What does this book give a reader who is not in therapy?

Van der Kolk's central claim is that trauma is stored somatically and that talk alone often fails to reach it. The clinical evidence for body-based approaches has grown, though specific modalities in the book vary a lot in support.

The difficulty is that this is a clinical book that became a mass-market one. Readers arrive looking for self-treatment and find descriptions of therapies that require a trained practitioner. Some come away with a vocabulary for their experience and no access to the interventions.

There is a real risk in self-diagnosis from a book that is largely about how hard accurate diagnosis is.

So the honest question: did reading this help, or did it mainly give you language? Both are legitimate outcomes, but they are not the same thing.