Some of my clients arrive having already read every book on their childhood. They can explain exactly what happened to them and why. And they’re still stuck — because understanding lives in the head, and the thing they’re carrying lives in the body. You can see it before they speak. The permanently raised shoulders. The shallow, high breathing. The way they sit as if bracing for a sound that stopped coming years ago.
Trauma isn’t only a memory. It’s a posture the nervous system learned in order to survive and then forgot to put down.
How the body holds it
When something overwhelming happens, the body organises around protection — collapse to disappear, or tighten to defend. Useful in the moment. The problem is that the pattern can outlive the danger. A protective hunch becomes the default shape. Over months and years it stops feeling like a response and starts feeling like “just how I am”. And because posture and emotion run on a two-way street, that braced body keeps signalling threat back to the brain, quietly topping up the very anxiety the person came to be rid of.
Beginning, gently
I want to be careful here, because the internet is full of “fix your trauma with this stretch” and that is not honest. The body holds a lot, and forcing it open can flood someone. So we go slowly, and never alone if the load is heavy.
- Notice before you change. A few times a day, simply note where you’re holding — jaw, shoulders, belly. Awareness comes first; release follows on its own timing.
- Lengthen the exhale. A slow out-breath tells the nervous system it’s safe to stand down. This is small and it is real.
- Let weight be supported. Feel the chair, the floor, the ground actually holding you. Trauma keeps the body poised to flee; being held is the counter-message.
None of this replaces therapy, and I’d never pretend it does. But healing genuinely begins in the body — one breath the shoulders are finally allowed to let go of.