Why Your Body Holds the Score on Trauma
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There is a book by Bessel van der Kolk called The Body Keeps the Score. When I first read it, I felt seen in a way I had not expected from a clinical text. Because it articulated something I had experienced and observed but never quite had the language for: trauma does not just live in the memory. It lives in the body.
How Trauma Gets Stored in the Body
When we experience something overwhelming, the brain's threat response activates. Adrenaline and cortisol flood the system. The body prepares to fight, flee, or freeze. But when the threat passes and the stress response does not complete, that activation gets stored in the body as incomplete. The muscles hold the tension. The nervous system stays on alert.
What This Looks Like in Daily Life
Chronic tension in the jaw, shoulders, or chest that no amount of massage fully releases. A startle response that seems excessive. Gut issues that doctors cannot find a physical cause for. Fatigue that does not respond to sleep. A sense of being disconnected from your body.
Why Body-Based Healing Matters
Talk therapy works with the cortical brain, the part that thinks and narrates. But trauma is stored below that level, in the limbic system and the body. This is why talking about trauma can help you understand it without necessarily shifting how it feels in the body.
Approaches that work with the body and the subconscious together, like hypnotherapy, somatic awareness practices, and NLP, reach the places that talking alone cannot. This is the foundation of the work we do in individual hypnotherapy and psychotherapy sessions in Bankstown Sydney NSW.
For further reading on the science of body-based trauma healing, the books section has resources that explore this in depth. The full range of booking sessions in Bankstown NSW covers different levels of support depending on where you are right now.
Your Body Is Not the Enemy
It is the messenger. And it has been trying to tell you something important. Book a free 15 minute consultation and let us begin listening to it together in Bankstown Sydney NSW.