polyvagal theory are untenable in their current form, particularly challenging whether respiratory sinus arrhythmia reliably measures vagal activity, and whether the evolutionary hierarchy Porges proposes between dorsal and ventral vagal pathways holds up across species.
This is a genuine scientific debate. It is also, it should be said, a debate that Porges has engaged with directly. In recent publications and interviews, he has emphasised that many critiques conflate polyvagal theory with “polyvagal inspired practices” or misapply the theory beyond its intended scope. Porges notes that the theory is a conceptual model, not a measurement system.
The criticism of van der Kolk’s work runs along different lines. A 2025 commentary in the BJPsych Bulletin synthesised the evidentiary basis for the book’s central claims, that trauma causes lasting neurobiological damage and that body-based treatments are uniquely effective, arguing these have been widely embraced but seldom subjected to systematic critical evaluation. Some researchers have gone further, suggesting the book is, at best, neuro-reductionistic, and at worst, distorts findings and overstates the case for somatic approaches at the expense of well-evidenced treatments.
These critiques are worth taking seriously. Science should be held to its own standard.
What the critics miss
The problem with the social media sippets of this date is that it conflates two distinct questions. The first is whether specific neuroanatomical claims hold up under scrutiny. The second is whether working with the body in trauma therapy is clinically valuable.
These are not the same question, and collapsing them does a disservice to the people sitting in therapy rooms.
Here is what I see as a practitioner trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a lineage developed by Pat Ogden that draws on somatic psychology, attachment theory, and neuroscience: the body is not a filing cabinet for memories. It is not that trauma is physically stored in muscle tissue the way data is stored on a hard drive. That framing, which is, again how social media can characterise it, is an oversimplification that deserves scrutiny.
But what the body is is the primary site of implicit memory. And that distinction matters enormously.
Implicit memory and the body as access route
Explicit memory is the memory you can narrate. It has a timeline, a beginning and an end, a story you can tell. Implicit memory operates differently. It is procedural, sensory, somatic, the memory of how something felt rather than what happened. It does not require conscious recall to be active. This memory is a felt sense that shapes posture, breathing, muscular tension, and the quality of attention long after the event that created it has passed from conscious awareness.
Janina Fisher, whose work on trauma and parts continues to shape somatic practitioners, draws a precise distinction between implicit sensory fragments, the emotional and physical texture of an experience, and procedural survival habits, the automatic behavioural responses the nervous system learned under conditions of threat. Both operate below conscious narrative. Both express themselves through the body.
Dr. Arielle Schwartz, writing on preverbal and implicit memory, notes that our earliest experiences are encoded entirely implicitly, through limbic systems that are functional from birth, long before language or narrative are available. The body is not storing these experiences as memories in any conventional sense. It is carrying the shape of what it learned about safety, connection, and survival in its most formative period.
This is not a fringe idea. It is well-established in memory research, rooted in the work of figures like Daniel Siegel on memory systems. The body is not where the memory is stored, it is where the memory speaks. The nervous system carries patterns of activation laid down under conditions of threat, and those patterns can be accessed somatically in ways that verbal processing alone does not always reach.
In Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, we work with this directly.
What this looks like in practice
Consider a client who presents with complex responses medical procedures, perhaps something that can seem disproportionate to observers but makes complete sense once you understand its origin. In the room, contact with healthcare settings can trigger an overwhelm that floods the body in the present moment: a tightening through the arms, a bracing in the chest. These are not dramatic expressions. They are involuntary, and, to the client, often confusing. There is no conscious memory being accessed. What is present is an implicit memory of loss of control, of being held down or overridden, woven through with an older attachment wound: the experience of being left alone because of illness, of care arriving inconsistently or not at all.
The body is not keeping score in the sense of storing a recorded event. It is replaying a learned pattern of protection, one that made complete sense once, and that the nervous system has not yet received permission to update.
This is not mysticism. It is not pseudoscience. It is careful, present-focused, somatically-informed clinical work, guided by what the body makes available, not by a theory of memory storage.
The shame that often accompanies these events — why me, it must be my fault — is a separate layer, and an equally important one. It requires a different quality of attention: relational, exploratory, slow. Understanding the value of that shame as a strategy, how it served the client’s system in a childhood home where to question felt dangerous, is work that happens through the therapeutic relationship, not through the body alone. The body is the trail-head, it is not the whole hike.
A more honest conversation
The debate around polyvagal theory and van der Kolk’s work is a useful corrective to the tendency in popular wellness culture to treat evocative frameworks as settled science. That corrective is welcome.
What it cannot do is invalidate the clinical reality that working somatically, carefully, ethically, within a well-trained framework, reaches something that other approaches sometimes don’t. Not because the body stores memories like a database, but because the body is always present in the room in a way that cognition sometimes isn’t.
The score is not kept in the body. But the body remembers the music.
If this kind of thinking resonates with you, Body Dispatch is a fortnightly letter from Psych Body — somatic and psychological research, translated into language you actually recognise in your own life. Subscribe at thepsychbody.com. And if you’re curious about what somatic work actually looks like, the free guide is a starting point — also at thepsychbody.com.