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…
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