28/12/2025
The Body Remembers
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Trauma doesn’t only live in memory. It lives in posture, breath, muscle tension, startle responses, and the way the nervous system stays on guard long after danger has passed. Long before words arrive, the body has already learned the lesson.
The Body Remembers begins from that understanding.
Babette Rothschild bridges neuroscience, physiology, and psychotherapy to explain how traumatic experiences are stored not just in the mind, but in the body’s automatic responses. This is not a book about reliving trauma. It is a book about understanding how the nervous system adapts to threat, and how healing must work with the body, not against it.
Clear, precise, and deeply respectful of both clients and practitioners, Rothschild explains how symptoms like hypervigilance, emotional numbness, dissociation, and chronic tension are not failures to “move on,” but intelligent survival responses. The body learned to protect itself. The problem arises when those protections remain active long after the danger is gone.
Lessons from The Body Remembers:
1. Trauma Is Physiological as Well as Psychological
Traumatic stress affects the autonomic nervous system, shaping reactions beyond conscious control. Healing requires working with the body, not just insight or memory.
2. Symptoms Are Survival Strategies
Responses like freezing, numbing, or hyper-alertness once served a protective function. What looks like dysfunction is often adaptation that outlived its context.
3. The Body Stores Implicit Memory
Trauma can be remembered through sensation, tension, and reflex, even without clear narrative memory. Understanding may come through bodily awareness before words.
4. Safety Comes Before Processing
Rothschild emphasizes stabilization and nervous system regulation before any trauma exploration. Healing cannot happen in a state of overwhelm.
5. Arousal Regulation Is Central
Managing activation (fight/flight) and shutdown (freeze) is key to recovery. Learning to recognize and modulate arousal restores a sense of control.
6. Choice Restores Agency
Trauma removes choice; healing reintroduces it. Empowerment, not exposure is the foundation of trauma treatment.
7. The Body Can Learn Safety Again
Just as the nervous system learned threat, it can relearn calm and connection.The body’s memory is not permanent, it is plastic.
The Body Remembers is not a light read, and it isn’t meant to be. It’s a foundational text that reshaped how trauma is understood and treated, especially in somatic and trauma-informed therapy. Its strength lies in its clarity, restraint, and respect for the human nervous system.
This book is invaluable for therapists, caregivers, and thoughtful readers who want to understand trauma beyond labels and symptoms. It teaches a crucial truth: healing is not about forcing the body to forget, but helping it learn that the danger has passed.
BOOK: https://amzn.to/48W0tgt
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