How trauma stays written in the body — and how the body can let it go

You may know the feeling: the event is long past, and yet a particular smell, tone of voice or gesture suddenly tightens your stomach. Your shoulders lift, your breath stops, your heart pounds — and all the while your mind knows perfectly well that nothing dangerous is happening right now. As if your body were living in a different time from your head.

This is not imagination and it is not weakness. It is one of the best-documented phenomena in the science of trauma: whatever overwhelms the nervous system is stored not only as a memory in the mind, but also as a pattern in the body — in the muscles, the breathing, the posture, the digestion, the heart rhythm. The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk devoted an entire book to it, with a telling title: The Body Keeps the Score — the body keeps a record.

In this piece I explain how trauma writes itself into the body, why talking alone sometimes cannot reach it, and what you can do when your body pulls you back into the past. If you haven’t yet, I recommend starting with the piece on the myth “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — there I explained what trauma actually is and what the window of tolerance means. This one builds on it: from the head to the body.

A memory that doesn’t know it is the past

An ordinary memory carries a time stamp. When you remember last year’s holiday, you know it happened then and there; you can tell the story from beginning to end and calmly watch it from a distance while you do. Traumatic memory often works differently: it isn’t stored as a story, but as scattered fragments — an image, a smell, a bodily sensation, a wave of panic — with no date and no narrative.

The reason lies in how the brain works when it is overwhelmed. The amygdala, our alarm centre, fires at full strength under threat and burns the experience into memory together with all its sensory detail. The hippocampus, which files events into time and place (“this happened then, there, and it is over”), works less well under intense stress. The result: the emotional and bodily part of the memory is extraordinarily vivid, but the frame that would tell it this belongs to the past is missing.

That is why a flashback isn’t “remembering” in the usual sense — it is reliving. When a trigger in the present (a smell, a sound, a touch, a certain look) strikes one of those stored fragments, the body reacts as if the danger were happening now: the same hormones, the same pulse, the same distress.

A research group that included van der Kolk showed something else surprising in 1996 using brain imaging: when people with post-traumatic stress disorder listened to a description of their own traumatic experience, activity in Broca’s area — the part of the brain responsible for producing speech — dropped considerably. Van der Kolk called this phenomenon “speechless terror”. It is the reason so many people literally cannot find words for the worst of it: not because they don’t want to speak, but because the part of the brain that would translate the experience into language partly shuts down during reliving. The body speaks then, instead of words.

The body keeps a record — even when the mind forgets

What does this mean in everyday life? That trauma can live on in the body for years after the event as a chronic readiness. Muscles that once tensed for defence stay half-tensed — most often the shoulders, jaw, neck, pelvic floor. Breathing stays shallow and high in the chest, like someone poised to leap at any moment. Digestion slows down or goes wild, because a body on alert simply pushes digestion onto a side track. Sleep becomes light — I have written in more detail about how hyperarousal steals your nights in the piece on insomnia and the nervous system.

The long-term consequences are not only unpleasant, they are medical. The large American study of adverse childhood experiences (ACE, Felitti and colleagues, 1998) showed a clear link in more than 17,000 adults: the more such experiences someone had, the higher their risk of depression, addiction, and also of entirely physical illness — cardiovascular, metabolic, autoimmune. A body that stands guard for decades wears itself out.

In my work with people I often meet this layer by a roundabout route. Someone comes because of headaches, a locked-up neck or a stomach that “goes mad” for no reason; doctors have ruled out every physical cause. Only once we begin to talk about when the body speaks up — in whose company, around which topics, alongside which memories — does the pattern emerge. The body did not choose its language at random: it speaks about what could not, or was not allowed to be, said in words.

It matters to understand that these bodily responses are not a malfunction. They are protection that stayed switched on. Your nervous system once did exactly what was needed for you to survive — and ever since, it answers every similar signal with the same programme. It isn’t broken; it is too loyal.

Three gears of the nervous system — polyvagal theory in plain terms

The neuroscientist Stephen Porges offered, with polyvagal theory, a language we use a great deal in trauma work, because it helps people make sense of their own responses. The details of the theory are still debated in science, but as a map of experience it is valuable. Simplified, it says that our autonomic nervous system doesn’t know only “on” and “off”, but three main states.

The first is a state of safety and connection: the body is calm, the face alive, the voice soft, and we perceive other people as a source of support. The second is mobilisation — fight or flight: the heart speeds up, the muscles tense, attention narrows onto the danger. The third, which arrives when neither fighting nor fleeing is possible, is freeze or collapse: the body “shuts down”, sensation dulls, the world recedes as if you were watching it through glass. This third state explains why many people did not scream or fight back during the worst of it — and why they should not hold that against themselves afterwards. The body chose for them, and it chose survival.

Porges coined another useful word: neuroception. It is the detection of safety and danger that runs below the threshold of awareness — faster than you can think. In people with a history of trauma this detector is calibrated too sensitively: it fires at neutral signals, because similar signals really were dangerous once. That is why you can feel threatened in a completely safe room — and why reasoning with yourself (“nothing is actually happening”) so often fails. The alarm doesn’t listen to arguments; it listens to the body.

How the body speaks: signs worth hearing

In my work with people I notice that the body most often speaks in one of two ways — by pressing the accelerator or by pressing the brake. Some swing between the two. None of what follows means trauma in itself (there can be many causes, including entirely physical ones), but when the signs keep repeating and you can’t explain them, they deserve curiosity rather than judgement:

• Body on the accelerator: chronically tight shoulders and jaw, grinding your teeth, shallow rapid breathing, a pounding heart over trivial things, trembling, restlessness, an outsized reaction to sudden noises, trouble sleeping, digestive trouble under stress.
• Body on the brake: numbness and emptiness, chronic tiredness with no clear cause, a foggy feeling in the head, disconnection from your own body (“I can’t feel myself”), a sense of watching the world from far away, difficulty noticing hunger, fullness or pain.
• Triggers: disproportionately strong reactions to certain smells, sounds, touches, places or tones of voice — the body responds before the mind has even grasped what is happening.

Why talking alone sometimes doesn’t reach deep enough

Classical psychotherapy works mainly “from the top down”: through words, understanding, new meanings. That is valuable and often entirely enough. But with trauma that lives in the body, this tends to happen: a person understands their story perfectly, can talk about it calmly and intelligently — and the body still responds the old way. There is insight, but no change. Sometimes the opposite happens: simply talking about the event sets off reliving, and every session floods the body again.

This is why approaches developed that also work “from the bottom up” — through the body. Pat Ogden’s sensorimotor psychotherapy, Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing and related approaches start from a simple principle: if trauma wrote itself into the body, the body has to be part of the way out. In practice this means that in therapy we explore not only what happened and what you think about it, but also where in the body the story speaks up — what your breath does, where the tension goes, what your hand would do if it were allowed. All of it slowly, in small doses, and always within the window of tolerance, so that this time the body can complete the experience instead of merely surviving it again.

The scientific support for body-based approaches is growing. In 2014 van der Kolk and colleagues showed in a randomised trial that trauma-sensitive yoga significantly reduced symptoms in women with chronic, treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. A review of research on Somatic Experiencing (Kuhfuß and colleagues, 2021) points to promising, though not yet conclusive, findings. I completed a year-long training in body-oriented psychotherapy myself and weave that knowledge into my work — not as a replacement for talking, but as its missing second bank. You can read more about how I work on the My Approach page.

Grounding: first aid when you’re pulled into the past

Grounding techniques are not trauma therapy — but they are valuable first aid when a trigger throws you off balance. Their logic is simple: a flashback pulls you into there and then, while grounding anchors the body in the here and now. Because the alarm doesn’t listen to arguments, we don’t address it with thoughts but with the senses and with movement — with information the nervous system understands directly. A few tried and tested ones:

• Feet and ground: feel your feet on the floor, press them into it, notice the chair holding you. Weight is information about the present.
• 5-4-3-2-1: find five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can touch, two smells and one taste. The senses are always in the present.
• Lengthened out-breath: breathe in through your nose and out slowly, as if through a straw, so the out-breath is longer than the in-breath. A long exhale is the fastest natural route to a calmer heart rate.
• Orienting: slowly turn your head and look around the room. Name what you see: window, door, tree. This literally shows the alarm system that there is no danger.
• Temperature and movement: cold water on your wrists, a few squats, a walk. If the body mobilised energy for flight, movement gives it an outlet.

A small but important caution: in people with a deeper history of trauma, turning attention towards the body (to the breath or the belly, for instance) can at first increase distress, because the body is precisely where the worst was stored. If that happens to you, there is nothing wrong with you — it only means it is wise to enter the body gradually and with the support of someone who knows the way.

The body knows how to let go, too

If the body stores trauma, it also knows how to release it — but not on command and not overnight. In my work with people I see that this release most often happens in small, almost imperceptible steps: a breath that one day drops into the belly of its own accord; shoulders that sink a centimetre by the end of a session; tears that finally come; a tremor that moves through the body and leaves calm behind it. Neuroscience would say that with repeated experiences of safety the nervous system gradually rewrites its predictions. I would say: the body slowly comes to believe the war is over.

Anything that regularly gives the body an experience of rhythm, strength and safe presence helps too: walking in nature, dancing, swimming, singing (the long exhale in singing is naturally calming), yoga, running. Not as an escape from feelings, but as a daily message to the nervous system: the body is capable, the body can be a pleasant place. The yoga research I mentioned above shows exactly this — that repeated, safe bodily experience changes symptoms as well.

What matters most here isn’t the technique, but the relationship in which it happens. The nervous system settles most deeply alongside another, safe nervous system — Porges calls this co-regulation. That is why we generally don’t carry trauma away on our own with exercises from a handbook: we need the experience of someone seeing us in our distress and staying calm, present, on our side. It is also the reason a safe therapeutic relationship isn’t merely a pleasant frame around therapy, but an effective part of it.

When to seek help — and what you can do tonight

If you recognise yourself in this piece — if your body reacts to the past as though it were the present, if you swing between constant tension and numbness, if you avoid your body or can’t feel it at all — that is reason enough to talk to a professional. You don’t need a “bad enough” story; you only need an experience your system couldn’t process on its own. With severe symptoms (recurring flashbacks, thoughts of self-harm), turn first to your GP or a psychiatrist. And if you feel it is time to make peace with your body, I am here — write to me and we’ll talk.

Until then, perhaps just this: the next time it floods you, try saying “my body remembers — and right now I am safe” instead of “you’re losing it again”. Then feel your feet on the floor and lengthen your out-breath. This isn’t a solution to everything. But it is a moment in which, for once, you aren’t fighting your body — you are listening to it.