By Abi Beri
Half a sentence
If you’ve ever read Bessel van der Kolk’s book, or come across the phrase the body keeps the score in a therapy room or a wellness post, you’ll know it has changed something fundamental about how we think about trauma and the body. The contribution was monumental.
It has also, almost as a side effect, left a lot of people convinced that the body is a permanent archive. That the marks are indelible. That you are, in your tissues, in your nervous system, in your reflexes, a kind of walking record of everything that has hurt you.
That framing is half a sentence. The doom-half has been bigger than the cultural appetite for the rest. This piece says the rest. The body keeps the score. And the body also keeps hope. The body holds the record, and the body holds the route home. These are not in tension. They are the same proposition, looked at from two sides.
What the original argument actually was
Van der Kolk and his colleagues, working with combat veterans and survivors of abuse, kept noticing that trauma symptoms didn’t live in the cognitive part of the brain. They lived in the body. In hyperarousal. In numbness. In flashbacks that arrived as sensation, not as story. In autonomic patterns that didn’t respond to insight.
The argument was that to heal trauma, you had to include the body — because the body was where the record had been laid down. That argument was correct. It opened the door for somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, EMDR, and the whole field of bottom-up trauma work. It is one of the most important reframings of how we work with suffering in the last fifty years.
What it never said, and was never meant to say, was that the body was a permanent prison. That argument got added later, by the algorithm and by a wellness register that finds permanent damage easier to sell than slow repair. Doom is more shareable than process. Always has been.
What the doom framing costs
The doom framing tells you that your nervous system has been shaped by what happened, that the patterns are stored, and that healing is, at best, a careful management of an essentially damaged system. Wounded inner child. Traumatised nervous system. Broken attachment. Each phrase is technically accurate. Together, in the register the wellness internet uses them, they form a story in which the listener is fundamentally compromised.
That story has consequences. People who absorb it tend to come to therapy expecting to spend years excavating damage. They tend to interpret good days as exceptions and bad days as evidence of the underlying pattern. They tend to make slower progress — because the nervous system listens to the story we tell about it, and a story of essential brokenness is itself a form of activation.
What the body actually does
The body is not primarily an archive. The body is primarily a process. It is continuously, every second, doing things. Repairing tissue. Replacing cells. Updating its model of the world. The body of one year ago is not the body of today.
Yes, the body holds patterns. Trauma patterns are stubborn because they were laid down during high-arousal states and the system, sensibly, doesn’t want to forget what nearly hurt it. But stubbornness is not permanence. Plasticity is not a wellness slogan. It’s a basic feature of how nervous tissue works.
Researchers have spent decades showing that nervous systems can be rewired. Not back to a hypothetical pre-trauma state — that’s not how this works. But forward, into new patterns. The old patterns can become inactive. New connections, formed through repeated experience, can become the new default. The same plasticity that made you vulnerable also makes you capable.
What hope looks like in the body
Hope, in the body, is not optimism. It’s not positive thinking. It’s a particular kind of micro-movement, a faint forward-orientation that you start to notice once you know what you’re looking for.
It’s the way someone who has been collapsed in a freeze response, after months of careful work, lifts their gaze and looks toward the window. Hope expressed as a movement of bone and tissue.
It’s the way someone whose breath has lived high in the chest for decades suddenly takes a breath that goes lower, almost without noticing. The diaphragm has released a fraction. Hope as a movement of muscle.
It’s the way an arm, in a session, will sometimes lift on its own, reaching toward another person, after years of having lived contracted close to the body. Hope as a reach. Hope as the un-shrinking of the soft tissue around the shoulder.
These movements are tiny. They are also data. The body is not actually committed to the score it kept. The body would prefer, given any plausible opportunity, to put the score down.
What hope requires
Hope, in the body, requires certain conditions to land. It doesn’t appear because we tell ourselves to be hopeful. It appears because something in the present moment has been different enough, safe enough, consistent enough, for the body to risk a small experiment.
The first condition is consistent enough safety. Not perfect safety — nobody gets that. Reasonably consistent safety in a relationship, an environment, a body, that allows the system to spend more time out of threat than in it.
The second is regulated company. A nervous system that knows how to be in ventral vagal, in your presence, regularly. Therapy provides this professionally. Some friendships, partnerships, animals, and communities provide it more informally.
The third is willingness to be patient. To work in body-time rather than wellness-influencer-time.
The fourth, perhaps most underrated, is the absence of constant re-traumatisation. There are bodies doing their best to heal in environments that keep injuring them — hostile workplaces, chronic financial pressure, abusive families. Those bodies are not failing. Their environments are.
A practice you can try now
Turn your head, very slowly, toward something in your environment that is genuinely pleasant. A window. A plant. A photograph of someone you love. Don’t strain. Just slowly let your head and eyes orient toward something good.
Notice what happens. Maybe nothing observable. Maybe your breath shifts a fraction. Maybe your shoulders soften. Maybe your gaze lingers slightly longer than expected.
That small movement — the orientation toward the good — is what Stephen Porges and others have called the orienting response. It’s also, in the body’s language, the beginning of hope. The system has decided, for this moment, that the world contains something worth looking at.
Practise that. Several times a day, slowly turn toward something good. Don’t make it a discipline. Make it a noticing. Over weeks, the practice teaches the body that the world is worth orienting toward.
The line worth keeping
The body keeps the score because the body is paying attention. The same attention that recorded the harm is recording, right now, the safety. The same plasticity that took on the trauma is taking on the present moment.
The body is not on a one-way trip away from wholeness. The body is in constant negotiation with its environment, and the new inputs are landing whether you notice them or not. The work of healing is not the heroic excavation of past damage. It is the consistent provision of present-moment safety. It is showing up, again and again, in conditions that allow the body to take small risks.
It is slow. It is often boring. It rarely makes for compelling content. But it is what works. And the body, given anything like a fair chance, will tend toward repair.
What changes
People who hold both halves of the sentence together make decisions differently. The decision to apply for the job, to say yes to the connection, to take the trip, becomes possible because they’re no longer waiting to be healed enough first.
They forgive themselves more. Bad days stop being indictments. Setbacks stop being evidence of essential brokenness. They start to see their patterns as features of a system in motion, not as the unalterable architecture of who they are.
And they relate to their history differently. Not as a permanent injury they have to honour through ongoing damage, but as a chapter that shaped them and is over. The shape it gave them, including the difficult parts, becomes integrated rather than worshipped. Which is, in the end, what healing actually looks like — not the absence of history, but its incorporation.
Hold both halves
If this piece has unsettled the doom framing for you, hold both halves. The body keeps the score. The body also keeps hope. The same body, the same plasticity, the same exquisite attention to what’s happening, can go in either direction depending on what you put in front of it.
Your job is not to fight the body. Your job is to give it conditions in which it can lean toward the second half.
About Abi Beri
Abi Beri is an Integrative Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator, and Nervous System Specialist. He works with clients in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge, and online worldwide. IPHM accredited.
