The Body Remembers: Understanding How Trauma Lives in the Nervous System

The body remembers 

There are specific patterns we see in clients, particularly those who come to our treatment centre in Canada for addiction or trauma therapy.

These individuals often come to us with a specific set of symptoms, such as hypervigilance, emotional numbing, or impulsivity, that may not directly indicate trauma.

However, when you scratch beneath the surface of a person’s symptoms, there is often a story or lived experience (usually incredibly painful) buried deep below, which can materialize in many ways, including ‘unhealthy coping’.

The body is a magnificent mechanism for all the obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, in that it remembers pretty much everything good or bad that has ever happened to you.

For example, if we think about the nervous system, its main job is to keep us safe.

Not socially connected, not happy, rich, successful, or even popular, just safe, a smart internal alarm system we like to refer to at our inpatient treatment centre in Canada as our ‘internal bodyguard’.

In acute (or even chronic) trauma, the body is clever enough to know our emotional and physical bandwidth -to the extent that it will literally ‘store’ experiences that are simply too overwhelming or shocking for us to process in the moment.

Trauma is not just a story we tell ourselves, our therapists, or even our nearest and dearest. It’s a lived experience that becomes embedded deep within the body – long before it evolves into conscious memory or thought.

This is often why we hear clients say, ‘I felt it in my body long before I understood it in my mind.’

Why?

Because the body remembers what the mind goes to great lengths to forget, it is the largest repository of lived experiences, both positive and negative.

In recovery, this is why it takes body-based approaches like trauma-informed treatment to access deeply encoded memories for individuals to experience a reduction in symptoms like anxiety, depression, PTSD, and even substance use.

Essentially, the body must be included in treatment for recovery to be effective, transformative, and long-lasting.

Common trauma responses

When something obliteratingly painful happens, like the sudden loss of a loved one or a physical assault, our internal bodyguard quickly stands up in service, assessing the most appropriate, necessary survival response to help guide us back to safety.

These responses often involve hyperarousal reactions (such as anxiety or anger) or hypoarousal responses (such as emotional numbness and sadness).

In modern discourse, these responses are typically known as ‘fight or flight’ and ‘freeze’.

Let’s explore these trauma responses in more detail.

Fight or flight (‘I can’)

When something traumatic happens, your inner bodyguard may decide that the upper part of what we call your ‘Window of Capacity’ is the safest, most appropriate place to be at that moment, depending on the type of threat or situation you’re dealing with.

This is where ‘fight or flight’ responses typically live -the part of the nervous system that is often referred to as the ‘I can’ part of the window, which elicits survival responses such as fighting, escaping, distraction, and busyness.

Here, you may experience a surge in energy as your body releases chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline to help you respond to whatever your internal bodyguard thinks is the most appropriate course of action, such as fleeing a dangerous situation or fighting off an attacker.

Freeze or shut down (‘I can’t’)

Freezing or shutting down is another typical trauma response.

Now, this response is quite different from the upper part of the nervous system, which tends to drive action-based responses and behaviours to help you escape immediate threat or danger in your environment.

However, when something profoundly scary happens, like being chased by a wild dog, there’s always the distinct chance, depending on what’s worked for you in the past, that your internal bodyguard decides being in a more immobilised state might be the response that helps you survive the most.

Let’s roll with the wild dog analogy here.

You are walking down the street, minding your own business, and the next thing you know, you are leaping concrete slabs four at a time to escape a very large-toothed, fierce-looking dog with no owner in sight.

The dog soon zones in on you, and before you know it, starts taking chunks out of your jeans.

All of a sudden, you feel zoned out, dreamlike even, your limbs feel too heavy for your frame, and the world around you looks strange, like you don’t belong where you are, frozen to the spot as the animal sinks its teeth further into your skin.

What’s likely happened here is your internal bodyguard has decided you can’t flee or fight off the dog, at least not without getting seriously injured, or worse, so it’s guided you, albeit very quickly, into the lower part of the Window of Capacity, often referred to as ‘freeze’ or shut down.

Unlike fight-or-flight, freeze is more of an immobilized state, where you may experience symptoms such as dissociation, emotional (and physical) numbness, extreme fatigue, and hopelessness. 

This response is often referred to as the ‘I can’t’ part of the nervous system window, which makes a lot of sense because individuals in this state tend to experience crippling symptoms that often feel incapacitating.

However, it’s important to note that both nervous system responses serve distinct purposes, which, as we’ve already established, are mainly about keeping you safe.

This is always the nervous system’s intention: guiding you back to your individual baseline of safety, which it often prioritizes over anything, even at the expense of joy and connection.

Understanding how trauma lives in the nervous system

Trauma often bypasses more explicit memories and lodges itself in what is called the ‘implicit system’, where unconscious sensations, emotions, body responses, and procedural memories tend to reside.

This is why many trauma survivors can be triggered by seemingly small things like smell, noise, tone of voice, and certain facial expressions, which can trigger anxiety, anger, or feelings of panic years later, even if the person cannot consciously explain why.

Essentially, trauma lives in the nervous system, filing painful experiences (often incorrectly) as a continuous ‘note to self’ to stay on guard to even the slightest whiff of danger or threat.

Trauma recovery, more often than not, is about the successful ‘completion of something’ – usually a memory or experience that somehow got stuck in the body or nervous system during a particularly stressful event or crisis.

We see this often, especially in high-stakes situations where there is an imminent threat to life (like a car accident) or a traumatic betrayal, sudden loss, or even a natural disaster.

The person wasn’t able to effectively ‘complete’ the processing of a difficult memory or experience during the original climate due to shock or overwhelm, which could have something to do with their internal bodyguard prioritizing survival over memory processing.

‘We’ll save that for later,’ says the internal bodyguard, and it means this in every literal sense of the word.

The body ‘saves’ the experience, often storing the memory in a way that becomes stuck or incomplete, which, once the dust settles, usually materializes in what we call PTSD symptoms.

‘It’s safe to feel now,’ says the body, and that is often when clients come to our rehab centre in Canada in a bid to try and understand their symptoms and how best to treat them.

Trauma symptoms

What often happens, particularly in acute trauma, is instead of returning to baseline safety, your internal bodyguard (nervous system) decides it’s much safer to remain on high alert.

This can show up in symptoms such as:

• Hypervigilance
• Intense panic or anxiety
• Chronic muscle tension and/or pain
• Extreme irritability or rage
• Emotional numbness
• Trouble sleeping or relaxing
• Difficulty trusting others
• Dissociation
• Feeling like you’re ‘not in your body’

These symptoms do not indicate malfunctioning; what they actually signal is that your body is adapting in the only way it knows how – it’s the equivalent of your internal bodyguard saying, ‘I’m just trying to keep you safe up there. That’s all.’

When safety feels unfamiliar, and danger feels normal

When a person’s nervous system is repeatedly overwhelmed, which happens often in complex trauma, where repeated experiences of adversity continue for months or years, it may start to misinterpret the world.

This is when the body learns that safety feels unfamiliar and must be avoided, and that danger feels normal (and maybe even expected).

For many individuals with a history of trauma:

• Love can feel overwhelming or threatening.
• Calm can feel unsettling or uncomfortable.
• Conflict and tension often feel familiar.
• Emotions may feel too big or too threatening. Therefore, it feels safer to get really angry and defensive or shut down entirely.

The good news

It’s worth noting here that the nervous system, for all its strength and rigidity, is also incredibly stretchy when given a compassionate, supportive foundation in which to move safely.

The body remembers, yes, but only until it feels safe enough to release.

Since the nervous system is plastic, it has unlimited potential to heal, soften, rewire, and, ultimately, relearn safety.

For instance, research shows that it takes a certain amount of repeated experiences of safety (around sixty) for the nervous system to relearn safety cues, giving much hope and promise for trauma survivors.

Trauma treatment in Canada

Modern trauma treatments in Canada, like EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, focus on the body, not just the mind, allowing the brain to reprocess traumatic memories at a safe and steady pace.

Once reprocessed, they lose their intensity, leading to a significant reduction in PTSD (and other mental health) symptoms.

These approaches teach effective regulation skills by working with the vagus nerve and the autonomic nervous system, and include practices like yoga and movement to release tension held in muscles and fascia.

Other techniques like breathwork and body-based grounding help restore safety signals and reduce symptoms of anxiety, all of which we provide at our rehab centre in Canada as part of our integrated trauma-informed treatment program.

Trauma recovery is not about erasing your past – it’s about permitting your body to feel again, creating a future that feels empowering, joyous, and, ultimately, peaceful.

To learn more about our trauma-informed treatment programs in Canada, contact our professional team today, who will gladly offer further information and support.

Remember, you are not alone in your struggles. 

We are here to guide you through each step of recovery, gently and at a pace that supports your future health and wellness.