I had a client a few years back — I’ll call her Maya — who came in after three years of talk therapy with someone else. Smart woman, very self-aware. She could narrate her childhood like a documentary. She knew the terms: attachment wound, hypervigilance, emotional neglect. She’d read the books.
But every Sunday night, her stomach would knot up so badly she’d end up on the bathroom floor. And no amount of understanding why it was happening made it stop.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about trauma. You can understand it perfectly and still be living inside of it. Because trauma doesn’t just live in your thoughts or your memories. It moves into your body and sets up camp there, and it does not care how many insights you’ve had about your mother.
Your Body Keeps the Score (And It’s Not Being Dramatic About It)
Bessel van der Kolk’s book made this phrase famous, and I think the reason it caught on the way it did is that people didn’t just agree with it intellectually. They felt it. Like, in their actual bodies. There was this collective exhale of oh, so it’s not just me.
Here’s what happens on a biological level, and honestly the more I learn about this the more amazed I am that any of us function at all. When something traumatic happens, your amygdala — the brain’s smoke detector, basically — sets off an alarm. Adrenaline, cortisol, the whole cascade. Your body shifts into survival mode. Fight, flight, freeze. You know the drill.
And that’s a good system. We need that system. It’s kept humans alive for hundreds of thousands of years.
Where it goes sideways is when the alarm never fully turns off. With chronic trauma especially — not a single car accident but years of walking on eggshells in your own home, or being bullied through middle school, or growing up with a parent whose mood you had to constantly monitor — your nervous system learns that danger is the default. So it just… stays on. Scanning, bracing, waiting. All the time. Even when you’re safe. Even when you’ve built a completely different life.
And you might not connect the dots. You just know you’re exhausted for no reason. Your shoulders live somewhere near your earlobes. You haven’t taken a real, full breath in so long you’ve forgotten what one feels like.
That’s not anxiety being dramatic. That’s your body doing its job with outdated information.
The Nervous System Remembers What Your Mind Forgot
We tend to think of memory as a brain thing. Dates, faces, the plot of that movie you watched last week. But Peter Levine — he developed Somatic Experiencing — talks about something called implicit memory, and it changed the way I think about almost everything I do in session.
Implicit memory isn’t a story. It’s a body state. It’s stored as tension, as a flinch, as the way your breath catches when someone raises their voice even a little. A client who grew up in a house where things were constantly unpredictable might carry that unpredictability in their digestive system — this low-grade nausea that no gastroenterologist can explain. Someone who learned early that their voice didn’t matter might feel a chronic tightness in the throat. Not a lump exactly, just… constriction. Like the body still believes speaking up isn’t safe.
I notice this in sessions all the time. Someone will be telling me about their week — mundane stuff, the grocery store, a work email that annoyed them — and then something shifts. Their breathing gets shallow. Their hands ball up. Their voice changes register and they don’t even notice. But I do. And that shift is the body waving a flag, saying hey, this connects to something bigger, pay attention.
I used to think the mind led and the body followed. Twenty-five years into this work, I think it might be the other way around more often than we’d like to admit.
Why Talking About It Doesn’t Always Fix It
Okay, I need to say this carefully because I don’t want to sound like I’m dismissing traditional therapy. I’m a therapist. I believe in the power of being heard. Having someone hold space for your pain and not flinch — that’s transformative. Full stop.
But.
I’ve sat across from too many people who can narrate their trauma with the precision of a TED talk and still can’t sleep through the night. Who understand their attachment style inside and out and still panic when their partner doesn’t text back within an hour. The insight is there. The relief isn’t.
And I think the reason is pretty simple, even though it took the field a while to catch up: the prefrontal cortex — where language and logic and all that narrative sense-making happens — isn’t where trauma is stored. Trauma lives deeper. Brainstem. Limbic system. The parts of you that were around long before humans developed language. Those parts don’t care about your insights. They care about whether your nervous system feels safe right now, in this moment, in this body.
Which is why, for a lot of people, bringing the body into the therapeutic process is what finally moves the needle. Not instead of talking. Alongside it. The talking builds the map. The body work is what actually walks the territory.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice (Because I Know It Sounds Woo-Woo)
I realize “somatic therapy” can sound like I’m going to wave crystals over you or something. Fair enough. Let me just tell you what a session might actually involve.
We might start with me asking you to just… check in with your body. That’s it. Not fix anything, not breathe a certain way, not relax. Just notice. What do you feel? Where? Some people draw a complete blank the first time I ask this, and that’s information too — it tells me how disconnected from the body they’ve had to become to get through whatever they got through.
Then we go slow. Way slower than your thinking mind is comfortable with. And things start to surface. Maybe a heaviness in the chest. A buzzing in the hands. A weird urge to stand up, or curl into a ball, or push against something. Last week a client suddenly felt her legs start to shake — not dramatically, just this subtle tremor — and she said “I don’t know why that’s happening” and I said “You don’t have to know. Just let it happen.”
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after doing this work for as long as I have: a lot of those sensations and impulses are survival responses that got interrupted. The body wanted to run but couldn’t. The arms wanted to push back but it wasn’t safe to. So that energy just got stuck. Frozen in time. And when we create enough safety in the room — real safety, not just the idea of it — those responses can finally complete.
Sometimes that looks like a big emotional release. Sometimes it’s just someone’s shoulders dropping two inches and them saying “…huh.” Sometimes there are tears that don’t have a story attached to them, and that’s fine. The body doesn’t need a narrative. It was there. It remembers differently than the mind does, and it heals differently too.
How This Shows Up When You’re Not in a Therapist’s Office
This is the part that tends to surprise people.
You think trauma shows up as flashbacks and nightmares, and sure, sometimes it does. But more often it shows up as your jaw being clenched so tight your dentist keeps asking if you grind your teeth. (You do. In your sleep. You had no idea.) It shows up as the brain fog that rolls in every time you need to make a big decision, or the way you go completely blank when your boss puts you on the spot in a meeting. It shows up as that thing where you’re simultaneously wired and exhausted — tired to your bones but you can’t fall asleep because your body won’t stop buzzing.
Chronic back pain with no structural cause. IBS that flares every time there’s conflict. Headaches that cluster around the holidays — weird, right? Except it’s not weird at all when you consider that your nervous system has very specific associations with certain times of year, certain tones of voice, certain smells.
I had a client once who got inexplicable shoulder pain every fall. Took us months to realize fall was when things had been worst at home growing up. The body was marking the anniversary in its own language.
Now — I’m not saying every stomachache is a trauma response. Bodies get sick for all kinds of reasons and I’m a therapist, not a physician. But I am saying that mind and body aren’t two separate departments that occasionally send each other memos. They’re one system. And when half of that system keeps getting ignored, it finds other ways to get your attention.
Coming Home to a Body That Feels Like Yours Again
If you’ve read this far and something in you is going yes, that’s me — I want you to know that what you’re feeling makes sense. And also that it can change. Not overnight, not through willpower, but it can change.
For some people the entry point is working with a somatic therapist. For others it’s yoga, or dance, or even just placing a hand over your heart for a few minutes in the morning and noticing what comes up. I started as a dancer and a yoga teacher before I became a therapist, and I still think movement is one of the most underrated healing tools we have. Not performance movement, not “push harder” movement — just the kind of slow, attentive movement where you’re actually in your body instead of dragging it around like luggage.
The through line in all of it is attention. Curious, patient attention. Which sounds so simple it’s almost annoying, I know. But most of us have spent decades learning to override our bodies — to caffeinate past the exhaustion, to push through the tension, to rationalize away the knot in the stomach. So turning toward the body instead of away from it? That’s actually a pretty radical act.
I’ve watched this happen more times than I can count: someone pauses, turns their attention inward, and something softens. Not everything. Not all at once. But something. A breath goes deeper. A jaw unclenches. And there’s this look that crosses their face — almost like surprise — because they forgot their body could feel like that. Like it was actually theirs.
That’s what I’m after in this work. Not fixing anyone. You’re not broken; your nervous system just adapted to circumstances that required it to stay on high alert, and now those circumstances have changed but the adaptation hasn’t caught up yet. The healing is in the catching up. In letting the body finally get the message that the danger is over, that you survived it, and that right here — right now — you’re allowed to land.
Stefani Reitter is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and somatic practitioner in Santa Monica, CA. She’s spent over 25 years working at the intersection of mindfulness, movement, and psychotherapy — first as a dancer and yoga teacher, later as a clinician. She works with individuals and couples who are ready to stop living in their heads and start coming home to their bodies.