Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like The Body Keeps the Score
The Body Keeps the Score changed the conversation about trauma. Not by telling one person’s story, but by proving something most survivors already knew: that trauma lives in the body long after the mind has tried to move on. Bessel van der Kolk spent thirty years treating people who couldn’t understand why they couldn’t just get over it — and this book is his answer. These 4 books share that same rigour and honesty. Each one refuses to simplify what it means to be broken by something real, and what it actually takes to heal.
By Lisanne Swart · 4 books · Memoir & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
01
Memoir
Educated On my shelf
Tara Westover · 2018
Tara Westover grew up in a family that denied reality — no school, no doctors, no outside world. The trauma in this book is so normalized that Westover herself cannot name it for years. Van der Kolk writes about exactly this: how the body absorbs what the mind refuses to recognize, how the nervous system adapts to conditions that should never have been normal. Educated is a memoir of that process, lived from the inside without clinical language.
Van der Kolk shows the neuroscience. Westover shows what it looks like when a person finally starts to trust what her own body has been telling her all along. Both books ask the same question: how do you know what happened to you when the people around you insisted it was nothing?
Read my full recommendation →
02
Memoir
The Choice On my shelf
Edith Eger · 2017
Edith Eger survived Auschwitz as a teenage ballet dancer and spent the following decades helping others survive what broke them. Van der Kolk draws on her work. They are, in many ways, colleagues across time — one building the science, the other living the proof. The Choice is what van der Kolk’s research looks like in a single human life: the body that stored what the mind could not bear, and the long, deliberate work of coming back to it.
Both books argue the same thing: survival is not the end of trauma. Healing is a second, slower fight — and it happens in the body as much as the mind. Eger understood before the research existed what the research would eventually prove.
Read my full recommendation →
03
Nonfiction
What Happened to You? On my shelf
Oprah Winfrey & Bruce D. Perry · 2021
Van der Kolk and Dr. Bruce Perry are working in the same field, asking the same question. Perry’s book — a series of conversations with Oprah Winfrey — covers the same terrain as The Body Keeps the Score: what childhood trauma does to the developing brain, why survivors behave the way they do, and what healing actually requires. But it does so in conversation form, which makes it warmer and easier to absorb without losing the clinical seriousness.
If The Body Keeps the Score is the rigorous foundation, this is the companion that makes the same ideas land differently. Van der Kolk asks: what does trauma do? Perry asks: what did it do to you, specifically, when you were young?
Read my full recommendation →
04
Memoir
Tell Me Who I Am On my shelf
Alex & Marcus Lewis · 2013
Alex wakes from a coma with no memory — not of his name, his past, the trauma he lived through. His twin brother Marcus decides what to tell him. And what to hide. Van der Kolk writes at length about how trauma disrupts memory, how the brain hides what it cannot process. This memoir is a living illustration of exactly that — except here the disruption was not just neurological. It was imposed by someone else, out of love, and at enormous cost.
One of the most unsettling books I have read. It asks the same question as The Body Keeps the Score in a completely different register: what do you do with what your body already knows, when someone else decided you shouldn’t?
Read my full recommendation →
Not sure where to start?
If you want the science made human
→ Read What Happened to You? first. Perry and Oprah cover the same ground as van der Kolk, but in conversation form — more accessible, equally serious.
If you want to see what trauma healing looks like in a single life
→ Read The Choice. Edith Eger and van der Kolk are in dialogue. One built the research; the other lived the proof.
If you want a memoir that shows trauma without naming it
→ Read Educated. It is what van der Kolk describes in the neuroscience — experienced from the inside, without the clinical language.
Frequently asked questions about books like The Body Keeps the Score
What is The Body Keeps the Score about?
The Body Keeps the Score is Bessel van der Kolk’s account of thirty years treating trauma survivors and researching what trauma does to the brain, mind, and body. His central argument is that trauma is not only a psychological event — it reshapes the nervous system and is literally stored in the body. The book draws on neuroscience, psychotherapy, EMDR, yoga, and theatre as paths to healing. It is widely considered the definitive book on trauma.
Is The Body Keeps the Score suitable for trauma survivors to read?
Many trauma survivors find it deeply clarifying — it can feel like finally getting an explanation for experiences that never made sense before. But it is also detailed and clinical in places, and some readers find it activating rather than soothing. It is worth reading at a time when you have support around you. That said, many people read it alone and find it genuinely helpful.
What is the difference between The Body Keeps the Score and What Happened to You?
Both books are about trauma and healing, written by clinicians with decades of experience. The Body Keeps the Score is more rigorous and research-focused — a comprehensive account of what van der Kolk has learned across a career. What Happened to You? is warmer and more accessible, a conversation between Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey covering similar ground with more personal storytelling and less clinical detail. Most readers find both worth reading, in either order.
Is The Body Keeps the Score too clinical or dense to read?
It depends on the reader. Van der Kolk is a good writer and the book has real narrative drive — it is not a dry academic text. But it is a substantial work of nonfiction, not a memoir. If you are looking for something more personal to start with, read The Choice or Educated first, and come back to van der Kolk when you are ready for the research behind what those memoirs describe.
