Does the Body Keep the Score? New Research on Trauma and Nervous System Patterns

Emma Toms
5 days ago
4 min read

For years, one phrase has shaped trauma conversations: "The body keeps the score."

And for many people, those words brought enormous relief.

Because trauma does not simply live as a thought.

It can be felt.

In the tightening chest before an appointment.

In the stomach that knots before conflict.

In disrupted sleep.

In skin flares.

In exhaustion.

In hypervigilance.

In the sense that your body reacts before your mind has even caught up.

For many people living with chronic stress, trauma histories and illness, this feels deeply true. The body speaks. The body participates. The body matters.

Recently, I came across a fascinating paper by Steven Kotler, Michael Mannino, Glenn Fox and Karl Friston titled The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability.

Rather than dismissing existing trauma understanding, the paper expands the conversation in a way that deeply resonated with both my own lived experience and the work I see unfolding with clients.

The authors suggest trauma may be understood less as something physically stored in the body and more as a pattern of prediction within the nervous system. This distinction is really helpful. Not because trauma suddenly becomes “all in the mind.” Or because the body becomes irrelevant. But because it may help explain why we can continue feeling trapped in patterns long after the original danger has passed.

Your nervous system is always predicting

Your brain is not simply recording life as it happens.

It is constantly making predictions.

Am I safe? What should I prepare for? What happens next?

This process is known as predictive processing.

The brain continuously uses previous experiences to predict future experiences. Usually, this is incredibly helpful.

You instinctively move away from danger.

You brake before consciously thinking.

You orient toward sudden sounds.

Prediction helps keep us alive.

But after trauma or prolonged stress, the nervous system can become highly efficient at predicting threat.

The system learns:

"Stay ready."

"Watch carefully."

"Something bad could happen."

Because it adapted. According to Kotler and colleagues, trauma may involve the nervous system becoming overly confident in danger predictions. The system becomes organised around protection.

Why symptoms can feel so real

This part of the research particularly resonated with me.

The paper explains that physical sensations themselves can become part of the loop.

A racing heart. A tightening chest. An anxious stomach. Muscle tension.

The brain notices these sensations and interprets them: "See? I knew something was wrong."

The body responds.The brain sees evidence. The cycle strengthens.

Not because trauma is physically buried somewhere in tissue waiting to be released. But because the nervous system learned a deeply intelligent survival response.

As someone with lived experience of autoimmune disease, I know what it feels like to become frightened of your own body.

I spent years monitoring symptoms.

Scanning sensations.

Trying to work out what my body was doing wrong.

Every sensation felt loaded.

Every symptom felt meaningful.

Every flare felt like evidence.

Healing for me did not come through finding hidden trauma buried somewhere inside me. It happened through helping my system learn safety again. Breath by breath. Choice by choice.

Healing may be about restoring flexibility

One of the central concepts in the paper is something called metastability. It sounds complex, but the principle itself is surprisingly simple.

Healthy nervous systems move. They shift. They adapt. They move into stress and then return.

Trauma can reduce that flexibility. Life becomes narrower. Responses become more automatic. The system becomes stuck repeating familiar patterns.

The authors suggest healing may not simply be about removing trauma. It may be about restoring flexibility. Restoring movement. Restoring the ability to update.

And reading that felt really aligned with the work I see every day. Because healing rarely looks like becoming a completely different person. It often looks like becoming more flexible. More able to pause. More connected. More able to respond rather than react.

Why this resonates with my work with IEMT and SSP

Reading this paper helped me put language around something I have witnessed repeatedly through my work.

If trauma becomes a pattern of nervous system prediction, then healing may not always require endlessly revisiting or analysing the story. Sometimes healing may involve helping the system update what it expects.

This is one reason I work with approaches like IEMT and SSP.

With IEMT we are not repeatedly retelling experiences.

We work with emotional patterns, identity patterns and how experiences continue influencing present responses.

Something I hear often afterwards is:

"I still remember it..."

"But it feels different."

"There is more space now."

The memory remains. But the emotional and physiological response shifts.

Not erasure. Not forgetting. Updating. Flexibility.

The same feels true with SSP.

The nervous system cannot easily create new predictions if it does not first feel safe enough to receive new information.

By working through pathways linked to regulation, safety and connection, SSP can help create conditions where vigilance softens.

People often become:

More present.

More connected.

More able to tolerate sensation.

More able to pause.

More able to participate in life.

Not fixed but flexible.

Trauma narrows life. Healing widens it.

The paper also explores emerging research around flow states — experiences of movement, creativity, challenge and deep meaningful engagement.

The authors suggest these experiences may help restore flexibility within the nervous system. More research is needed but the idea itself feels hopeful.

Healing rarely seems to happen through catharsis or force.

It often happens through repeated experiences that gently show the nervous system:

You are here.

You survived.

Something new is possible.

And perhaps healing is not about becoming someone different.

Perhaps it is helping the nervous system realise it no longer has to keep preparing for yesterday. Trauma narrows life. Healing widens it. And sometimes healing begins when the system learns that the danger it once needed to predict no longer belongs to the present.