Bad Therapy versus The Body Keeps the Score

Stop therapeuticizing sin

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A couple of years ago, I was asked to read a book entitled The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. You’ve probably heard of it, even if you haven’t read it. It was all the rage, sold millions of copies, and was a NYT best seller for several years. This, it was suggested, was going to totally revolutionize the way we think about our current selves and the choices and emotions we experience, our childhood, and how to better parent and be sensitive to our children.

I’ll be blunt: I hated the book. It didn’t take long before my BS-o-meter started going off. In fact, on page 45 I read this doozy:

“When something reminds traumatized people of the past, their right brain reacts as if the traumatic event were happening in the present… but because their left brain is not working well, they may not be aware that they are reexperiencing and reenacting the past—they are just furious, terrified, enraged, ashamed or frozen.”

- The Body Keeps the Score, p. 45

When I was researching my thesis in Philosophy of Mind in the mid 2000’s, my advisor and chair of the department also held professorships in the cognitive science and neuroscience departments, and insisted I took some of his courses as part of my studies. I’ll admit, I didn’t find it all that interesting (I maintain that those disciplines have little to say on the metaphysical questions I was interested in), so I won’t pretend to be an expert or even all that interested in them. But even in the mid 2000’s, we knew the common descriptions of “right brain” and “left brain” had scant data to support it, and the evidence contradicting this kind of difference between the hemispheres has only accumulated since.

This gave me pause. Van der Kolk was supposedly giving us a scientific description of trauma, what it does to us physiologically, how that impacts us throughout our life, and what to do about it (spoiler alert: keep going to therapy… forever). And yet his description includes what amounts to largely an old wives tale about how the brain works? I mean, one could kind of abstract out an idea that parts of our reactions are involuntary and visceral, rather than linguistic and logical. But he’s using right/left brain as if it’s not just an abstract metaphor. As if that’s what is actually happening in your brain. What is going on here?

Alas, I kept reading. I regularly stop reading books that I find boring or dumb, but I make an exception once a book becomes popular enough. If for no other reason, I want to be able to talk to people about it intelligently when they bring it up (this is why I forced myself to read Dan Brown back in the day).

I’ll save everyone some time and get right to the premise of the book so you don’t have to waste your own time reading it: our childhood “trauma” is “stored” and “encoded” in our bodies. This “memory” manifests itself in extreme emotional reactions, anxiety, depression, cancer, autoimmune disorders, asthma, and more later in life, even if you don’t remember the “trauma” that supposedly created it.

At this point I got a very eery feeling. It just seemed too familiar. So I looked up this van der Whatshisface to find out what else he has published. Turns out, he was a major player in the “repressed memory” scandal of the mid 90’s.

For those who aren’t familiar, the repressed memory scandal arose out of an older Freudian idea, but the reader’s digest version is that starting in the 1980’s and peaking in the 90’s, many therapists started advising their patients that their current distress could be caused by childhood trauma, specifically repressed sexual abuse they experienced and then repressed due to the pain, and that the therapist could help them “rediscover” those memories (and, of course, keep giving them therapy for it).

The result was a series of false accusations, broken families, trials and prison terms for men and women (often parents) accused of sexually abusing now-adult patients when they were children. These therapists would go around and testify for prosecutors about these memories, and the “science” behind them. There was just one problem: it was all nonsense.

And, as it turns out, Bessen van der Kolk was a major witness often in these cases, and helped put many innocent people in prison. A great deal of these cases were overturned when evidence came to light that the abuse never occurred, the evidence that so-called repressed memories can be recovered via therapy is nonexistent, and the fact that childhood trauma hasn’t been shown to have explanatory power over all that ails us.

So here we have good old van der Kolk, now rebranding his repressed memory grift. Same junk science, different packaging. His con now is to convince people that their problems (emotional outbursts, broken relationships, substance abuse, infidelity, sexual promiscuity, porn addiction, <insert here>) are all because of childhood trauma! What is the cure? Why, incessant therapy of course. Not only for you, so you can linger on your trauma and tell yourself a story about why you do the things you do and how it’s not your fault. But also for your kids. Authoritative parenting induces trauma, which will encode itself into their bodies and manifest as cancer, or something. You need to affirm them at all times. Also, they should go to therapy.

Now, at this point my skepticism that this book had anything at all good to say was about as high as when I read infidels.org. To buy into van der Kolk’s thesis, there are some very high hurdles to get over:

1. That despite evidence that the entire right/left brain dichotomy is bunk, it’s actually correct, or at least useful somehow to explain what happens when we “reexperience” a traumatic suppressed memory.

2. That despite repressed memory recovery being discredited in study after study (and in court) after many innocent people were put in prison using those techniques, repressed memory recovery is actually a thing and can explain why you are the way you are today.

3. That despite there being literally no evidence in a forward facing study that childhood trauma permanently alters your brain, it totally does and it’s why you’re <insert here>. (In fact, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary: children who are physically or sexually abused are not more likely to abuse their children. But pay no attention to the man behind the curtain)

4. That parents for all of human history have been parenting their children wrong and creating trauma that begets trauma, and it’s this entirely novel way to think about child rearing and trauma that will fix what ails us, despite the fact that as these new therapeutic approaches gain popularity, the prevalence of reported anxiety, depression, etc increases (the opposite of what you’d expect)

5. That it’s totally a coincidence that the prescription to address all this fractal, inception style trauma-within-trauma is to go to therapy. Lots of therapy. And to be a therapeutic parent. And send your kids to therapy. So say the therapists.

That leads me to today Abigail Shrier’s new book, Bad Therapy. In it she eviscerates van der Kolk’s entire thesis, bringing in experts such as Richard McNally and Harrison Pope showing it to be the farce that it truly is. But she goes farther: the therapeutic parent is actually the worst of all worlds. Children need structure and authority and boundaries, and punishment when they cross one. They also need space for autonomy, so they are able to explore and become resilient and antifragile. The therapeutic parent takes the worst of the Authoritative parent with the worst of the Permissive parent: hover over your child’s emotions, affirm them always, but “punishment” has to come in the form of “here are the natural consequences of your actions”. (e.g. we’re not going to have time to watch a show before bed, because you flung your spaghetti across the kitchen and now we have to clean it up). None of the backbone of the authoritative parent, but none of the autonomy of the permissive parent.

Well, call me old fashioned, but it seems the cure is worse than the disease. Sometimes you feel a certain way, and you really shouldn’t. How you feel might be understandable, but it doesn’t excuse your actions, and the fact that you do feel a certain way has no bearing on whether your feelings need to be affirmed as if they’re sacrosanct.

There is no external locus of control. You decide what to do. This post hoc rationalization of why you sinned (yep, using that word), placing the cause outside yourself (so you can be the victim), is both anti-Christian and also unsupported scientifically. Shrier puts it this way:

“Why did my marriage fall apart? It’s natural to want an explanation. If your life is not as you wish it were, it isn’t your fault. Something done to you in your past made you that way. That’s how the snipe hunt for childhood trauma begins. “Memories,” once dredged, are rarely independently verified, and the resulting theory of childhood trauma becomes unfalsifiable.

If you think you’ve been damaged, you are. Why would verifying or validating the memories be necessary? Because the events represented in those bad childhood memories may not have happened at all, or may not have happened in the way you remembered. Even if they happened, they may not have been significant to you at the time. Perhaps the remembered event, raked from your mental riverbed, had no impact on your life until a therapist placed the loupe of your focus upon it, suggesting it had the power to clarify your adult woes.” - Bad Therapy, p 126

In other words, maybe our grandparents did it right, after all. Maybe we’re searching for excuses, because we don’t want to take responsibility. Maybe we want to push the burden of making sure our kids are fine to someone else (the therapist, of course). Maybe it’s easier to say yes to kids, when we should say no more often. Maybe it’s our selfishness that makes us want to blame our parents for our sin, and our narcissism that makes us want to seek our child’s validation, rather than the other way around.

I am shocked at how susceptible well meaning Christians seem to be to this, but what we’re talking about is taking the idea of sin seriously. This is a choice we all make. You choose to keep your word, or not. You choose to cheat on your spouse, or not. You choose to love, or not. You choose to forgive, or not. Your childhood is not an excuse, regardless of how good or bad you had it (or think you had it). And your child isn’t your patient. As the last chapter eloquently put it:

When you mute the expert advice, when you log off Slate Parenting, when you lay down rules according to your values, and insist your kids abide by them—you will be surprised by just how much you like your kids. Because the truth is, you should.” - Bad Therapy, p 240