Does Your Body Remember Trauma?

BY BETHANY HEITMAN

When she was 22, Stephanie was driving to meet friends for brunch when a man in a pickup truck blew through a stop sign and T-boned her. Though her small SUV was totaled, Stephanie walked away injury-free—with the exception of a bad bruise across her chest from the seatbelt. The bruise healed within a few weeks, but ten years later Stephanie still experienced occasional pain in the area. “When I’d get stressed out, I’d feel a shooting pain across my shoulder and chest—it felt like I was in the accident all over again,” she says.

Thinking she had a lingering injury, Stephanie went to her doctor but was told there was nothing physically wrong. That’s when she turned to Dr. Google and discovered something called somatic therapy (also called somatic experiencing or body therapy). The basic principle: The toll traumatic events take on you go well beyond the psychological and can have lasting physical effects that eventually need to be addressed. Keep reading to learn more.

What is Somatic Experiencing?

From flashbacks to nightmares, a scary or major life event can weigh heavily on the mind. But, for some, trauma can also cause physical symptoms—think chest tightening, tight shoulders, a jittery stomach and more.

Enter somatic (which means “of the body”) experiencing. With a focus on the mind-body connection, this type of therapy can be used to treat everything from grief to PTSD and beyond. The general belief behind this modality is that traumatic experiences can affect your nervous system, which prevents you from fully processing it.

Let’s dig into this even more: You’ve probably heard of the fight or flight response. But there’s a third response that’s often overlooked: freeze. Rather than confronting the trauma or running from it, some people freeze or lock up—and may stay that way long after the event.

People trained in somatic experiencing believe that frozen energy lingers in the body and prevents you from emotionally healing—repeating the trauma over and over until you deal with it.

How is it Done?

The primary goal of somatic experiencing is to unveil the bodily feelings associated with trauma. During a session, your therapist will sit face to face with you while they ask you gentle questions about certain life events. But don’t worry, they won’t dive right in. Generally, you’ll start very slowly.

As you begin recalling parts of your trauma, you’ll be asked to identify how your body feels in that moment. Say you start feeling tightness in your chest. Your therapist will ask you to focus on that tightness, remind you that you are not in danger and that you can release that feeling.

You’ll repeat this process over and over with the idea that, as you do, you will become more in touch with your body. The hope is that you can eventually recognize when stress or trauma is present in your body and release it without the assistance of a therapist.

While this form of therapy isn’t guaranteed to help everyone, it does work for many people.

One study found that 44 percent of people with PTSD were able to move past their trauma after doing somatic experiencing.

And Stephanie says it helped her to finally heal from her accident. “Through somatic experiencing, I came to realize how out of touch I was with my body,” she says. “I had never processed my car crash and how scary it was. I bottled it up because I felt like I should be grateful that I was alive. But, the truth is, it was terrifying and it really affected me. For years, my body held on to that stress. Through somatic experiencing, I was able to finally process my fear and leave it behind.”

Bethany Heitman, Contributor

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