How Trauma Lives in the Body & the Path Back to Yourself
- High Value Woman
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
We’re kicking off an intimate and transformational 4-part blog and podcast series called The Body Remembers: Somatics & Trauma Recovery. As a somatic and trauma-informed coach, this topic isn’t just part of my work—it’s deeply woven into my own healing story.
🌿 What Is Somatic Healing?
“Somatic” comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “the body.” Somatic healing is a body-first approach to emotional healing. While traditional therapy often focuses on mindset, somatics teaches us to listen to the language of the body: tension, sensation, fatigue, energy, and even disconnection.
Through somatic work, I’ve learned that trauma doesn’t just happen in the mind—it imprints itself onto the body. Our nervous system becomes stuck in survival states long after the threat has passed. Learning to recognize and respond to these states is a key part of reclaiming safety within ourselves.
🔄 How Trauma Shows Up in the Body
If you’ve ever felt exhausted, tense, numb, or dissociated without a clear explanation, your body might be carrying unprocessed trauma. For me, trauma lived as chronic hypervigilance. Growing up with a bipolar parent meant I was always on alert. I never knew which version of my dad would walk through the door. Over time, that anxiety became my comfort zone—even in adult relationships.
This is how trauma rewires our sense of safety: I found myself gravitating toward partners who were inconsistent and emotionally unavailable. My body mistakenly interpreted that instability as “normal.”
Symptoms of stored trauma can include:
Tightness in the throat or chest
Chronic fatigue
Dissociation (mentally checking out)
Sleep disturbances
Unexplained pain or autoimmune issues
Anxiety and overthinking
For many women healing from narcissistic abuse—there’s a deep sense of shame and body distrust.
🔄 The Nervous System & the Traffic Lights of Tolerance
In my training, we use a simple but powerful model to describe our nervous system states: The Traffic Lights of Tolerance.
Red Light (Shutdown): You feel frozen, depressed, numb, and overwhelmed. Getting out of bed feels impossible.
Yellow Light (Fight or Flight): You feel anxious, reactive, or hypervigilant. This was my default state for years—and I didn’t even know it.
Green Light (Regulated): You feel grounded, present, and capable. This is the goal—not perfection, but stability.
The truth? Most of us live in the yellow light. We walk on eggshells. We anticipate danger. Especially after narcissistic abuse, it’s hard to trust our body’s signals. But learning to move from red → yellow → green is possible, and it's life-changing.
🛠️ Simple Somatic Tools for Grounding
You don’t have to leap into the deep end of healing. Small practices are incredibly powerful:
Breath awareness: Not to change it—just notice it.
Grounding: Feel your feet on the floor. Notice the objects in the room. Come back to the now.
Body check-ins: Ask yourself, “What am I feeling—and where in my body do I feel it?”
Yoga: Especially trauma-informed yoga that brings you into sensation through safe, slow movement.
And if you try one of these and it doesn’t land? That’s okay. Tomorrow is always Day One.
✨ Your Body Holds the Truth
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is this: My body knew the truth, even when my mind couldn’t accept it.
I knew something was off in my relationship long before I admitted it to myself. My stomach flipped every time my ex-husband got too chummy with another woman—but I ignored it. I wanted to believe his words, not my intuition. Now I understand—my body was speaking. Loudly.
Healing is about coming back home to your body, especially after years of gaslighting or trauma that taught you to override it. This work is how we reclaim our power.
💬 Final Thoughts
Whether you’ve survived narcissistic abuse or just sensed something deeper that you haven’t quite named—this journey is for you. You don’t need to have the perfect words. Your body already remembers. And it knows the way back to you.
Stay tuned for upcoming episodes in The Body Remembers series, where we’ll explore the nervous system, somatic tools, trauma-informed yoga, and more.
You have the power. You always have.
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