And why that matters more than it sounds, when you're trying to tell if you're actually healing.
You are sitting in the living room. Nothing is happening. Someone says an ordinary sentence, about nothing at all, and within a second your shoulders are already up near your ears, your breath has moved high into your chest, and your stomach has tightened as if someone raised a hand at you. Nothing happened outside you. Inside your body, everything just happened.
You know this feeling if you have ever done body work, breathwork, somatic therapy, or ceremony. And most people learn to read it the same way: there is something old and stored in there, and if you press the right spot, it will finally come out. The body keeps the score of what the mind forgot. I said that sentence for years myself, and I still work through the body in every session I hold.
But new research published this year offers a different reading. And I think it matters most for anyone who has been through a round or two of body work without the relief it promised.
There are two possible pictures of what is happening in the body. In one, the pain sits stored somewhere, like a file in a locked drawer, and if you find the right drawer and open it, it will finally be over. In the other, there is no drawer at all. There is a brain that learned to predict danger, and it is constantly checking the body to confirm that prediction.
A team led by Steven Kotler, together with Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox and Karl Friston, published a paper this year in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience that directly challenges the metaphor of "the body keeps the score," the one underneath most of the popular imagery around trauma in the body. Their argument: the racing heart, the tight chest, the shallow high breath, all of it is real and measurable, but none of it is proof that something is stored. It is the output of a brain that learned to expect danger, and reads every signal from the body as confirmation of that forecast.
On the source and its limits: the paper by Kotler, Mannino, Fox and Friston is a theoretical opinion piece, not an empirical study, published in April 2026. The authors themselves state that their central claim, about reduced neural "metastability" in post traumatic states, has not yet been directly tested in clinical samples. Separately, a 2025 review by researcher Michael Scheeringa in BJPsych Bulletin examined 122 claims from Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score and found recurring problems in how the evidence was presented. Both pieces raise real questions about the popular metaphor, but neither is a final scientific verdict. Kotler, Mannino, Fox & Friston, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2026.
If the body stores, the goal is to empty it out: find the spot, release it, be done. If the body responds to a forecast, the goal is completely different: retrain the system on what it should expect. This is not a wording issue. It decides what actually happens in the room.
And it also explains something I have seen in a lot of people I have worked with, and in myself. You come out of a session cracked open, with shaking and crying and real release, and it feels like enormous progress. Then you go back into the same situation in your life, and the exact same thought shows up at three in the morning, just like before. If the assumption was emptying, that is a failure. If the assumption is learning, that is exactly what you would expect: the discharge in the body does not teach anything on its own, unless it is paired with a new experience in real time, not just a feeling that got released.
Body work has not become worthless. It just does something different than we thought. When you breathe deep while the body is in high gear, when you move while it is frozen, when you feel safe touch while it is on high alert, you are not emptying a container. You are giving your system a new experience right at the moment it most resembles the old one, and that is what updates the forecast. That is why repetition is not a technicality. Updating a prediction does not happen in one big session. It happens again and again, until the body stops expecting threat as its default.
The signal check, a two minute exercise
When something in your body flares with no clear outside cause:
When to stop: if the sensation does not settle after a few rounds, or real flooding shows up, that is not a moment to practise alone. That is a moment to reach out to someone.
Healing is not emptying the container. It is the new habit the body learns after it has felt.
If you recognise yourself in this: round after round of body work, real relief inside every session, and the exact same spot in your life afterward, what might be missing is not another session, but the part that gives the experience words and meaning while the body is still inside it. That is the moment to add conversation to the body work, not to replace it.
And if your body work does come with real change in your life, not just momentary relief, you are exactly on track, and none of this needs to change what you are doing. Both sides are real, and this is not a test you pass or fail.
I work one on one and with couples, on Zoom from anywhere in the world, and in person around Lisbon and Sintra. My work is somatic and focused: not only talking about the pattern, but catching it live in the body as it happens, and giving it words and meaning in real time. Full details on the coaching page.
It absolutely does. The difference is in the interpretation. A trigger is not a memory escaping a locked drawer, it is a danger prediction the brain is re-running. Both feel identical in the body, which is exactly why they are so easy to confuse.
Because it gives your system a new experience right at the moment it looks most like the old one. That is not emptying a container, it is relearning, and relearning needs repetition rather than one big session.
No. This is a theoretical opinion paper, not a trial, and the authors themselves say plainly that their central claim has not yet been directly tested. It is a proposed alternative framework, not a final verdict.
If the sensation does not settle after a few rounds of the exercise, if it keeps returning with more intensity, or if you flood into a state you cannot exit on your own. Those are signs for supported work, not for one more attempt alone.
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