The official reasons were allegations of bullying, verbal abuse, and creating a hostile work environment for junior staff and trainees. Specific accusations included yelling at employees, disparaging other clinical approaches, and fostering a cult of personality around his own methods. Van der Kolk admitted to being "impatient and demanding" but denied the most serious charges, framing the conflict as a clash between his unconventional, disruptive style and bureaucratic managerialism.
It was the 1970s and 80s, and the United States was still reeling from the Vietnam War. The VA system was flooded with young men suffering from what was then poorly understood. Officially, "Post-Vietnam Syndrome" was not yet the well-defined diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which would only appear in the DSM-III in 1980. Van der Kolk was on the front lines. He saw veterans who would explode in rage at a loud noise, who numbed themselves with alcohol and heroin, who were trapped in a perpetual present where the jungle was always just around the corner. bessel van der kolk
The trauma world was split. Many colleagues and former patients defended him passionately, arguing that his intensity was part of his genius and that the accusations were a pretext for a long-simmering institutional rebellion against his dominance. Others saw the dismissal as a necessary reckoning, arguing that a man who preached the importance of safety and relational attunement was failing to provide it to his own staff. The official reasons were allegations of bullying, verbal
He found that when trauma survivors are reminded of their experience, a region of the brain called the —the smoke detector for threat—goes into overdrive. Meanwhile, Broca’s area , the part of the brain responsible for speech, effectively shuts down. This was a neurobiological explanation for the common clinical observation that survivors "go speechless" under duress. They cannot articulate their experience because the part of the brain needed to form coherent narrative is offline. It was the 1970s and 80s, and the
More controversially, van der Kolk focused on the , a region that monitors the body’s internal state (interoception). He argued that trauma fundamentally alters the relationship between the mind and the body. Survivors often feel disembodied, numb, or disconnected from their physical sensations. They might be unable to feel comfort, or they might experience ordinary touch as a threat.
For much of the 20th century, psychological trauma was a ghost in the room of psychiatry. It was acknowledged in the fine print of diagnostic manuals, often reduced to a checklist of symptoms like flashbacks and hypervigilance. The dominant treatments—talk therapy and medication—offered relief for some, but for countless others, the nightmare of the past refused to fade. Enter Bessel van der Kolk, a Dutch-born psychiatrist whose career has been a forty-year crusade to prove a radical, unsettling, and ultimately liberating truth: trauma is not just a story in the mind; it is a wound etched into the body.
His impact has spilled far beyond the clinic. Survivors of childhood abuse, sexual assault, and racial violence have found validation in his pages. The book has become a foundational text for understanding the link between trauma and addiction, chronic pain, and autoimmune disorders. It has even influenced social justice movements, providing a framework for understanding "collective trauma" and intergenerational transmission of pain.