Our bodies store our unhealed trauma – but they are also our gateway to freedom
Hello beautiful people,
Some years ago I was doing an online course about learning to inhabit my feminine goddess energy. It felt exciting, I had spent many years feeling disconnected from my body, through the years of child rearing and from having long term back pain – and I was ready to reconnect to the magical mystical woman the course was so eagerly promoting.
I put on some music one afternoon, some sensually beautiful Portuguese fado music and started to dance. I started to think about my sexuality, my feminine magnetism, I was swaying my hips, and then all of a sudden I burst into tears.
And I couldn’t stop crying.
I had this deep, terrifying sensation of being incredibly unsafe. I was scared.
I tried to carry on dancing, but I couldn’t. I was shaking, I was scared and I wanted to just stop, crawl up into a ball and hide.
I felt deeply confused and unsettled. I had no clear visions about why I was crying. I had no clear understanding of any connection to an event or events in my life. It was just a horrible feeling that seemed to have no connection to anything else in my life.
It wasn’t until I started working with, and then training in, Neuro Emotional Coaching that I understood what had happened.
I had had an experience when I was a young woman that had been so confusing and painful that I hadn’t told anyone about it.
I felt so alone in this experience, and what I now recognise as shame, that I suppressed the feelings about it. I was alone in the pain, and it was this that created such a deep, life-altering trauma response.
Trauma gets stored in our bodies and stops us from living in a fully free, fully realised way.
The trauma that we have appears in all kinds of ways, when you know how to look for it. But for most people, and this was me for decades, trauma doesn’t always look ‘logically’ like trauma. It can appear like:
- Pathologically avoiding situations, experiences, peoples or emotions
- Having overwhelming fears or anxiety
- Having a body that is full of pain and chronic illness
- Having hair-trigger reactions to seemingly innocuous events
- Overwhelming and persistent anger or rage
- A deep unease and sense of unsafety in our bodies
And many other things.
Trauma can be defined as an experience or experiences that provoked strong emotion and pain, that you were not able to process, or left unsupported or alone with.
“Trauma is a psychic wound that hardens you psychologically that then interferes with your ability to grow and develop. It pains you and now you’re acting out of pain. It induces fear and now you’re acting out of fear. Trauma is not what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.” Gabor Mate
My body has stored the raw emotional pain of that experience. My body remembered. And for me it reappeared over and over in a deep feeling of unsafety when I am too close, too connected, to my sexuality.
So my mind and body tried to keep me safe by avoiding situations and experiences that will bring it up. Our minds are always trying to protect us, and if we don’t have the tools to deal with trauma, it will do its best to keep us safe. Although this often means we are cutting off huge parts of our life, our experiences and potential.
I dealt with it by diving into being a mother. I allowed my kids to take over my body and life, because it was a convenient and safe way for me to not be too close to that raw, painful feeling of violation.
It changed my behaviour in a myriad of ways – but none of it felt clearly connected to that early experience.
Where we hold tension and pain in our bodies can often be the signs or the information about where our unprocessed trauma is being held. Which is why it can often be brought up in things like movement, as mine had, or massage, breathwork or acupuncture.
Unprocessed trauma can affect our current behaviours in ways that may not seem obvious on the outside.
The man whose mother had crippling anxiety feels so unsafe in the world he needs to control his routine and environment so he can try to feel safe. The world sees him as hyper organised and productive, but he never feels like he is ‘safe’ from that dangerous sensation of never having ‘safe ground’ to stand on.
The middle aged man whose body is in constant pain, with ailments being fixed and the pain appearing in other places, whose early life had been a constant stream of anger and rage being directed at him.
The ever single woman whose parents were cold, distant and judgmental, who looks like she can’t seem to find the perfect guy, but in actuality whose body is rejecting the sensation of intimacy as too painful. Intimacy is a dangerous sensation to her body because for so many of her early years it always led to the sensation of rejection.
For me the experience as a young woman developed into a sensation of unsafety with so many things – flying left me a nervous wreck, any physical adventure activities were off limits – any sense that my body was out of control and vulnerable would overwhelm my nervous system and make me feel like I was in danger.
But the incredible thing is – we don’t have to relive our childhoods or forever be influenced by the past. Our lives don’t need to always be at the mercy of what came before.
Freedom is possible.
And for that we have our bodies to thank. For it’s in our bodies that these deep wounds, these traumas get stored – and is also where they also get healed.
The path to freedom from the traumas I had experienced was not by beating up on the people or situations or myself – but through my body.
Our bodies store the raw pain, the unintegrated emotions, the shock and shame – we are a walking memory bank full of the sensations of the knocks and scrapes and impacts of past painful situations.
Our bodies are also the place that we can create the deepest, most intense and liberating freedom. “Of all the things trauma takes away from us, the worst is our willingness, or even our ability, to be vulnerable. There’s a reclaiming that has to happen.”
Brene Brown
Sometimes we can handle these resurfacing of trauma and unprocessed emotions. We can do practises that bring up unprocessed trauma and sit with it, be with it, hold it and offer ourselves deep compassion.
But often, for things that are too intense or even going close to it pushes our nervous systems into dysregulation, panic or overwhelm – it is wise for us to work with a practitioner who is trauma-informed and can create safety in your nervous system.
To work with somatic-focused modality. Someone who knows how to hold you and ensure your emotional safety so that you can journey gently and slowly through trauma together for healing.
A practitioner with a trauma-informed approach will make sure that you feel safe, ask your permission along the way in order to go deeper and give you a clear understanding of what to expect and when (no surprises!)
Our bodies are the key, the ultimate wisdom, amazing intuitive guides, and when we can’t fully connect to the wisdom and guidance that they can offer, starting to build that relationship again comes from releasing the trauma that is so exhausting to carry.
Our bodies will always show us the way, if we can learn to reconnect to them once again.
Sending you so much love,
Diana