When it comes to stress and trauma, your body is like that friend who remembers every awkward detail about the time you tripped in high school—except it doesn’t just remember the moments; it stores them. Whether it’s a knot in your stomach when someone raises their voice or a sudden freeze when you’re overwhelmed, your body holds onto experiences, even when your brain decides to hit the “forget” button.

Your brain is like that overprotective friend who means well but ends up creating chaos. It’s always either reliving the past—“Remember that embarrassing thing you said in 2008? Let’s cringe about it for hours!”—or trying to predict the future—“What if everything goes wrong? Let’s panic just in case!”

This isn’t malicious. Your brain is just doing its job: protecting you. It’s scanning for threats, thanks to its trusty negativity bias, which is like having a personal alarm system set to “paranoia.” It remembers all the bad stuff to keep you safe and adapts to the environment around you.

But here’s the catch: instead of hanging out in the real world, your brain often keeps you stuck in a virtual reality of worst-case scenarios and past disasters. Meanwhile, your body is over here like, “Hey, I’m in the present moment! Wanna join me?”

When the brain and body stop communicating, though, it’s bad news. Research shows that this disconnection can lead to chronic stress, emotional dysregulation, and even physical health issues like inflammation and heart disease (Van der Kolk, 2014; Chrousos, 2009). The brain might be busy replaying past failures or imagining future catastrophes, but without feedback from the body, it can’t accurately gauge what’s happening right now. That’s like trying to navigate with a broken GPS—it’s just guesswork.

The thing is, your body is your true bestie(even though in all reality our brain is part of our body too lol). It’s always working to help you survive, adapt, and even thrive. But if your mind is running the show solo, you end up disconnected from your body’s wisdom, stuck in a loop of overthinking, and missing what’s actually happening right now.

To sum it up: Your brain’s a bit of a drama queen, but your body? Total grounding MVP. And when they’re on speaking terms, magic happens—you heal, grow, and actually enjoy the ride.

Now to the topic of trauma, which thanks to new science isnt viewed as just the experience but what happens inside of us as a result. From the perspective of psychobiology trauma is an interrupted stress response and all the creative ways we adapt to protect ourselves as a result of the wound that happened. 

So it’s not like they used to think that trauma is just a psychological wound, it doesn’t just live in our memories, sometimes we actually have no memory or words for what happened; it’s imprinted in our posture, movements, physiological responses,  and the way we perceive ourselves and navigate the world. Chronic stress or early attachment wounds—like inconsistent care, abuse or chronic emotional misattunemets—shape how we hold ourselves. Leaning forward might signal a drive to please or seek connection, collapsing inward could reflect defeat or helplessness, while moving against others, with a rigid, defensive posture, may guard against harm. 

These patterns are not flaws—they’re adaptations your body developed to keep you safe in the moment – only what was helpful back then often becomes the root of our issues as adults. So the process of soamtic healing is finding ways to let the body, the nervous system, know that right now we are safe enough. When the body does not feel safe aka survival mode, we cannot fully take in new information, experience, connect socially, or engage in life in adaptive ways , only reacting in protective ways – survival comes first.

The Body as a Keeper of Memory

This is why early life adversity leaves such a profound mark. Our baby nervous system is constantly scanning the enviroment, learning, and adapting all In the name of survival.  The memories might not live in your conscious mind, but they exist in your body as implicit memories (and subconscious)—the unspoken sensations, automatic reactions, imagery, and emotions that pop up seemingly out of nowhere. As Dr. Pat Ogden says:

“The body remembers what the mind forgets.”

A traumatic event—especially in early childhood—signals your brain’s alarm system (the amygdala) floods your body with stress hormones, while the rational thinking brain (prefrontal cortex) is not yet fully developed to help you process what’s happening. In infancy and early childhood, the hippocampus is still maturing, which means it cannot effectively organize experiences into cohesive narratives. Instead, these experiences are stored as fragmented bits—sensations, images, or physical reactions—without clear context or a sense of time.

As the brain develops later in life, traumatic experiences may still overwhelm the hippocampus, especially if the nervous system is already dysregulated from earlier stress or attachment disruptions. This can result in a similar fragmented storage of memories, with emotions and body sensations remaining disconnected from the conscious, logical understanding of events.

It’s also crucial to acknowledge how our identity, privilege, and intersections with systemic oppression influence the ways trauma impacts us. Factors like race, gender, class, disability, and sexual orientation shape both the types of traumatic experiences we might face and the resources available to us for healing.As humans we all have the same needs of physical resources like food, water, and shelter, but we also all need to feel safety, belonging, and dignity and unfortunately these resources are not distributed equally.

For individuals from marginalized communities, trauma is often not a singular event but an ongoing experience rooted in systemic inequalities, discrimination, and generational oppression. The chronic nature of this trauma can keep the nervous system in a persistent state of survival, further complicating the healing process. Recognizing these dynamics ensures that trauma-informed care is inclusive, equitable, and responsive to the diverse ways trauma shows up in our bodies and lives. 

These body-based memories linger, influencing how you respond to the world. For instance, you might feel inexplicable tension in your chest when someone criticizes you, even if the situation isn’t truly threatening. This is your implicit memory at work, replaying survival patterns that were once necessary but may no longer serve you and actually hold you back from moving towards the life you truly desire.

Additionally, insufficient sensory processing due to chronic survival stress can disconnect you from your body altogether, leading to numbness, dissociation, or depersonalization. The result is a fragmented sense of self and difficulty regulating emotions, forming healthy relationships, or trusting your inner world. And when this complex trauma happens in early life we may never get a change to form a sense of Self because all our attention is on the external world and staying safe ( staying connected to our caregivers is essential to our survival even when the wounding is coming from them ), our nervous system is wired for survival so we will unconsciously abandon ourselves, our needs, and our bodies to live.

Why Somatic Healing Matters

Talk therapy is excellent for unpacking explicit memories, but it doesn’t always reach the deeper, wordless layers where trauma lives. As Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, emphasizes:

“Trauma is stored not as a story, but as sensations and emotions. You must address the body to access it.”

Somatic therapies, like Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY)  and other integrative psychobiological and nervous system informed modalities focus on helping you reconnect with your body to release stored tension, complete stress cycles, build resilience, and start to feel safe enough to inhabit your body. These practices work by inviting you to notice, explore, and integrate the sensations and movements that live in your body.

Stress, Trauma, and Movement

Trauma interrupts the body’s natural stress response cycle, leaving survival energy stuck in the system. This incomplete process shows up as habitual physical patterns, like clenched muscles, shallow breathing, or avoidance behaviors. Over time, this dysregulation can manifest as chronic pain, anxiety, depression, or autoimmune disorders.

Healing through somatic work is not about reliving the trauma but allowing the body to complete what was interrupted, metabolizing the trapped energy of the stress response, what we sometimes call life force energy (or we can go more woo woo here and call it prana, chi, or something =P) . For example, rhythmic movements like rocking or shaking can help release stored tension, while practices like grounding, centering, self-touch and other embodied mindful movements that focus on the internal felt sense (not on how it looks but how it feels)  can help restore connection to the body and balance to your nervous system.  

Healing in Action

In Trauma Healing Yoga  (TCTSY), which is an evidence based soamtic therapy for complex trauma, you’re invited to notice sensations in your body and make choices about what you want to do with your body, There’s no “right” way to do it, no gaols to achieve, nothing to perfect—it’s about exploring what feels ok and empowering, while in the presence of an attuned, non-judgemental, non-coercive, empathetic TCTSY facilitator – which is crucial in the case of chronic relational trauma . This helps rewire your nervous system so that old survival patterns can soften, and a sense of agency can be restored.

There are all different kinds of approaches and modalities to somatic healing and I blend many of them in my Integrative Somatic coaching container, blending ancient wisdom with the newest breakthroughs in the psychobiology of stress and trauma:

•Polyvagal-informed tools: Shift from survival states into calm and connection by learning to speak the language of your body and mapping your individual system.

•Somatic stress + emotional release: Learning how to support emotions and the stress response to complete organically

•Somatic movement therapy: Reconnect to your joy, aliveness, and freedom through movement, re-patterning bracing patterns and completing interrupted survival responses. 

•Sensual somatics + pleasure activism: reconnect to your ability to receive and unlearn the societal conditioning that is keeping you small, silenced, self-sacrificing and causing physical and mental dis-ease

•Mind-body education for healing chronic dis-ease: knowledge is power and the more you know about how your mind and body work, the more agency you have in your own health and wellbeing. Wester medicine is ignoring the mind body connection, even though there is MORE than enough research on it. Connecting to your body isnt just a wellness trend, its your ticket to a regulated nervous ssytem and HEALTH.

•Somatic Shadow + Parts work (IFS): Safely explore and integrate parts of yourself that feel stuck  disowned, or too scared to express (inner child), to remembering your inherent wholeness , shedding conditioning that is not yours to carry, and starting to feel good in your own skin – there are no bad parts of you.

These practices, tool, and modalities serve to help you tune into your body’s wisdom, finding ease and a sense of safe enoughness and reclaiming connection to your true embodied Self. IT’s not about perfecting or fixing yourself, its a process of unlearning the things that no loner serve you and remembering your wholeness, your inherent goodness and that you are a worthy human being, all of you belongs here.

As Dr. Peter Levine, creator of Somatic Experiencing, reminds us:

“Healing isn’t about remembering every detail. It’s about finding safety in the present and allowing the body to complete what was once interrupted.”

Somatic healing isn’t about forcing change but creating safety to reconnect to yourself and the world around you, to dip your toes in the river of the felt sense, and integrate all parts of you at your own pace. It’s about recognising that you are not borken and how your body has been protecting you all along.

Dr. Dan Siegel sums it up perfectly: “Integration is the heart of healing. When we bring together the different aspects of our experience—mind, body, and emotions—we create a sense of wholeness.”

I would argue this wholeness is how we come into the world, somatic healing is about remembering that fact.

Your body isn’t just holding your past—it’s holding the key to your freedom, fulfilment, pleasure, and resilience. By reconnecting with the rhythms and language of your body, you can move out of survival mode and into a state of balance, aliveness, thriving, and authentic self-expression. Healing is not about fixing yourself—it’s about coming home to the body that’s been holding you all along.

 

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