Reading Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score in 2026
Trauma, Black Identity, and the Politics of Feeling Safe
THE MIND is an ARCHIVE
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having to remain composed in environments that do not always make room for your vulnerability.
It is the exhaustion of anticipating rejection before entering a room, monitoring your tone to avoid being misunderstood, or learning to become so self-sufficient that asking for help feels like a personal failure. Sometimes, it looks like ambition. Sometimes, it looks like independence. And sometimes, it looks like being perfectly functional while quietly struggling to feel at ease in your own life.
Reading The Body Keeps the Score by psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk invites us to reconsider what we understand about trauma, emotional wellbeing, and the relationship between the mind and the body. First published in 2014, the book explores how traumatic experiences can affect the brain, body, memory, emotional regulation, and relationships long after a threatening experience has ended.
Its central premise is both scientific and deeply human: surviving something does not necessarily mean that we have recovered from it.
But in 2026, I find myself considering a question that extends beyond the individual psyche: What does healing mean when the conditions that produce fear and insecurity are not entirely in the past?
To explore that question, we must consider not only what trauma does to us, but also the environments in which we learn to survive, the identities through which we experience the world, and the conditions that make genuine safety possible.
THINK: Trauma Is More Than What Happened to Us
One of van der Kolk’s most compelling arguments is that trauma is not simply a memory of something terrible. It can influence how a person experiences the present.
A sound, facial expression, disagreement, or unfamiliar environment may activate a response that seems disproportionate to the immediate situation but makes sense in the context of earlier experiences.
As van der Kolk writes, “Being traumatized means continuing your life as if the trauma was still going on.”
This idea offers a useful framework for understanding why people may continue to struggle even after leaving an abusive relationship, surviving violence, or growing up and establishing lives of their own. The mind may recognize that circumstances have changed while the body continues to anticipate danger.
For some, this manifests as hypervigilance, irritability, and anxiety. For others, it appears as emotional numbness, withdrawal, difficulty trusting others, or an overwhelming need for control.
Yet these responses should not automatically be interpreted as personal deficiencies. They may be adaptations developed under difficult circumstances.
The person who struggles to trust may once have depended on someone who repeatedly betrayed them. The adult who finds rest uncomfortable may have grown up in a household where remaining alert was necessary. The individual who insists on doing everything alone may have learned early that their needs would not reliably be met by others.
What appears dysfunctional in one context may have once been protective in another.
This does not mean every difficulty can be explained by trauma, nor that our past determines our future. Trauma responses vary, and similar behaviors can have different causes. Rather, understanding trauma encourages us to approach human behavior with greater curiosity and less judgment.
Instead of asking only, “What is wrong with this person?” we might also ask, “What experiences taught this person to navigate the world this way?”
That shift matters because understanding a survival strategy is not the same as being condemned to repeat it.
It also invites us to reconsider what healing looks like. Recovery is not necessarily a matter of becoming a completely different person. Sometimes, it begins with recognizing the strategies that once helped us survive and asking whether those strategies still serve the lives we are trying to build.
The question is no longer simply how we learned to protect ourselves. It is whether we can learn to live without having to remain perpetually protected.
THE ARCHIVE: Who Gets to Feel Safe?
Van der Kolk’s discussion of trauma becomes particularly significant when considered alongside the histories and contemporary experiences of marginalized communities.
For Black Americans, the relationship between safety and the body cannot be separated entirely from the history of enslavement, racial terror, segregation, and exclusion. These histories shaped not only institutions and material conditions but also family structures, cultural expectations, and the ways successive generations have understood survival.
Historical and intergenerational trauma are important frameworks for examining these legacies, although their effects should not be assumed to be identical across individuals or families.
For Black Americans whose families have lived through generations of U.S. racial history, the legacy of racial violence and discrimination intersects with contemporary experiences of racism, unequal treatment, and the pressure to demonstrate competence in spaces where Blackness may be stereotyped or scrutinized.
For Black immigrants, including Haitians and Jamaicans, these dynamics can intersect with migration, language, cultural adaptation, economic insecurity, and the challenge of establishing belonging in a new country. Their experiences are not identical to those of Black Americans whose families have lived through generations of U.S. racial history. Nor are Black immigrant communities internally uniform. Nationality, class, colorism, gender, and immigration circumstances all shape how people experience the world.
Still, these different histories can illuminate a shared question: What happens when a person repeatedly encounters environments in which their dignity, credibility, or safety feels conditional?
The answer cannot be reduced to individual trauma alone. It also requires attention to the social conditions surrounding that person.
A Black professional who carefully monitors their speech and behavior at work may be responding to more than personal insecurity. A woman who remains alert to the possibility of harassment may be navigating risks that cannot be resolved through mindfulness alone. A transgender person who anticipates hostility when accessing healthcare or moving through public spaces may have legitimate reasons to question whether an environment is safe.
These examples are not interchangeable, and the experiences of marginalized groups should not be collapsed into a single narrative. What connects them is the broader question of how power, social expectations, and exposure to harm shape a person’s ability to feel secure.
The important distinction is that not every perception of danger is a trauma response, and not every danger is imagined.
This matters in conversations about racial trauma and Black mental health because psychological language can sometimes be used to individualize problems that are partly structural. A person who is persistently scrutinized, excluded, or discriminated against may experience stress that reflects the conditions they are navigating, rather than an inability to regulate their emotions.
Psychological healing can help people distinguish present threats from reminders of past ones. It cannot make discrimination disappear, eliminate material insecurity, or guarantee that hostile environments will become safe.
This is where the conversation about trauma must become a conversation about power.
If we focus exclusively on helping individuals regulate themselves, we risk asking marginalized people to become more comfortable enduring conditions that should change.
Emotional regulation matters, but so do workplace protections, accessible healthcare, economic stability, affirming communities, and institutions that treat people with dignity.
For Black communities, this means making room for conversations about mental health that acknowledge both personal experiences and the broader social realities in which those experiences occur. It means recognizing that coping strategies can be necessary without treating the conditions that make them necessary as inevitable.
It also means resisting the temptation to romanticize resilience when what people need is relief.
Healing should not become another demand placed on people who are already carrying too much.
FEEL: The Cost of Being Strong
Another theme that resonates throughout The Body Keeps the Score is the relationship between trauma, shame, and connection.
Van der Kolk describes how people who have experienced trauma may become disconnected from their bodies, their emotions, and the people around them. They may struggle to articulate what they feel or find themselves alternating between emotional overwhelm and numbness.
For many women, these experiences intersect with cultural expectations surrounding strength, caregiving, and emotional labor.
Cisgender women may be expected to remain accommodating, nurturing, and composed even when their own needs are neglected. Transgender women may face additional burdens associated with gender-based hostility, rejection, and the struggle to be recognized and respected. Neither group has a single, universal experience, but both deserve to have their individual circumstances taken seriously.
Similar expectations of endurance can shape Black communities, where resilience has historically been essential to surviving oppression.
Yet resilience, while valuable, can become complicated when it is treated as an obligation.
We celebrate the strong Black woman who carries everyone else. We admire the ambitious professional who never appears overwhelmed. We praise the person who turns hardship into achievement without asking what the transformation cost them.
We may even learn to measure our own worth by how little support we appear to need.
But what happens when strength becomes the only acceptable expression of pain?
What happens when being dependable means never being allowed to fall apart?
There is a difference between possessing resilience and being denied the opportunity to need support.
This distinction is especially important when we consider the relationship between trauma, ambition, and high-functioning adulthood. A person can be accomplished, disciplined, emotionally perceptive, and outwardly successful while still struggling with anxiety, shame, loneliness, or a persistent sense of unsafety.
Functioning is not the same as flourishing.
Nor does achievement necessarily resolve the emotional experiences that may have helped drive it. For some people, ambition becomes intertwined with a need to prove their worth, avoid criticism, or establish a sense of security through control and accomplishment. For others, ambition is simply a source of joy, purpose, and possibility. The distinction matters; not every achievement is an attempt to compensate for pain.
The question is whether our ambitions are creating room for us to live more fully or leaving us perpetually preoccupied with what we must do to remain worthy.
Van der Kolk’s emphasis on social connection offers an important counterpoint to the cultural glorification of self-sufficiency. Supportive relationships can help people develop a greater sense of safety and belonging. Crucially, support is not simply the presence of other people; it involves being heard, believed, and treated with care.
This distinction matters in families where emotional expression has historically been discouraged, workplaces where vulnerability is perceived as weakness, and communities where stigma can make seeking mental health care difficult.
Connection does not require us to share every detail of our pain with everyone. It requires environments in which honesty does not automatically threaten our dignity.
Perhaps one of the most meaningful forms of healing is discovering that we can be loved without performing strength, productivity, or perfection.
Perhaps it is also learning that our needs do not make us less capable, our boundaries do not make us less loving, and our willingness to receive support does not diminish everything we have learned to carry on our own.
BECOME: Healing Is Not a Solo Project
Van der Kolk explores several approaches to recovery, including trauma-focused psychotherapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), yoga, mindfulness, and activities that restore connection through movement and shared experience.
The broader lesson is that healing may involve more than intellectual understanding. Recognizing why we behave a certain way does not always change how we feel or respond.
Sometimes, we need to learn through experience that the present can be different from the past.
That process may involve therapy, supportive relationships, creative expression, movement, or the gradual development of boundaries and self-trust. Different people need different forms of support, and no single approach works for everyone.
It is also important to distinguish the book’s broader insights from the strength of evidence behind individual treatments.
The 2023 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense clinical practice guideline recommends several trauma-focused psychotherapies for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including cognitive processing therapy (CPT), prolonged exposure (PE), and EMDR. Other interventions may be helpful in particular circumstances, but their evidence and clinical recommendations vary. Treatment decisions should reflect an individual’s circumstances, needs, preferences, and professional guidance.
This distinction matters because a thoughtful conversation about trauma should neither overstate the evidence for a particular intervention nor imply that every person who struggles needs the same form of treatment.
The goal is not to prescribe a universal path to recovery. It is to expand our understanding of what recovery can involve.
For individuals, this may mean learning to recognize when an old fear is shaping a present decision. It may mean allowing trusted people to offer support rather than interpreting every need as a weakness. It may mean understanding that rest is not something we must earn through exhaustion.
It may also mean learning to distinguish self-protection from self-isolation, discernment from persistent suspicion, and a healthy desire for achievement from the belief that we must continually prove our worth.
These distinctions are not always easy to make, particularly when our habits have been reinforced over many years. They require patience, self-awareness, and, for some people, professional support.
For families and communities, healing may mean creating spaces where children can express distress without being immediately punished, where mental health care is accessible and culturally responsive, and where people are not shamed for seeking help.
For institutions, it means recognizing that individual coping strategies cannot substitute for equitable conditions.
A workplace cannot mindfulness its way out of discriminatory practices. A healthcare system cannot ask patients to become more emotionally resilient while dismissing their concerns. A community cannot meaningfully support mental health while treating vulnerability as a moral failure.
And for those of us interested in psychology, culture, and the ways people become who they are, it means resisting the temptation to separate the individual from the world that shaped them.
Healing is personal, but it is not exclusively private. It unfolds within relationships, communities, institutions, and material circumstances that can either support recovery or make it more difficult.
To become is not simply to improve ourselves. It is also to consider what kinds of environments allow us to live differently.
The Final Reflection: Becoming Safe Enough to Live
What I take from The Body Keeps the Score is not simply that the body remembers what the mind would prefer to forget. It is that our histories continue to influence how we encounter the world, often in ways we do not immediately recognize.
But the past is not the whole story.
People are more than their injuries, more than the systems that have constrained them, and more than the strategies they developed to survive. With appropriate support, they can develop new ways of relating to themselves and others. They can build lives that are not organized entirely around avoiding pain.
Still, healing should never require us to pretend that the world is safer than it is. For marginalized communities, recovery must make room for both inner work and the work of changing external conditions.
We need spaces where people can learn to regulate their emotions, but we also need relationships that do not continually destabilize them. We need individuals to reclaim their sense of agency, but we also need institutions that respect it. We need to understand the body’s responses to danger without forgetting that some dangers are real and ongoing.
Perhaps becoming is not about reaching a point where nothing hurts us anymore.
Perhaps it is about developing the capacity to recognize what has happened, understand what we need, seek connection without surrendering our boundaries, and imagine a future that is not merely a repetition of our past.
It is the possibility of becoming ambitious without being consumed by the need to prove ourselves. Of becoming independent without believing we must do everything alone. Of becoming softer without becoming less discerning. Of learning to receive care without experiencing it as a threat to our autonomy.
And perhaps, for some of us, it is the gradual discovery that a life can be built around more than the avoidance of disappointment, rejection, or harm.
The work is personal, but it is never exclusively personal.
We cannot always choose what shaped us. We can, however, begin to question what we have been taught to carry—and imagine what might become possible when survival is no longer the only thing we are living for.
THINK. FEEL. BECOME.
Ron The Universe, 2026