Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like
Van der Kolk has spent over four decades researching how trauma reshapes the brain and body, and his book The Body Keeps the Score became an unlikely, years-long bestseller for making that research accessible to a general readership. This list is for readers who want more of that territory: the researchers and clinicians whose work overlaps with his, extending trauma neuroscience into attachment, addiction, and racialized and developmental trauma specifically.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 authors · Psychiatry & Trauma · Neuroscience · Updated August 2026
Peter Levine
Levine developed Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy built on the premise that trauma is stored in the nervous system rather than only the mind, sharing van der Kolk’s core conviction that talk therapy alone is often insufficient.
The clinical originator of much of the body-based treatment philosophy van der Kolk advocates for in The Body Keeps the Score.
John Bowlby
Bowlby’s foundational attachment theory — that early caregiver bonds shape lifelong emotional development — provides the developmental groundwork that much of van der Kolk’s trauma research builds on and extends into neuroscience.
Read him for the earlier developmental-psychology foundation that predates and underlies van der Kolk’s more recent neurological trauma research.
Gabor Maté
Maté’s work connecting early trauma to adult addiction and chronic illness covers closely related clinical territory to van der Kolk, both arguing that trauma’s effects are physical and lasting, not just psychological.
A close physician-peer to van der Kolk, working similar terrain with a particular focus on addiction and disease.
Resmaa Menakem
Menakem applies a closely related body-based trauma framework specifically to racialized trauma, arguing it lives physically in the body across generations — a direct application of van der Kolk’s broader thesis to race specifically.
Read him for how van der Kolk’s core insight — trauma is stored in the body — gets applied specifically to racial and intergenerational trauma.
Nadine Burke Harris
Burke Harris’s research on Adverse Childhood Experiences demonstrates the same core principle van der Kolk documents — that trauma produces measurable physical health effects — from a pediatric public health angle rather than psychiatry.
A useful medical complement to van der Kolk’s psychiatric focus, showing the same trauma-body connection through a different clinical lens.
Judith Herman
Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, published in 1992, was one of the foundational texts establishing complex trauma as a distinct clinical category, predating and directly influencing much of van der Kolk’s later work in the same field.
An essential predecessor to The Body Keeps the Score — Herman’s earlier book laid much of the clinical groundwork van der Kolk later built on and popularized.
Where to start if you loved Bessel van der Kolk
If you want the foundational trauma text, then read Judith Herman.
Trauma and Recovery predates and directly influenced much of van der Kolk’s later work.
If you want the somatic treatment origin, then read Peter Levine.
He developed the body-based trauma therapy van der Kolk advocates for.
If you want the racial trauma application, then read Resmaa Menakem.
He applies van der Kolk’s core insight specifically to racialized and intergenerational trauma.
If you want his own work first, then start with his books.
My complete guide to Bessel van der Kolk’s own books is the place to begin.
If you want more of this tradition, then keep exploring it.
My best books about trauma and healing list has the natural successors.
Frequently asked questions about authors like Bessel van der Kolk
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