Body Memory
The effects of traumatic events are held not only in conscious memory. They are held in repetitive body responses—which is what we mean by body memory in the context of trauma.
This is one of the things that can be most confusing — and most frightening — for people whose bodies are still responding to traumatic events. The mind may have tried to move on. It may have told itself that it's over, that it was a long time ago, that there is no reason to still be affected. And yet the body tells a different story.
The chronic tension that won't release. The startle response that fires at nothing. The physical symptoms that arrived at the same time as the traumatic experience and never fully left. These are not imagined. They are not signs of weakness or instability. They are the body's record of what happened — held in tissue, in breath, in the nervous system itself.
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One of the symptoms almost always present in traumatic stress is some degree of dissociation. This word can sound alarming but what it describes is something most of us have experienced in a mild form — the sense of going somewhere else, of not quite being present, of watching yourself from a slight distance.
One common response in traumatic stress is some degree of dissociation. Dissociation is the nervous system's attempt to manage what was too overwhelming to be fully experienced at the time. Fragments of the experience get stored not as coherent memory but as sensation, image, physical response — emerging later in circumstances that echo the original event, often without any conscious connection to it. A smell. A quality of light. A tone of voice. Suddenly the body is back there, even when the mind knows it isn't.
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I have worked with people who came to me with chronic physical pain that began at exactly the time of a traumatic event.
One client experienced a persistent pain in her left shoulder and lower back that started the day he was violently attacked. Another had developed breathing difficulties after witnessing something terrible happen to his daughter. In both cases, as the body was given space and attention — as the emotional experience was gradually met and integrated rather than managed and suppressed — the physical symptoms resolved.
In both instances the client’s body had been bracing against what was too overwhelming to process at the time. When the emotional experience could finally be met and integrated, the body let go of the physical holding.
In my experience this is very common. The body remembers what the mind has tried to move on from. And it will go on remembering, signalling, insisting — not to make life difficult, but because something in us knows, deeply, that what was interrupted needs to complete.
The work is in learning to listen to that. Gently. Without forcing. In the right conditions and with the right support.