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Someone told me once, early in their work with me, “I don’t understand why my shoulders hurt. Nothing happened to my shoulders.” And I said, gently, something happened near your shoulders, every time you braced for what was coming. Your shoulders remember bracing. They don’t know the danger is over. Nobody told them.
This is the part of trauma work that talk therapy alone tends to miss, and I say that as someone who values talk therapy deeply. The body keeps score in places language never reaches. You can intellectually understand that you are safe now, completely, fully understand it, and your jaw will still clench at a certain tone of voice. Your stomach will still drop at a certain time of night. That’s not you failing to heal. That’s your body holding information your mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
Implicit memory versus explicit memory
There are two kinds of memory at play here, and most people only know about one of them. Explicit memory is the story. What happened, when, where, who. That’s the memory you can narrate. Implicit memory is different. It’s procedural, it’s sensory, it’s the flinch before you know you’ve flinched. Implicit memory doesn’t live in language. It lives in muscle, in breath, in the speed of your heartbeat when a door slams two rooms away.
Trauma encodes heavily into implicit memory, especially trauma that happened early, or happened repeatedly, or happened when you had no language yet for what was occurring. That’s why you can have no conscious memory of an event and still have a body that responds to its echo. The mind forgot. The body didn’t.
What this means in practice
It means healing has to include the body, not just the story. Somatic approaches, things like body scanning, gentle movement, breathwork, paying attention to where tension lives, these aren’t alternative medicine add-ons to “real” trauma treatment. They’re often the most direct route to where the trauma actually is. I’ve watched people make more progress in ten minutes of noticing where they hold their breath than in an hour of intellectualizing what happened to them.
I want to be honest about something here too. This work is slow, and it should be. You are not trying to override your body’s signals. You’re trying to update them. That takes repetition. It takes safety, sustained over time, not just a single calm afternoon. Your nervous system needs a pattern of evidence before it revises its expectations, and patterns take longer to build than single moments do.
A place to start
Try this today. Just once. Sit somewhere quiet and ask your body, not your mind, your body: where are you holding something right now? Don’t judge what comes up. Don’t try to fix it immediately. Just notice. Maybe it’s your jaw. Maybe it’s your hands. Maybe it’s a tightness behind your ribs you’ve stopped registering because it’s been there so long it feels like background noise.
The body’s timeline doesn’t match the calendar’s
One thing I find myself explaining over and over is that the body doesn’t track time the way a calendar does. You can be twenty years removed from an event, with a full, settled life, and your body will still respond as though the threat is current the moment it encounters a strong enough cue, a smell, a posture, a tone of voice. People often interpret this as backsliding, as evidence they haven’t really healed. I see it differently. It’s evidence that the body is doing exactly what it’s built to do, matching present sensory input against stored patterns, and finding a match.
This is also why somatic work tends to require so much patience. You’re not erasing the old pattern. You can’t erase implicit memory the way you might correct a misremembered fact. What you’re doing is building a second pattern alongside the first, one based on current safety, and giving your nervous system enough repeated experience with that second pattern that it becomes the more available response over time. The old pattern doesn’t disappear. It just stops being the only option your body reaches for.
Working with the body without forcing it
A caution I give often: somatic work is not about pushing through discomfort to “release” something dramatically. That approach can flood a person faster than it helps them. Real somatic work tends to be slow, almost gentle to the point of feeling underwhelming at first. A small movement. A single breath, noticed fully. A hand placed on your own chest, just to feel your own warmth. These small moments, repeated consistently, do more over time than a single intense session that overwhelms the system and sends it right back into the old protective pattern.
That’s the conversation. That’s where the body starts to be let back in, instead of carried around like a separate problem from the mind. You are one system. Trauma never forgot that. It’s time the rest of your healing remembered it too.
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