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Trauma in the Body: What You’ve Been Avoiding Feeling
- Somatics Embodied Therapy
- Jan 19
- 3 min read
Much of personal growth focuses on awareness noticing patterns in our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. But there is another layer of these patterns that often goes unseen.
They live in the body.
The tight shoulders.The shallow breath.The heaviness in the chest.The unsettled feeling in the stomach when certain topics arise.
These responses are not flaws or failures. They are nervous system responses learned adaptations formed during moments when your system was trying to keep you safe.
As trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score, the body remembers what the mind may not consciously recall.
This isn’t because something is wrong with you. It’s because your body learned how to survive.
Your Body Is Responding, Not Reacting
When the body holds tension, fatigue, or discomfort, it isn’t trying to sabotage you. It’s communicating in the language it knows best: sensation.
The nervous system is designed to protect. If something once felt overwhelming, unsafe, or too much to process, your system may have learned to tighten, numb, disconnect, or stay alert. These patterns were intelligent responses at the time.
The challenge isn’t to force the body to change. It’s to create enough safety to listen.
Healing does not happen through pressure or pushing. It happens when the body feels supported enough to soften even a little.
Two Places Where Safety Often Breaks Down
Today, I invite you to explore two areas gently, at your own pace:
Your Body & Mental-Health and Your Inner-World & Growth-Healing
With curiosity rather than judgment, ask yourself:
Where do I override my body’s needs instead of listening to them?
When I feel discomfort or emotion rising, how do I cope, distract, numb, stay busy?
Where do I push through when my system is asking for rest or care?
Then, inwardly notice:
Where do I hesitate to slow down or go deeper?
What sensations or emotions feel unfamiliar or unsafe to stay with?
What might my nervous system be protecting me from feeling?
There are no right answers. These reflections are not about fixing. They’re about noticing.
Avoidance Is a Survival Strategy
Avoidance is not a weakness.It is a protective strategy shaped by experience.
Many of us learned often unconsciously that feeling too much was unsafe. So the body adapted by numbing, bracing, disconnecting, or staying constantly activated. Over time, these patterns become familiar, even when they’re no longer needed.
Listening Without Forcing
Trauma-informed healing honors pacing, choice, and consent even within yourself.
Small moments of presence, a deeper breath, unclenching the jaw, placing a hand on the chest help signal safety to the nervous system. And safety is what allows healing to unfold.
Where the Subconscious Mind Comes In
When the nervous system doesn’t feel safe, the subconscious mind takes over running protective patterns designed to prevent overwhelm, pain, or emotional threat. These patterns often operate below conscious awareness, shaping reactions, beliefs, and behaviors long before the mind has time to “think.”
This is where subconscious healing and hypnotherapy become powerful.
Creating a state of safety where the body can soften and the nervous system can settle. In this space, the subconscious no longer needs to stay on high alert, and old survival responses can begin to release.
Hypnotherapy works by meeting the body and subconscious exactly where they are. Healing can happen without reliving trauma, without pressure, and without bypassing. Instead, the system is gently invited back into presence where new patterns of safety, trust, and regulation can take root.
Healing doesn’t require pushing past your limits. It begins when your system feels safe enough to be present, calm, peaceful.
Today’s Mantra
Today, I move at the pace of my nervous system.I offer my body safety, not pressure.I listen gently, knowing that every sensation is a protective response and I am allowed to meet it with care.
When the nervous system feels safe, the body can release what it’s been holding.
In my practice, Somatics Embodied, I help clients calm anxiety and shift subconscious patterns through gentle, trauma-informed hypnotherapy and somatic work — often in 2–3 sessions.
Book a free discovery call if you’re curious ❤️. Free Discovery call
Ashley
Somatics-EmbodiedRTT® Clinical Hypnotherapy & NLP-IFS, and Somatic Counseling
Rewiring Mindset: Conquer Anxiety-Self-Sabotage.
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