When Bessel van der Kolk appears on a screen, thousands of clinicians, survivors, thinkers, and seekers instinctively lean in. He has, after all, spent over five decades insisting that the body remembers what the mind cannot bear to hold – a premise that reshaped modern trauma theory and, through The Body Keeps the Score, reshaped culture itself.
In Common Threads’ inaugural live interview and community Q&A, van der Kolk was his usual paradox: the world’s most influential trauma expert who insists, at every turn, that trauma is not a fixed category but a deeply personal, relational, and contextual phenomenon. Across ninety minutes, he offered reflections on the nature of trauma, the erosion of community life, the rise of political division, and the healing potential of belonging – touching everything from screen-based living to dementia, peer support groups, and the quiet rescue of human touch.
What follows is a distillation of the conversation: a portrait not just of van der Kolk’s ideas, but of the cultural moment he believes we’re all trying to survive.
Trauma Is Not the Event, It’s What Happens Inside Us
Van der Kolk begins by dismantling the idea that trauma can be universally defined.
“A trauma,” he says, “is something that overwhelms your capacity to cope. It keeps you stuck – replaying it, reenacting it, reliving it – long after the event is over.”
Two people can live through the same experience; one may absorb it and continue through life, the other may find their nervous system locked in perpetual alarm. The defining variables aren’t the scale of the event but:
- Whether you had resources – internal or external – to meet the moment
- Whether you were supported afterwards
- Whether secrecy and shame forced you into silence
He gives a vivid early-career example: treating a child with severe burns. Today, such an event would overwhelm him; then, as a young doctor, he was trained, prepared, and supported. The experience was horrifying, he says, “but it did not become traumatic.”
Helplessness, not horror, is the hinge point.
Why Support Is the Turning Point in a Traumatic Experience
If there is a villain in van der Kolk’s narrative, it is not fear – but isolation.
Trauma, he says, becomes durable and toxic “in the context of secrecy and shame.” Many survivors, especially of childhood abuse, face a second injury when they try to speak: the loss of their community.
“Once people start telling the truth,” he notes, “they generally get extruded from their community. It’s very unusual for a community to say, ‘We’ll protect you.’”
This exile cuts twice: the original harm and the collapse of belonging.
Surprisingly, collective crises can have the opposite effect. In Vermont, where van der Kolk spends part of each year, floods periodically devastate the town. Yet these disasters often strengthen social ties:
“People get together, help each other rebuild. It becomes the opposite of trauma – a deepening of trust and community.”
Belonging is not a soft concept in his framework. It is biological. It is protective. And without it, the human body keeps score.
When Community Breaks, the Body Suffers
Van der Kolk returns again and again to the physiological price of belonging to a group whose values contradict your own – or staying silent to avoid losing the group entirely.
You can leave, he says, and pay the social cost.
Or you can stay, and pay the physical one.
“If you don’t tell the truth, your survival brain keeps sending you messages: I’m not safe. You become uptight, you lose spontaneity, your hormones and immune system shift. You’re more likely to get sick. The body keeps the score.”
Even without overt trauma, the misalignment corrodes the nervous system. It places people in impossible bind: stay and abandon the self, or leave and abandon belonging.
It is one of the defining psychological dilemmas of our era.
Why the World Feels Angrier and More Divided Than Ever
When asked about political fragmentation – families torn apart, siblings unable to share a room without volatility – van der Kolk does not pretend to have the grand answer.
But he has a theory.
1. Anger creates instant belonging
“Hate makes the world go round,” an old teacher once told him.
Van der Kolk now believes this might be right.
Shared hatred is a crude but powerful bonding agent. It delivers energy, purpose, and a feeling of being alive – especially when daily life feels flat or digitally diluted.
2. Our screens are eroding real connection
We spend unprecedented hours in virtual spaces that stimulate emotion but not embodied connection.
This, he warns, is no small concern:
- Screen-based relating activates only part of our social wiring.
- It gives the illusion of community without the buffering effects of real human presence.
- It has contributed to skyrocketing loneliness, particularly among adolescents.
The brain evolved in the context of other bodies – eye contact, movement, co-regulation, and shared labour. Without that, people seek intensity elsewhere.
3. Many people have no physical community left
As traditional communal structures weaken – extended families, neighbourhoods, religious congregations – people search for belonging in online tribes, ideological enclaves, or political identities. These groups offer validation, certainty, and in-group cohesion, but often through division and antagonism.
Put simply: we are collectively starved of safe, embodied community.
And people who feel unsafe cling fiercely to anything that mimics belonging.
The Lost Art of Peer Support And Why It Matters
In a provocative aside, van der Kolk laments the decline of peer support groups in mental health, even though the trauma field began with them.
Vietnam veterans did not wait for the VA to validate PTSD, they formed groups themselves. Survivors of incest, domestic violence, and childhood abuse did the same.
Today, he says, insurance systems and rigid medical structures have squeezed out innovation and community-based models.
“The NHS is prescriptive. The insurance companies in the US are prescriptive.
And the prescriptions are often wrong.”
People heal through connection, not codes on a billing sheet.
He believes the future lies in reviving grassroots, embodied, creative communities: music groups, yoga collectives, theatre projects, peer-led circles. These are the spaces where safety and agency can return.
“How Do We Feel Alive Again?”
One attendee asks a profoundly modern question:
If trauma flattens the nervous system, and if danger or anger becomes a shortcut to feeling alive, how do we reacquaint ourselves with joy, beauty, and safety?
Van der Kolk answers with characteristic simplicity:
“Through sensory awareness. Through noticing the small details of life.”
He points to emerging research by Norman Farb and Zindel Segal showing that sensory immersion – sound, smell, texture, movement – can awaken or rebalance the brain’s default mode network.
This is the essential logic of:
- mindfulness
- yoga
- breathwork
- nature immersion
- music-making
- prayer
- psychedelic therapy
Intensity is not the only route to aliveness; attunement can be too.
But it must be practised. Repeatedly. Gently. Daily.
The Body Remembers – Even in Dementia
In one of the evening’s most poignant exchanges, a caregiver asks whether her husband, living with Lewy body dementia and a history of early trauma, might be experiencing resurgent PTSD.
Van der Kolk’s answer is painfully empathetic, and clinically compelling.
Dementia, he says, often strips away the cortical layers that help suppress old terror.
“When the frontal lobe disappears, the old returns.”
He has seen Holocaust survivors relive the past as dementia progresses; his own mother plunged into unprocessed trauma when hers began. Reasoning does not help. Regulation often lies only in presence, touch, and calm co-regulation.
He acknowledges the enormous emotional burden on caregivers, who often provide mothering to adults who cannot reciprocate.
It is a reminder: trauma is never just psychological. It is neurological, relational, and lifelong – but not immutable.
Leaving an Abusive Religious Community: The Trauma of Losing God and Tribe
Another attendee raises the issue of religious trauma, the unravelling of selfhood when the belief system that formed you becomes the site of harm.
Van der Kolk’s response reframes the question entirely:
“You’re nobody without a community.”
Healing, he argues, is less about untangling doctrine and more about rebuilding belonging. Not necessarily to a new religion, but to a group grounded in openness, creativity, purpose, and acceptance.
A therapist can offer understanding but not belonging. Only another community can.
So What Does Healing Require?
Across the entire conversation, one theme reverberates again and again:
Healing happens in connection.
Trauma thrives in isolation.
Van der Kolk offers no silver bullets. But he offers a path:
- Tell the truth. Secrets breed sickness.
- Find companions who can tolerate your reality. Shared experience dissolves shame.
- Rebuild your sensory world. Touch the ground. Smell the air. Hear the birds.
- Return to embodied community. Not screens. Not ideologies.
Real people. Real presence. Real life.
His theory is not just biological. It is profoundly human.
Trauma fractures connection.
Healing restores it.
Everything else is detail.
About the session
This conversation took place inside Common Threads, a professional learning community for therapists and practitioners, hosted by Masters Events. Members take part in live sessions, reflection spaces, and shared learning with leading clinicians.
Learn more about Common Threads or join here