Bessel van der Kolk

Bessel van der Kolk was born in the Netherlands and built his clinical and research career in the United States, settling in Boston. From the 1970s he concentrated on post-traumatic stress, a field then poorly understood and frequently dismissed in mainstream psychiatry. Over three decades of working directly with survivors — veterans, abuse victims, and those who grew up in violent or chaotic households — he accumulated the clinical evidence and neurobiological data that would underpin his most influential work. He holds a professorship in psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine.

In _The Body Keeps the Score_, van der Kolk drew on his own research and that of fellow specialists to argue that traumatic experience is not merely a psychological wound but a physiological one: it literally reshapes both brain and body, disrupting the systems that govern pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. The book examined treatments that go well beyond conventional talk therapy — neurofeedback, meditation, yoga, drama, sport — each working with the brain's neuroplasticity to open recovery routes the standard medical model had largely overlooked. Its publication shifted how trauma is understood and approached across psychiatry, psychology, and allied clinical fields.

Van der Kolk continues as president of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts, where his work centres on trauma treatment development, clinician training, and ongoing research into how traumatic experience physically shapes the nervous system across the lifespan. _The Body Keeps the Score_ remains in wide circulation, consulted by clinicians, educators, social workers, and general readers alike. Its account of the body's central role in both holding and recovering from trauma has become a working reference across medicine, psychology, and education.