Psychological
The Body Keeps Every Receipt
Van der Kolk discovered that trauma isn’t stored as a narrative — it’s stored as sensation. Tightness, nausea, freezing, panic — all are echoes of the body’s original survival strategy replaying on loop.
The body keeps the score: if the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heart rate, and in the gut, then talking won’t fully heal it.— Bessel van der Kolk
The full breakdown — the context, the shift, and a question to sit with — opens in the Insights app.
The thinker
Trauma & Body Researcher
Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, known for his pioneering research on how trauma lives in the body.
Based on Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score (2014), summarised and reframed by Insights.
Part of these journeys
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