[1][2] The book describes van der Kolk's research and experiences on how people are affected by traumatic stress, including its effects on the mind and body.

[7] The book is based on van der Kolk’s 1994 Harvard Review of Psychiatry article "The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress".

[8][9] In the book, van der Kolk focuses on the central role of the attachment system and social environment to protect against developing trauma related disorders.

McNally describes "recovered memory therapy," inspired by Kolk's approach, as "arguably the most serious catastrophe to strike the mental health field since the lobotomy era".

It states that van der Kolk and Levine "regularly ignore, misrepresent, and sometimes veer into or close to pseudoscience when it comes to the scientific knowledge base of PTSD treatment".

Buoyed by a groundswell of popular interest in trauma and psychology in the wake of the pandemic, the dense, scientifically rigorous text has become a latent, runaway success, spending nearly 300 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.