Nonfiction, Trauma, and Healing

What’s Down There: The Body Keeps the Score

In my view, the best nonfiction book of the past 20 years is The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk.

The book is one of those cases where everything comes together. It explains the cause of a huge proportion of human suffering—a cause which our culture has somehow overlooked or misunderstood—and it also describes ways of relieving this suffering that differ greatly from what our culture has been trying to this point. Like The Wealth of Nations or Silent Spring, The Body Keeps the Score is the cornerstone book on a crucial new domain of understanding.

The book’s topic is trauma. To quickly describe its core thesis:

• We experience trauma when we encounter overwhelming experiences with which we cannot cope in the moment. Trauma is not restricted to PTSD, but is a universal experience—we could be traumatized by anything from parental neglect to bullying to a car crash.
• Trauma is encoded not in the thinking mind but in the body, producing physical and emotional symptoms such as anger, fear, or numbness (based on our nervous system’s fight-flight-freeze survival responses).
• Trauma cannot be thought or reasoned through, including by talk therapy. Situations that activate our trauma engage our survival responses, which totally override our thinking minds.
• Healing from trauma involves integrating body practices (such as yoga or EMDR) with more traditional psychology.

I’m not in love with the writing style itself, which reads somewhat like Van der Kolk sitting you down in his living room for three days and telling you everything he knows. It’s not especially organized to put the most important things first, and it doesn’t support skimming; it expects you to read linearly, long paragraph after long paragraph.

The title, on the other hand, is a masterpiece. It summarizes the core insight of Van der Kolk’s trauma literature, and what elevates it above prior understandings of human suffering: as we encounter overwhelming life experiences, our minds might say whatever they say, but our bodies keep the score. If we want to change the score, we need to work with our bodies.

So if you have a body or mind, I recommend you read The Body Keeps the Score—or at least Google it enough to absorb the core message. For myself, it’s oriented me toward finding ways to work with my own trauma, using therapy and other modalities but always with the embodied focus it advocates, and this is helping me a lot in my life.

Takeaways for Nonfiction Writing

Beyond this ringing endorsement, I’d like to say a little about how the book has helped me think about nonfiction writing.

I feel that good nonfiction should acknowledge the depth of the challenges we encounter.

Look, not every book can change the world. But one of The Body Keeps the Score’s triumphs is acknowledging the depth of the problem. We are discussing life’s most terrifying experiences: experiences that make us hate and fear ourselves and others, act in bizarre and self-destructive ways, and even seek death as a release.

I feel that good nonfiction should acknowledge these experiences. This doesn’t mean focusing on them, but simply not running from them. For example, even a book about a straightforward topic like financial freedom should not have the enforced cheerfulness of a rags-to-riches story. Your readers are not going to become real estate moguls/inspirational TikTokers like you. They likely don’t even want to, although they may find your sales pitch compelling. They likely want, at least in part, to stop feeling scared—about money specifically—and they hope you can help them. Meeting them on earth feels more humane.

So I find that the chipper attitude of lots of other nonfiction rings hollow, exactly because it is not about—not informed by, not looking at, not wanting to deal with—the depths of our experience. Their content aside, consider the titles of the following nonfiction classics: How to Win Friends and Influence People; Rich Dad, Poor Dad; or The End of History and the Last Man. In these and many other titles, I can feel a (male) entity striding cheerfully into the sunrise, trusty wrench in hand, ready to do Great Work upon the world, or else tie it up in Grand Theories. It’s the spirit of bourgeois extroversion that made the 1950s so off-putting, and the core issue is the same: What is going on inside you that you’re so afraid of? Can anything be done about that?

We’re hurt, and we can say so, and we can be gentle about it. We can even heal.

I feel we are reaching a point where we can stop confusing ourselves with this or that dream that ignores, bypasses, the pain we are actually in, and we can improve our lives for real. Trauma-informed book titles—and I assume these are marketing poison, but just to make the point—might include Forgiving My Poor Dad, or How to Cherish Friends and Love People, or Feeling the Horrors of History and Expressing Optimism for a Period of Global Peace and Stability. In other words: We’re hurt, and we can say so, and we can be gentle about it. We can even heal. We have the tools, now, at last, thank God.

A Nonfiction Book for the Bright Future: My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

If some nonfiction writing attempts to bypass pain and terror, other writing wallows in it. I feel that my fellow millennials are famous for this. (Recent article title: “Baby Boomers Are Aging. Their Kids Aren’t Ready.” Uh-oh, that sounds bad!!)

In my view, the high whine of outrage, the compulsive gnashing of teeth, is another form of not being with. If our pain is entertaining, has an external cause, and demands a forceful response, then that’s a lot of our own work sorted (or, rather, postponed indefinitely).

So what would a book on a painful topic look like, written on clean ground? I feel that My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem is a beautiful example. It tackles one of the most painful topics there is—the legacy of racial trauma in the United States—and it does it kindly, with grace, generosity, and understanding for both white people and people of color.

Each chapter’s “body practices” convey the feeling—not the idea—of different experiences.

My Grandmother’s Hands is explicitly written from within the trauma model that The Body Keeps the Score describes, and inherits the focus on embodiment. The book’s “body practices,” present in each chapter, give the feeling—not the idea—of different experiences, including of racial trauma, and I find them much more directly illuminating than another bar chart or forcefully argued op-ed.

I very much appreciate being able to read My Grandmother’s Hands not primarily to determine that yes, I agree, or no, I disagree, but rather to experience, myself. In this sense, it is more like literature than much general nonfiction; but, on the other hand, it is nonfiction that wishes to share a specific perspective on how we might better see and heal ourselves. Writing a nonfiction book this way feels like a view from a bright future, and I hope many others will take up its approach, on all kinds of topics.

For More on Good Nonfiction Writing…

Check out these articles:

• How to Write a Memoir
• 10 Types of Nonfiction
• How to Write a Narrative Essay