Emily Articulated: The score

By Emily Erickson
Reader Columnist

In 2014, psychologist and author Bessel van der Kolk published The Body Keeps the Score, a nonfiction work exploring how traumatic experiences reshape the brain and body. Since its release, the book has spent more than 350 weeks on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list and sold nearly 2 million copies worldwide.

Van der Kolk’s central thesis is that trauma is not just a mental event but a physiological one. Traumatic experiences reshape the brain and nervous system, and the body can store these memories long after the original danger has passed, producing chronic, present-day distress.

Like many effective popular psychology books, he explains this through simple metaphors. The amygdala functions as the brain’s “smoke alarm,” while the frontal lobes act as “watchtowers.”

In a dangerous situation (real or perceived) the smoke alarm goes off, activating the autonomic nervous system and flooding the body with stress hormones. This prepares us to run, fight or freeze. The watchtowers observe the situation from “above,” helping determine whether the threat is real and, if it isn’t, shutting the alarm back down.

But when someone experiences repeated trauma or never fully processes a past event, these systems can become stuck. The watchtowers grow hyper-vigilant. The smoke alarm fires at smaller and smaller stimuli. A system designed to protect us begins reacting to everything as if it were the original danger. The result is a pattern of recurring emotional reactivity that eventually takes a toll on the body (“the score”).

I began reading about this a few months ago after starting therapy, hoping to better understand how earlier experiences shape my relationship to stress and anxiety today. But alongside a helpful framework for my own life, I found myself thinking about something larger: the state of the world.

The idea that unresolved trauma creates cycles of stress and reactivity feels just as relevant beyond the counselor’s office. It maps surprisingly well onto our collective consciousness and onto the story of the United States itself.

The notion that our country might benefit from therapy feels morbidly accurate. When you consider our origin story and long history of conflict, injustice and division, the tensions of today feel less surprising (if not inevitable).

The U.S. began in conflict, as colonists wrested land and resources from the Indigenous peoples who already lived here. Those tensions escalated into the Revolutionary War, wherein independence was the outcome, but what it took to achieve it — violence, sacrifice and existential struggle — became part of the country’s founding identity.

In the centuries since, the U.S. has returned to war with a steady cadence. From the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War, the World Wars and later conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, combat has become part of our national rhythm.

We fund a military larger than that of the next several countries combined, maintaining a system built for response — so much so that it might, at times, reach for something to respond to. It’s hard not to see echoes of the brain’s trauma circuitry in that position: watchtower-like vigilance, a smoke alarm primed to sound and the sense that the largest possible response is the safest one.

Just as the body’s protective systems can become stuck in patterns, firing at smaller and smaller perceived threats, perhaps nations can fall into similar habits. What once served survival begins to shape identity, and reactivity becomes precedent.

The same echoes appear in our political life and social systems. A two-party system hardened by the trauma of the Civil War carries a legacy of otherness so deep that violence once seemed like the only resolution. The language of today’s politics — name-calling, demonization, existential framing — still carries traces of that wound.

And then arguably, there’s the deepest trauma of all: a foundation of systemic inequality. Generations of injustice have carved grooves into our national life, shaping who benefits, who suffers and how we respond to attempts at change.

Like unprocessed trauma in an individual, these patterns tend to recreate themselves.

We normalize enormous reactions, like loss of life in the name of war, civic breakdown in the name of political victory and social division in the name of identity.

In my 20s, I wore the consequences of my own unprocessed trauma like a badge of honor. My hyper-independence felt like something to be proud of. My inability to trust people to show up for me became justification for avoiding stability — something I rebranded as “vagabonding.”

But in my 30s, I’m beginning the slower work of examining those experiences more honestly. I’m learning that my reactions rarely begin in the present moment, instead drawing from the entire archive of what came before. Sometimes those reactions sabotage the life I’m trying to build.

Our country, in all its youth, feels caught between the two, wearing our scarred history like patriotism itself, with half the population being proud of that identity and half wanting to examine the ways it perpetuates outcomes that don’t serve them at best, and causes harm at worst.

Like the therapist in the chair, I’m left questioning whether we’ll ever decide to examine our past in the ways that demand recourse or beg for repair, or if we’re doomed to forever live with the smoke alarm ringing — and the ever-escalating toll it’ll surely take.

Emily Erickson is a writer and business owner with an affinity for black coffee and playing in the mountains. Connect with her online at www.bigbluehat.studio.