The Body Keeps the Score

In this collection, The Body Keeps the Score references 2 other books and is cited by 7 other books.

It draws on Man's Search for Meaning and Emotional Intelligence.

It’s picked up by Chatter, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art and It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle and 4 others.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

The Body Keeps the Score is widely cited as the most influential book on trauma of the past two decades, referenced across therapy, parenting, and self-help. Ethan Kross draws on van der Kolk's work in Chatter to argue that chronic rumination physically wears down the body, and James Nestor uses his trauma-body framework in Breath to explain why slow breathing calms stored stress responses. Mark Wolynn builds directly on it in It Didn't Start with You, and Brene Brown cites it in Atlas of the Heart on the role of body awareness in emotional granularity.

Lori Gottlieb references it in Maybe You Should Talk to Someone for patients whose trauma manifests as physical symptoms. Readers consistently describe it as life-changing, praising its validation that trauma is a physiological event rather than a personal failing, though some find the clinical case studies difficult to read and note that the book's scope can feel overwhelming. It has become essential reading for anyone trying to understand how past experiences live on in the body.