Can Trauma Be Stored in the Body? Stress Physiology and Evidence
Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: October 9, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Trauma can affect the body through real, measurable biological and behavioral processes. After threatening or overwhelming experiences, people may notice a racing heart, shallow breathing, muscle tension, pain, digestive disturbance, sleep disruption, numbness, fatigue, or a heightened reaction to reminders. Some changes can persist after the immediate danger has ended. The expression ‘trauma stored in the body’ is a popular metaphor for these effects. Scientific evidence supports altered stress regulation, learned threat responses, and reciprocal brain–body signaling; it does not establish that autobiographical memories are literally stored in muscle tissue or that physical manipulation must release trapped trauma.
The most useful question is therefore what persists after trauma, how it is maintained, how it is measured, and which interventions help. This article examines those questions, separates established findings from hypotheses and popular claims, and explains when bodily symptoms deserve medical or mental health assessment.
For a broader explanation and related clinical context, see Psychological Trauma: Meaning, Responses, and Recovery.
What Does ‘Trauma Stored in the Body’ Mean?
People use this phrase in at least four ways. It can describe physical sensations during recollection; persistent changes in arousal, sleep, or pain; a feeling that conscious understanding has not resolved automatic reactions; or the stronger assertion that tissues physically retain traumatic memories and require ‘release.’ The first three refer to recognizable experiences and testable psychophysiological processes. The fourth is a proposed mechanism requiring evidence that goes beyond a person feeling tension or relief.
A traumatic event can be experienced as threatening or overwhelming, but clinical definitions have specific boundaries. PTSD is a diagnosable disorder with characteristic symptom patterns, duration, impairment, and qualifying exposure requirements; many stress responses occur without PTSD. A person can have distressing body sensations and no trauma-related disorder. A person with PTSD can also have few prominent bodily complaints. Language that feels meaningful in therapy or everyday life should be distinguished from diagnostic criteria.
Is ‘body-stored trauma’ a medical diagnosis?
No. ‘Stored trauma’ is neither a DSM-5-TR diagnosis nor an ICD-11 diagnosis, and there is no accepted clinical test that can identify a hidden traumatic memory inside a muscle or organ. PTSD and acute stress disorder have distinct diagnostic pathways, while ICD-11 also identifies complex PTSD. A clinician assesses exposure, intrusive symptoms, avoidance, perceived threat, duration, functioning, and possible alternative explanations. Describing ‘body memory’ or an ‘emotional release’ does not establish any of those diagnoses.
Where did the expression become popular?
Bessel van der Kolk’s influential account helped bring the relationship between trauma and bodily response into public discussion. His 1994 paper described somatic and physiological aspects of posttraumatic responses. Its theoretical language should be read in the context of evolving evidence about conditioning, memory, neuroendocrine responses, and sensory processing, rather than as a laboratory demonstration that memory resides in soft tissue. Read the original review.
Research on bodily memory is more specific than claims about memories lodged in muscles. Gentsch and Kuehn (2022) proposed a neuroscientific account of how remembered bodily experiences and interoceptive signals may contribute to symptoms; their article explicitly treats several mechanisms as hypotheses, not validated methods for retrieving events from tissue. A later scholarly critique of popular trauma narratives also examined the risks of claiming irreversible biological damage or exceptional efficacy for body-based methods beyond the evidence. Together, these perspectives reinforce the distinction between meaningful embodied experience, testable brain–body mechanisms, and literal tissue-storage assertions.
How the Stress Response Connects the Brain and Body
When a person perceives danger, interacting neural and physiological systems organize attention, movement, cardiovascular activity, hormonal signaling, and defensive behavior. These functions are adaptive during actual threat. After trauma, reminders or internal sensations can sometimes activate threat-related reactions even when current circumstances are safe. In PTSD, this may contribute to hypervigilance, startle, irritability, avoidance, and sleep disturbance.
The autonomic nervous system
The autonomic nervous system helps regulate heart rate, breathing, digestion, sweating, vascular responses, and recovery after activation. Its sympathetic and parasympathetic branches cooperate and change continuously with context. Trauma-related hyperarousal may involve increased heartbeat, trembling, gastrointestinal discomfort, or an urge to escape. Other people primarily report shutdown-like experiences, blunted sensations, or detachment; these experiences have multiple possible physiological and psychological explanations.
Heart rate variability, or HRV, is a research measure of variation in time between heartbeats. Meta-analyses have found lower average indices of vagally mediated HRV among people with PTSD compared with controls. A 2020 meta-analysis synthesized 19 studies, and a 2026 multilevel meta-analysis examined 24 studies involving 2,537 participants. The latter found that recording duration influenced the size of observed differences. These are group-level associations, influenced by age, medication, activity, respiration, physical health, and measurement conditions. HRV cannot identify where trauma is ‘stored,’ diagnose PTSD, or establish that any single exercise has cured it.
The HPA axis, cortisol, and why a simple ‘stress hormone’ story fails
The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis regulates stress-related hormonal activity, including cortisol. Cortisol follows a daily rhythm and responds to many factors besides trauma. Prolonged or repeated stress can be associated with changes in this system, but the direction and size of findings vary by population, sampling time, exposure history, and comorbid conditions.
In a 37-study meta-analysis, basal cortisol did not show a significant overall difference between adults with PTSD and controls; some subgroups differed. A 2023 meta-analysis of experimental studies also found that cortisol responses to simulated traumatic material did not predict longer-term PTSD symptoms. Consequently, claims that every trauma survivor has ‘high cortisol,’ ‘exhausted adrenals,’ or a distinctive hormone profile are scientifically unsupported. Individual cortisol testing is not a routine PTSD diagnostic method.
Threat learning and bodily reminders
Learning systems can associate cues—such as sounds, smells, locations, interpersonal signals, or bodily sensations—with danger. Later encounters with those cues may prompt automatic alarm, remembered images, or avoidance. This is a useful account of why the body can react before someone has deliberately interpreted the situation. The processes involve distributed neural circuits, memory, perception, and ongoing interaction with peripheral physiology. They do not require an unremembered scene to be mechanically embedded in tissue.
The interpretation of bodily sensations matters too: a sudden heartbeat can be perceived as exertion, excitement, illness, panic, or danger depending on context. Attention, expectations, prior learning, and physical states may interact in feedback loops. Models of these loops are actively studied; a compelling explanation in an individual case still requires careful assessment rather than automatic attribution to trauma.
Which Physical Symptoms Can Accompany Trauma and PTSD?
Some people experience persistent muscle tension, headaches, fatigue, jaw clenching, chest tightness, nausea, digestive changes, rapid heartbeat, changes in appetite, interrupted sleep, or heightened sensitivity to touch and sound. Others describe numbness or a sense of being disconnected from bodily sensations. Such symptoms can be disabling, and their reality is independent of whether their cause proves to be trauma, a medical condition, medication effects, pain sensitization, or several processes at once.
Sleep disruption deserves particular attention because insufficient sleep can amplify pain, irritability, threat sensitivity, and difficulty concentrating. Trauma reminders can elicit bodily arousal, while anticipation of distress may encourage avoidance of ordinary activities. Over time, deconditioning, disrupted routines, reduced physical activity, and persistent worry about sensations can compound problems. Each potential contributor is a reason for thoughtful evaluation, not a shortcut diagnosis.
PTSD and chronic pain
PTSD and chronic pain frequently co-occur, and each can influence disability, sleep, mood, and activity. Several mechanisms have been proposed, including shared threat processing, pain-related fear, sleep disruption, injury-related factors, and behavioral avoidance. Their coexistence does not demonstrate that tissue contains traumatic memories or that all pain arises from trauma.
A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 30 trials and 3,245 participants studying co-occurring pain and posttraumatic symptoms found low-certainty evidence that trauma-focused treatments may improve both PTSD symptoms and pain modestly. It did not find significant pooled effects for the mind–body interventions examined, and many trials had methodological weaknesses. Results support coordinated psychological and medical pain care rather than replacing medical investigation with trauma-only explanations.
Can physical symptoms appear years after trauma?
Yes. Threat-related symptoms can persist or recur, and a new stressor or reminder may provoke symptoms after a period of relative stability. Yet a symptom appearing years later does not establish that it came from an earlier event. Timing alone cannot distinguish trauma-related arousal from migraine, thyroid disease, cardiac problems, respiratory conditions, gastrointestinal illness, chronic pain disorders, sleep conditions, substance effects, or other causes. New, severe, or progressive symptoms warrant appropriate medical evaluation.
Does Scientific Research Show Trauma in Muscles, Fascia, or Organs?
No validated body map shows specific memories deposited in the shoulders, hips, psoas muscle, fascia, or any other organ. Muscle tension may be associated with stress, posture, pain, guarding, and repeated behavior, but its location cannot reveal which event a person experienced. Statements such as ‘grief is stored in the lungs’ or ‘sexual trauma is stored in the hips’ lack the clinical specificity and reproducible evidence needed to function as medical claims.
People may experience intense emotion during massage, movement, breathing exercises, or relaxation. An experience of relief is meaningful as a personal outcome. It does not demonstrate that the intervention extracted a memory or that the emerging emotion identifies a previously unknown event. Memories are reconstructive and susceptible to influence; clinicians should avoid suggestive techniques that assert a hidden traumatic history based solely on bodily responses.
The phrase ‘cellular memory’ is sometimes used loosely to describe learned biological responses or changes in gene expression. Cells indeed respond to environments and can undergo lasting regulatory changes, but these observations are not evidence that autobiographical events are encoded as identifiable narratives in peripheral tissue. Research on trauma-related epigenetic associations is complex, often observational, and influenced by many confounders; it cannot be used to read a person's experience from a single biomarker.
What the Evidence Supports—and What It Does Not
The strongest claim supported by the literature is that traumatic stress and PTSD can involve persistent, dynamic changes in responses across brain, autonomic, endocrine, behavior, attention, and health. The specific patterns vary widely and overlap with other disorders. Group-level findings cannot be converted into a personal ‘stored trauma score.’
A second claim is that bodily sensations can participate in intrusive recollection and conditioned responses. Somatic sensations may act as cues and contribute to distress, including when the person cannot immediately explain the connection. Whether a given sensation is trauma-related must be investigated in context, with the person’s history and alternative causes considered.
A third, more speculative claim is that specialized somatic methods are necessary to remove trauma held in tissues. Treatment research does not establish this mechanism. An intervention can help someone regulate arousal, increase mobility, improve sleep, or reduce anxiety without proving its proposed explanatory model. Efficacy, mechanism, and marketing language are separate questions.
Trauma, PTSD, Dissociation, and Ordinary Stress Are Different
A traumatic exposure is an event or circumstance; a stress reaction describes a response; PTSD describes a persistent clinical pattern meeting diagnostic requirements. Under DSM-5-TR, acute stress disorder occupies the early period after qualifying exposure, whereas PTSD requires symptoms lasting more than one month alongside other criteria. ICD-11 uses a more concise PTSD symptom formulation and recognizes complex PTSD, which additionally includes disturbances in self-organization. Classification systems differ, so the words ‘trauma response’ should not substitute for diagnosis.
A sense of detachment, unreality, or reduced bodily awareness may accompany PTSD, panic, exhaustion, or dissociative experiences. Depersonalization and derealization can occur in the DSM-5-TR dissociative subtype of PTSD, but persistent dissociative disorders have their own diagnostic evaluations. A person experiencing numbness does not automatically have dissociation, and physical numbness also requires consideration of neurological and other medical causes.
Childhood-specific mechanisms and developmental outcomes have their own evidence base, including the relationship between childhood trauma and PTSD and how childhood memory can be clear, fragmented, or incomplete. These topics should not be collapsed into one generic claim about tissues or inferred from muscle tension.
How Clinicians Evaluate Trauma-Related Bodily Symptoms
A careful assessment begins with the present complaint: what the sensation is, when it began, its severity and frequency, associated health symptoms, medications, sleep, injury, medical history, context, functional impact, and signs requiring urgent examination. The clinician then considers whether trauma exposure and a recognizable PTSD pattern are present. When indicated, assessment may combine clinical interviewing, validated symptom measures, physical examination, and targeted medical tests.
Self-report questionnaires such as the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 can help estimate symptom burden and track change, but cutoffs are not diagnostic proof and cannot demonstrate a bodily reservoir of trauma. Physiological measurements—heart rate, HRV, cortisol, wearable arousal data—likewise cannot by themselves establish PTSD or identify causal origin. They may sometimes guide broader health evaluation or research, but they require appropriate interpretation.
For a person whose symptoms appear around specific reminders, the clinician may explore associations gently and without assuming a memory has been repressed. The goal is to understand distress, functioning, safety, and treatment options. A trauma-informed evaluation also respects a person’s preferences about physical examination, touch, emotional disclosure, and pacing.
Do Body-Based Therapies Work for PTSD?
Different interventions have different purposes. Movement, breathing, mindfulness, yoga, somatic experiencing, massage, rehabilitation, and trauma-focused psychotherapy should be assessed separately. A reduction in stress or muscle pain may be valuable even when evidence for treating core PTSD symptoms is limited. Conversely, strong evidence for PTSD psychotherapy does not require a claim that memory is physically trapped in the body.
First-line trauma-focused psychotherapy
For adults with PTSD, authoritative clinical guidelines prioritize evidence-based trauma-focused psychological treatments. The 2023 VA/DoD guideline, 2025 APA guideline, and NICE NG116 emphasize structured therapies, including cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure, and EMDR, with some differences in strength and scope of recommendations. These interventions target traumatic meanings, memories, threat learning, avoidance, and daily functioning. Their protocols include clinical preparation, ongoing monitoring, and adaptation for complexity or risk.
Trauma-focused CBT is an umbrella of structured cognitive and behavioral approaches, not a synonym for any supportive conversation. Prolonged exposure involves therapist-guided, planned work with avoided trauma reminders; cognitive processing therapy works with trauma-related beliefs and interpretations; EMDR combines structured memory-focused treatment with bilateral stimulation. These methods are not interchangeable with intensive self-directed exposure or an unstructured effort to force the body to ‘release’ distress.
Somatic experiencing and body-oriented approaches
Somatic experiencing is a body-focused therapeutic approach that emphasizes awareness of sensations and regulation. A 2017 randomized trial of 63 adults with PTSD reported improvement relative to a waitlist; a waitlist comparison alone cannot establish comparative superiority to established active therapies. A 2020 randomized trial in people with chronic low back pain and posttraumatic symptoms found no additional benefit from adding somatic experiencing to physiotherapy on the study’s outcomes. These findings illustrate why individual trials and different populations should not be combined into a universal efficacy claim.
A 2023 meta-analysis pooled 29 trials of heterogeneous body- and movement-oriented interventions, finding a moderate average reduction in PTSD symptoms but very high between-study heterogeneity (I² = 89%) and generally substantial risk-of-bias concerns. It also found no clear pooled improvement in interoceptive awareness. The findings justify further investigation; they do not prove a single somatic technique is effective for everyone or show that trauma is literally stored in tissue.
The VA/DoD guideline synopsis suggests mindfulness-based stress reduction for PTSD with a weak recommendation, but reports insufficient evidence to recommend for or against several other mind–body methods, including somatic experiencing, yoga, tai chi, relaxation training, and acupuncture as PTSD treatments. Insufficient evidence means the research does not support a reliable general recommendation in either direction; it is different from proof of ineffectiveness.
What about exercise, breathing, massage, and physical therapy?
Regular, tolerable movement can support general health, sleep, physical conditioning, and a sense of agency. Breathing or grounding practices may help some people manage moments of arousal. A physical therapist may address injury, pain, stiffness, balance, and functional limitations. Massage may feel soothing or uncomfortable depending on the person and circumstances. These goals matter, but the evidence should be described according to the actual outcome measured, not promoted as a cure for PTSD.
Some practices involving prolonged breath holding, intense hyperventilation, forced emotional catharsis, or unexpected physical touch can increase distress, dizziness, panic, pain, or dissociation in susceptible people. A trauma-informed practitioner explains what will happen, offers choice, monitors reactions, and stops or modifies an approach when needed. Any claim that worsening distress is necessary because trauma is ‘leaving the body’ deserves scrutiny.
Can the Body Recover Without ‘Releasing’ Trauma?
Recovery can occur through multiple interacting processes: safer circumstances, reliable relationships, sleep and medical care, reduced avoidance, updated learning about threat, and evidence-based psychological treatment when needed. Some people improve without formal therapy, while others benefit from specialized care. Neither pattern demonstrates an obligatory stage of physical discharge.
Useful signs of progress include improved functioning, better sleep, greater flexibility in responding to reminders, reduced intrusion and avoidance, more stable relationships, and increased choice over daily activities. Physiological sensations may become less distressing even when they still occur occasionally. A person does not need to experience shaking, crying, vivid recovered memories, or an intense emotional breakthrough to be recovering.
Practical Steps for Managing Body Sensations After Trauma
Start with safety and assessment. If symptoms are new, significant, or medically concerning, contact an appropriate healthcare professional. If a history of trauma is relevant, mention that alongside the bodily complaint. Both physical and psychological explanations can be considered without choosing one prematurely.
When arousal rises, some people find it helpful to orient to present surroundings, notice the support of a chair or the floor, reduce sensory overload, or try a comfortable breathing rhythm without straining. Others find inward attention unsettling; looking around, walking gently, talking to someone trustworthy, or changing the environment may work better. The person’s sense of safety and voluntary choice should guide the practice.
Track patterns as observations rather than verdicts. A brief note about sleep, medication changes, pain, caffeine, workload, situational triggers, and what helped can make a clinical appointment more productive. Avoid obsessively monitoring every heartbeat or bodily twitch: repeated checking can itself heighten attention to symptoms.
If PTSD symptoms interfere with work, relationships, sleep, or routine, ask a licensed clinician about structured trauma-focused care and how any physical-health treatment can be coordinated. If chronic pain is also present, a combined assessment can address both problems. Do not attempt intense memory-reenactment exercises or unsupervised exposure because a video or practitioner claims that emotional pain is trapped in an organ.
When to Seek Medical or Crisis Help
Sudden chest pain, severe shortness of breath, fainting, new one-sided weakness, a seizure, or similarly alarming physical symptoms require immediate medical evaluation rather than interpretation as trauma release. Persistent pain, unexplained neurological sensations, significant gastrointestinal symptoms, or progressive fatigue also deserve routine or timely medical assessment according to severity.
Seek urgent mental health support when severe dissociation, an inability to maintain personal safety, escalating substance use, or suicidal thoughts create immediate risk. Local emergency services and available crisis services can help with imminent danger. Supportive practices can accompany care, but they do not replace urgent evaluation or a coordinated safety plan.
Common Myths About Trauma in the Body
Myth: Your hips, jaw, or shoulders reveal which trauma you experienced
Muscle tension and pain have many causes. No validated anatomical map can infer a person's trauma history from the location of tightness. A practitioner should never claim certainty about abuse, neglect, or a forgotten event from physical findings alone.
Myth: Crying, shaking, or trembling means trauma has been removed
These can be genuine emotional and physiological responses, but no accepted biomarker shows that an episode of crying or tremor has extracted stored trauma. Relief may reflect nervous-system settling, interpersonal support, reduced tension, altered attention, or many other processes. Lack of catharsis is not treatment failure.
Myth: PTSD is just a body stuck in fight-or-flight
PTSD involves intrusion, avoidance, perceived threat, and functional impacts; DSM and ICD formulations also differ. Hyperarousal is important for some people, yet the disorder cannot be reduced to one autonomic state. Emotional numbing, dissociative experiences, mood changes, cognitive symptoms, and comorbid conditions can be central.
Myth: Talking therapy cannot help bodily trauma
Evidence-based trauma-focused psychological treatment can improve PTSD symptoms, including reactions triggered by memories and reminders. Psychological and bodily responses are deeply connected, and improvements in threat learning, sleep, avoidance, and daily functioning can affect both. Clinical guideline treatment recommendations provide a more reliable basis for choosing care than a claim that only bodywork can reach an event.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is trauma literally stored in the muscles?
There is no established evidence that muscles store an individual's autobiographical trauma memory. Muscle activity and pain can change with stress, while memory and threat learning are functions of distributed neural and brain–body processes.
Why does my body react when I know I am safe?
A learned threat response can be activated by reminders or internal sensations faster than deliberate appraisal. Sleep loss, pain, current stress, medication effects, and medical conditions can also contribute. If the reaction is frequent or disruptive, clinical assessment can clarify what is happening.
Can trauma cause stomach problems, headaches, or chronic pain?
Stress and trauma-related symptoms may contribute to gastrointestinal discomfort, headaches, sleep disturbance, and pain, and some disorders co-occur. The presence of these symptoms does not prove a trauma cause, so medical explanations deserve appropriate attention.
Does trauma always raise cortisol?
No. Findings differ across studies, samples, and methods, and meta-analyses do not support a single cortisol profile for everyone with PTSD. Cortisol alone is not a PTSD diagnosis or a test of hidden trauma.
Does lower heart rate variability prove I have PTSD?
No. HRV is influenced by many factors, and group-level differences in PTSD research cannot establish an individual diagnosis. Consumer wearables are not validated tests for ‘stored trauma.’
Are yoga, somatic therapy, or breathwork proven PTSD cures?
Research on body- and movement-based interventions is promising in some areas but heterogeneous and generally less certain than evidence for established trauma-focused treatments. A particular practice may improve comfort or function without being a proven standalone PTSD treatment.
Do I have to remember every traumatic event to heal?
No universal clinical requirement demands perfect or complete recall. Treatment focuses on current symptoms, functioning, and collaboratively selected approaches. Attempts to force memories or interpret bodily reactions as proof of forgotten events can be harmful.
Can trauma recovery involve the body and the mind together?
Yes. Coordinated clinical care can address both psychological symptoms and physical health, including sleep, pain, activity, and medication considerations. A broad care plan does not require believing that memories are lodged in tissues.
Conclusion
‘Trauma stored in the body’ is best understood as a metaphor for the continuing influence of stressful experiences on physiology, perception, learning, health, and behavior. The body participates in remembering and responding through real biological processes. Evidence does not establish a literal anatomical storage site for traumatic memories or a mandatory physical-release procedure. The most clinically useful approach is to take sensations seriously, investigate medical and psychological contributors, and choose care according to the person's symptoms and the strength of the evidence.
Related Articles
Childhood Trauma and PTSD: What Is the Connection? — how childhood-specific exposure relates to PTSD risk and diagnosis.
Trauma Triggers From Childhood: What They Are, How They Work, and How to Respond — an age-contextual explanation of learned reminders and responses.
Childhood Trauma and Memory: Why Recall Can Be Clear, Fragmented, or Incomplete — memory evidence and limits of inferring past experiences.
Childhood Trauma and Dissociation: What Is the Connection? — understanding a distinct cluster of posttraumatic experiences.
References
American Psychological Association. (2025). Clinical practice guideline for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder in adults. Official guideline.
Andersen, T. E., Ellegaard, H., Schiøttz-Christensen, B., Mejldal, A., & Manniche, C. (2020). Somatic experiencing for low back pain and posttraumatic symptoms: A randomized trial. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11, 1797306. DOI:10.1080/20008198.2020.1797306.
Brom, D., Stokar, Y., Lawi, C., et al. (2017). Somatic experiencing for posttraumatic stress disorder: A randomized controlled outcome study. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 30, 304–312. DOI:10.1002/jts.22189.
Engel, S., Laufer, S., Klusmann, H., Schulze, L., Schumacher, S., & Knaevelsrud, C. (2023). Cortisol response to traumatic stress to predict PTSD symptom development: A systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 14(2), 2225153. DOI:10.1080/20008066.2023.2225153.
Ge, F., Yuan, M., Li, Y., & Zhang, W. (2020). Posttraumatic stress disorder and alterations in resting heart rate variability: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychiatry Investigation, 17, 9–20. DOI:10.30773/pi.2019.0112.
Gentsch, A., & Kuehn, E. (2022). Clinical manifestations of body memories: The impact of past bodily experiences on mental health. Brain Sciences, 12(5), 594. DOI:10.3390/brainsci12050594.
Meewisse, M.-L., Reitsma, J. B., de Vries, G.-J., Gersons, B. P. R., & Olff, M. (2007). Cortisol and post-traumatic stress disorder in adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 191, 387–392. DOI:10.1192/bjp.bp.106.024877.
National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. (2018, updated as applicable). Post-traumatic stress disorder: NICE guideline NG116. Recommendations.
O’Donnell, M. L., Arjmand, H.-A., Lumley, M. A., et al. (2026). Systematic review and meta-analyses of nonpharmacological interventions for co-occurring chronic pain and posttraumatic stress disorder. Pain, 167, 756–766. DOI:10.1097/j.pain.0000000000003880.
Scheeringa, M. S. (2025, published online). Evaluating evidence behind popular trauma narratives: Neurobiological and treatment claims in The Body Keeps the Score. BJPsych Bulletin. DOI:10.1192/bjb.2025.10174.
Schnurr, P. P., Hamblen, J. L., Wolf, J., et al. (2024). The management of posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder: Synopsis of the 2023 VA/DoD clinical practice guideline. Annals of Internal Medicine, 177(3), 363–374. DOI:10.7326/M23-2757.
Tucker, R. C., Taylor, P. J., & Robinson, S. J. (2026). A multi-level meta-analysis of vagally-mediated heart rate variability and post-traumatic stress disorder. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 184, 106585. DOI:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2026.106585.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs & U.S. Department of Defense. (2023). VA/DoD clinical practice guideline for management of posttraumatic stress disorder and acute stress disorder. Official clinical guideline.
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, National Center for PTSD. (n.d.). Overview of psychotherapy for PTSD. Official professional resource.
van de Kamp, M. M., Scheffers, M., Emck, C., et al. (2023). Body- and movement-oriented interventions for posttraumatic stress disorder: An updated systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 36, 835–848. DOI:10.1002/jts.22968.
van der Kolk, B. A. (1994). The body keeps the score: Memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 1, 253–265. DOI:10.3109/10673229409017088.