by ants_everywhere | 2025-10-23 02:02:31+00:00
The blog post very much agrees with mainstream science.

The Body Keeps Score is pseudoscience. This sort of pseudoscience has a pretty long history. Arguably it's repackaged Freud. Freud aside, therapists have a long history of advocating theories that are not supported by science. For example, repressed memories, multiple personality disorder, etc.

CPTSD is an area where there is a lot of bad research partially because it's not a recognized disorder by the DSM and partially because of its political affiliations. This works from two sides. You get downward pressure on good research because it isn't recognized by most American psychologists. You also get upward presure from researchers whose motivations are political rather than scientific. I don't understand why political groups are interested in CPTSD, I just know that they empirically are [0]. There have previously been strong political interest in other pseudosciences like Freudian psychotherapy and Jung etc. I don't understand this either, but I'm sure there's an explanation.

> It's also well known that past trauma predisposes you to future trauma

Many people are targeted for abuse because they are different. For example autistic women are especially frequently targeted for abuse. Thus being autistic (genetic) can cause abuse (environmental) and hence trauma. Many people who are especially isolated or have especially poor social skills will be predisposed to being abused multiple times. Partially this is because abusers can tell if you've been abused and, if you have, there's a good chance your previous abusers got away with it.

If you look at the subreddit overlap for CPTSD linked below, you'll notice that there's significant overlap with genetic psychological conditions that predispose people to getting abused. This makes correlational data hard to interpret, especially because so many psychological papers study a small group over a small period of time and ask only a small number of questions.

> This article (and author) seems to be something of a trauma-skeptic

This doesn't mean that mainstream science is skeptical about trauma. There is a great deal of good mainstream research on trauma. However, there is also a ton of systematically bad and wrong information on social media about trauma that is popular despite being wrong. So mainstream science is rightfully skeptical about claims that are unsupported by science.

> There's also data indicating...

Finding good psychology articles is something that's much harder than it sounds. Psychology articles are easy to read compared to, say, physics. But there is a lot of really bad psychology out there that you won't be able to filter out without a background in research psychology. In some ways, familiarity with applied psychology but not research psychology makes things harder because so much of the bad research comes from applied psychology.

For example, is this a good study? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26488918/ "Extrasensory Perception Experiences and Childhood Trauma: A Rorschach Investigation"? Well ESP isn't real. Trauma is real. The Rorschach test is nonsense. But it has an nih.gov link. Is J Nerv Ment Dis a high quality journal? What are the biases of its editors?

What about this one? https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7342092/ "Personal Experiences With Auditory Verbal Hallucination and Extrasensory Perception" from Schizophr Bull 2019.

I pick on ESP because it's obviously a violation of the law of physics. Yet applied psychologists keep churning out ESP research just like they keep churning out research about things like repressed memory like The Body Keeps the Score.

[0] For example see the list of subreddits similar to r/cptsd https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/cptsd. It's a mix of subs for people with genetic psychological disorders (narcissism, bpd, bipolar, asd, adhd, etc). And a mix of politicized and religious subreddits (FDS, witchesvpatriarchy, menlib, christianity, etc). Also see https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/pr6wh4/cptsd_and_lef...