20/10/2025
How I've learnt to Understand Trauma in my Body
Healing from trauma isn’t about fixing what’s wrong with you. It’s about helping your body remember that you are safe now.
Trauma doesn’t follow logic. It doesn’t care what topic you bring to counselling or what story you tell yourself about why you feel the way you do. It simply hurts, in your chest, your gut, your breath, and your skin. It shows up before you even have a thought about why.
Our minds try to make sense of that pain. We link it to relationships, work, money, s*x, family, anything that gives the discomfort a reason. But trauma isn’t a story. It’s a physical experience that lives on in the nervous system long after the event has passed.
That’s why it can be so confusing. You might think, “I’m upset because of this situation,” when in fact your body is remembering something old. You’re not overreacting, your nervous system is still trying to complete what never got finished.
When something painful happens and you can’t fight, flee, or escape, that energy stays trapped. It hides in your muscles, your breath, and your thoughts. Later in life, a small moment, a look, a delay, or a tone can stir the same old response. The body reacts before the brain can catch up.
You can’t think your way out of that. You can only learn to stay with what’s happening long enough for it to move through you. That’s why somatic therapy, breathwork, mindfulness, and gentle awareness matter. They don’t erase pain; they teach your body that it can survive feeling it.
Healing isn’t about never hurting again. It’s about no longer being controlled by the hurt. It’s learning to feel sadness without collapsing, anger without destruction, and fear without shutting down. It’s knowing you can sit in discomfort and still be safe.
Sometimes, even joy can feel strange. When your body has lived in protection mode, peace and pleasure can seem unsafe. You might find yourself drawn to chaos, not because you want to suffer, but because it’s familiar. Healing teaches you how to rest in safety, how to trust calm.
The real work of therapy isn’t just about understanding what happened, but helping your body know that it’s over. You don’t have to keep guarding yourself in every silence or conversation.
Your mind may still search for reasons, it’s what minds do when they’re afraid. But healing isn’t found in control. It’s found in softening, in noticing, in allowing.
Every time you stay present with your pain, your body learns something new, that you’re safe now, that you’re not alone, that you can feel and still exist afterwards.
That’s how old loops start to fade, through kindness, presence, and patience. When you stop confusing the trigger for the source, you stop building your life around pain and start building it around truth.
Healing isn’t about erasing what happened. It’s about reclaiming who you are underneath it.
It’s about remembering safety, one breath at a time.
