The Body Keeps the Score: How a Book Used Against Me Became How I Reclaimed My Power
A mental health professional once used The Body Keeps the Score against me — not to help me understand my own nervous system, but as a tool of power, while we shared clients and I was working as a certified holistic healing practitioner and coach.
That is not what this book is for. And it took me time to separate the book from the way it was used on me.
What happened
The information in that book — how trauma lives in the body, how a nervous system trained by real harm reads danger accurately — was turned into a weapon instead of a map. My own vigilance, built from real abuse, was used as evidence against me, in a professional relationship where the power imbalance was supposed to be held responsibly.
That is its own form of narcissistic abuse: taking the truest, most vulnerable material of a person's healing and using it to control them instead.
What I had to reclaim
I had to separate the book from the person who weaponized it. The science didn't stop being true because it was used badly. My body's memory wasn't wrong because someone with credentials decided to make it inconvenient.
So I went back to the book on my own terms. Not as something done to me, but as something I get to use — the same way I use it now with my own clients, responsibly, the way it should have been used with me.
What this actually means, practically
If someone with authority uses your own healing information to control or diminish you, that is an abuse of power — not proof that the information, or you, is the problem.
You are allowed to keep what's true and discard how it was used against you. Those are two separate things.
Reclaiming power sometimes looks like returning to the exact material that was turned against you, and deciding what it means for yourself this time.
This book didn't just teach me that trauma lives in the body. It taught me that power, used without integrity, will use anything it can reach — including the very tools meant to heal you. Reclaiming it meant taking the map back out of the hands that used it wrong.
SUPPORT THE WORK
All contributions help sustain Alexandria Tava, LLC and its independent work in education, media, advocacy, and public wellbeing—particularly around abuse of power, injustice, rebuilding, and human wholeness.
