When the Body Carries the Story

Not all trauma speaks in words.

Some of it settles in your chest like a heaviness you can’t explain.
Some of it tightens your throat, makes your stomach churn, keeps your shoulders raised just enough to feel safe.
Some of it says: You’re fine. It wasn’t that bad. Even as your body tells you otherwise.

We often think of trauma as an event. But more often, it’s the absence of what we needed in those moments — safety, comfort, attunement. And when those needs go unmet, our nervous systems learn to adapt. To brace. To numb. To overfunction. To shut down.

Even long after the moment has passed, the body remembers.

You might notice it in the way your jaw clenches when someone raises their voice.
Or the way your body goes still when you sense conflict.
Or how your stomach aches before a conversation you’re dreading.

None of this means something is wrong with you.
It means something happened to you — and your body is still trying to protect you the best way it knows how.

When the body carries the story, healing can’t just happen through insight or analysis. We have to include the body in the process — not to force it to “relax,” but to listen. To build trust. To offer what wasn’t there before.

This is the beauty of somatic work, and why therapy can feel like such a homecoming.
Because the goal isn’t to make symptoms disappear — it’s to understand the story beneath them.
It’s to help your body learn what safety feels like again.

And that’s slow, sacred work.
Work that doesn’t ask you to perform or perfect.
Just to begin noticing, gently.

Your body isn’t the enemy.
It’s the storyteller.
And it’s been speaking all along.