He still has the pronounced, reassuringly psychoanalytical western European accent of his birthplace – the Netherlands – even though he took his first degree in the 60s at the University of Hawaii and has practised in the US since. Van der Kolk speaks to me on a video call from Boston, Massachusetts, where he has lived for the past 50 years. (If your body does keep the score, is that why you look so rough?) Is trauma really so widespread? And are people feeling particularly traumatised now? On social media, it is ubiquitous, a psychiatric meme, the source of inspirational get-you-out-of-bed quotes and self-deprecating jokes. So, how do you account for its incredible popularity? In the seven years since its publication, it has spent 147 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than half a million copies in the UK alone, and nearly 2m worldwide amid the shared trauma of the pandemic, it has become more popular than ever, spending the whole of July this year at No 1 on the nonfiction bestseller list in the US. Nevertheless, it is a searching, complex account of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), not pop-psychology for the general reader seeking to live their best life through Bikram. The Body Keeps the Score is engagingly written and plainly not a textbook. The reality, of course, is that being traumatised does make you a difficult person to get along with This has profound ramifications for talking therapies and their limits: the rational mind cannot do the repair work on its own, since that part of you is pretending it has already been repaired. The stress is stored in the muscles and does not dissipate. But the body does not forget physiological changes result, a “recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormones, an alteration in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant”, as he says in his book. His thesis centres on trauma: the urgent work of the brain after a traumatic event is to suppress it, through forgetting or self-blame, to avoid being ostracised.

After that, nothing has ever made more sense. It doesn’t make sense until you read Van der Kolk. Certain physical activities do something weird to your brain: ancient memories resurface, often with new feelings or perspectives attached you start treating yourself with more compassion. That is not a euphemism for “rich, underoccupied people”, it is just people who do yoga. W hen Dr Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score in 2014, it was a huge hit with yoga people.

Autodesk inventor 2010 stress analysis