Bessel van der Kolk: The body keeps the score, but which part of the body?

There is a finding in Bessel van der Kolk's work that I keep returning to, as it is so interesting and actually also an open end in his book about how the body stores trauma.

When his team scanned the brains of trauma survivors while those survivors were reliving what had happened to them, one particular region went quiet. Broca's area, the part of the brain that puts experience into words. The people in the scanner were in the middle of something overwhelming, and the machinery for describing it had gone offline.

He called it speechless terror, and it is one of the most honest things ever written about why change is so difficult.

Because if the part of us that speaks is the part that switches off under threat, then everything we have built around talking about our problems has a limit sitting inside it that no amount of skill can talk its way past.

What the book got right, and why it deserved its success

The Body Keeps the Score has sat on bestseller lists for years now, and I think it earned that in a way very few books in this field do.

Its central claim is simple and was, at the time, quietly radical. Trauma is not stored as a tidy story that we can retrieve and revise. It is stored as sensation, as posture, as heart rate, as the way the shoulders come up when a certain tone of voice enters a room. The event finished a long time ago. The body did not get the message.

From that claim, van der Kolk drew the practical conclusion that made the book matter. If the imprint lives in the body, then insight alone will not shift it, and the work has to reach the body somehow. He spent his career investigating what actually does that, from EMDR to yoga to neurofeedback to theatre, and he was willing to follow the results rather than his own preferences.

For coaches and therapists everywhere, the book gave permission to stop treating the body as the place where the real work shows up, and to start treating it as the place where the real work happens.

I have no argument with any of that. My question sits one layer underneath it.

The question Bessel van der Kolk opens and does not quite close

If the body keeps the score, which part of the body is doing the keeping? And what, precisely, is it keeping score of?

Because the body is not one thing, and it does not have one opinion. Modern neuroanatomy is fairly clear that we carry three complex neural networks, each capable of processing information, storing memory, and shaping behaviour before the thinking part is consulted.

There is brainpower in our heads, roughly 86 billion neurons, occupied with logic, language, prediction, and cause and effect. There is the heart, with its own network of some forty thousand neurons, described in the neurocardiology literature by Dr Armour and others, occupied almost entirely with connection, belonging, and what any change will cost us relationally. There is the gut, with over five hundred million neurons, mapped by Dr Gershon and known as the second brain, asking one question continuously, which is whether this is safe.

Three networks, three different jobs, three different kinds of score.

What each one is keeping score of

Once you look at it this way, the sentence changes from a poetic observation into something you can actually work with.

Your gut keeps score of safety. It remembers what happened last time, and it does not care whether the last time was thirty years ago or whether the situation has changed since. This is where the anticipatory dread lives, the churn before a conversation that logically ought to be simple, the body that will not walk into a room that the mind has already declared harmless.

Your heart keeps score of belonging. It remembers who turned away, who stopped calling, what it cost to be honest in a family where honesty was not welcome. This is where the reluctance lives, the version of us that will not ask for the pay rise because somewhere underneath it, asking has previously meant being seen as too much.

Your head keeps the story. It is the only one of the three that produces sentences, which is why it does most of the talking in a coaching session, and why the story it tells is so often a reasonable-sounding account constructed after the decision was already made somewhere else.

Read that way, van der Kolk's speechless terror finding stops being a curiosity and becomes the whole design problem. Under threat, the one network that can speak goes quiet, and the two that cannot speak take over. Then, afterwards, the speaking one comes back online and writes up a version of events it was not present for.

Why talking helps, and why it does not finish the job

This is the part I would want any coach to sit with, because it is not an argument against conversation.

Talking does a great deal. It builds the safety that lets a nervous system settle, it makes a pattern visible, and it gives a person the experience of being met, which is itself a heart-level intervention whether we name it that way or not.

What talking struggles to do is change a score that was never written in words. You may already have noticed this in your own room. The client understands the pattern completely. They can describe its origin, its function, its cost, sometimes more articulately than you can. They leave with a plan they believe in. Within a fortnight they are doing exactly what they were doing before.

That is not resistance, and it is not a lack of willingness. It is the gut voting quietly against a plan the head made without asking it.

What our own data shows

Across 5,575 completed 3 Brains assessments, in sixteen languages and forty-two countries, one pattern shows up more consistently than any other.

For 61% of people, the gut is the quietest of the three. Not the weakest, the quietest, the one scoring lowest of all. Only 17% come out anywhere near balanced across the three.

Which means that in roughly six out of ten people, the network whose entire job is to determine whether it is safe to move is the one being listened to least. It has usually learned to be quiet for good reasons, often a very long time ago, and it goes on keeping score regardless.

What changes in the room

When a coach knows which of the three is holding a pattern, the work stops being general and starts being specific.

A gut that has not felt safe needs safety accumulated slowly and in the body, not an argument about why the fear is irrational. A heart that is protecting a bond needs the cost of that bond named and honoured before anything is asked of it. A head that has concluded and will not reconsider needs the belief underneath the conclusion reached, and no amount of new information will do it.

The same insight, offered to the wrong one of the three, is politely received and quietly refused. You will have felt that happen. The insight was correct. The address was wrong.

This is what the 3 Brains framework adds to the ground van der Kolk opened. He established that the body keeps the score. What a coach then needs is a way of reading which part is holding the pen.

Where to start

If you would like to see your own pattern, the free 3 Brains Preference Test takes a few minutes and will show you which of the three has been leading, and which one has gone quiet.

3 Brains Dominance Test

And if you are a coach, therapist or leader who recognised your clients in the paragraphs above- the ones who understand everything and change nothing- that gap is exactly what the 3 Brains Coach Certification is built to work with. It carries 40 ICF CCEUs and 24 EMCC points, it runs live online in small cohorts, and the next ones start on 17 September, 8 October and 19 November 2026.

See the 3 Brains Coach Certification

I would love to read your thoughts, and have a beautiful week.

Christoffel

Source: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, 2014. Neuroimaging finding: Rauch, van der Kolk et al., Archives of General Psychiatry, 1996.

Frequently asked

What does "the body keeps the score" actually mean?

It means that overwhelming experience is stored physically rather than as a retrievable narrative, showing up as sensation, posture, heart rate and reflex long after the event has ended.

Why is talking about a problem often not enough to change it?

Under threat, the language centre of the brain reduces its activity, so the pattern was never encoded in words in the first place. Conversation can make it visible without reaching where it is held.

How is 3 Brains Intelligence different from trauma-informed practice?

It is not an alternative to it. It adds a way of identifying which of the three neural networks- head, heart or gut- is holding a given pattern, so that the intervention can be addressed to the right one.