Your Body Remembers What Your Mind Wants to Forget: Why Trauma Healing Needs Somatic Work

You've talked about the difficult memories in therapy. You've gained insight into your patterns. You understand why you react the way you do. And yet, your body still tenses when you hear a certain tone of voice. Your heart still races in situations that shouldn't feel threatening. You still shut down or snap at people you love, even when your rational mind knows better.

If this sounds familiar, you're not broken. What you're experiencing is your body's way of holding onto what your mind has tried to process away. Understanding trauma isn't the same as healing it. Real transformation happens when we bring the body into the conversation.

The Science Behind Why Your Body Holds Trauma

When we experience something overwhelming, whether it's a single traumatic event or years of chronic stress, our nervous system responds in ways that bypass conscious thought. This survival mechanism has kept humans alive for millennia.

Your nervous system constantly scans for threat through a process called neuroception. When it detects danger, it activates survival responses: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. These responses happen in milliseconds, far faster than conscious awareness. Your body mobilizes stress hormones, redirects blood flow, and prepares for survival, all before your thinking brain registers what's happening.

When a traumatic experience is too overwhelming to process, your nervous system can get stuck in that activated state. The threat response that was adaptive in the moment becomes chronic. Your body continues to signal danger even when you're objectively safe. The memory gets encoded in your nervous system, in your muscles, in your breathing patterns, in your gut.

This is what I mean by a biopsychosocial approach to trauma. We're looking at the biological reality of how your nervous system adapted to survive, and how that survival adaptation now shows up in your daily life, your relationships, and your sense of safety in the world.

When Talk Therapy Isn't Enough

Traditional talk therapy operates primarily in the cortex, the thinking, reasoning part of your brain. And for many concerns, that's exactly where the work needs to happen. Understanding patterns, gaining insight, reframing beliefs: these are valuable tools for change.

But trauma lives deeper. It's encoded in the subcortical regions of the brain, in the amygdala and brainstem, in areas that govern survival responses. These regions don't speak the language of words and reasoning. They speak the language of sensation, movement, and felt experience.

You might have had the experience of talking about a traumatic event and feeling nothing: numbness, disconnection, a sense of telling someone else's story. Or conversely, you might have talked about it and felt completely overwhelmed, flooded with emotion, unable to stay present. Both responses signal that the work is happening at the level of cognition but not at the level of the nervous system.

This is why some clients come to me after years of traditional therapy and say, "I understand everything intellectually, but nothing has changed." They've gained tremendous insight, but their body is still carrying the trauma. Their nervous system hasn't received the message that it's safe to stand down from high alert.

What Somatic Work Actually Means

Somatic work is any therapeutic approach that engages the body's wisdom in the healing process. It recognizes that your body isn't just a vehicle for your mind. It's an integral part of your experience, your memory, and your healing.

In my work, somatic approaches might include:

Tracking body sensations during difficult conversations. Instead of just talking about what happened, we pay attention to what's happening in your body right now as you remember. Where do you feel tension? What's your breathing doing? What impulses arise: to move, to pull away, to collapse?

Brainspotting to access trauma held in the nervous system. This approach uses eye position to tap into the brain-body connection, allowing trauma memories to process at a deeper level than words alone can reach. It's particularly powerful for experiences that feel stuck or overwhelming when approached through traditional talk therapy.

Nervous system regulation practices. These might include breathwork, grounding techniques, or simple movements that help your body shift from a state of activation to a state of safety. Over time, these practices help rewire your nervous system's default settings.

Working with body-based parts through Internal Family Systems. Some parts of us hold trauma in the body: a part that always feels on guard, a part that collapses under stress, a part that numbs out. By bringing somatic awareness to parts work, we can help these protective responses shift and heal.

Mindfulness and present-moment awareness grounded in physical sensation. This isn't just about calming down. It's about building the capacity to stay present with difficult feelings and sensations without being overwhelmed by them or shutting them down.

The goal isn't to relive traumatic experiences. It's to help your nervous system complete the responses that got interrupted or frozen during the original trauma. It's to give your body the experience of moving through threat to safety, so the survival response can finally rest.

The Biopsychosocial Framework: It's All Connected

When I say I work from a biopsychosocial lens, I mean that healing happens at multiple levels simultaneously. Your biology, your psychology, and your social context are constantly influencing each other.

The biological level includes your nervous system, your stress response, your sleep, your movement patterns, your gut health, your hormones. When trauma is unresolved, it often shows up in physical symptoms: chronic pain, digestive issues, sleep problems, autoimmune flare-ups. Healing trauma in the body can have ripple effects on your overall health.

The psychological level includes your thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and the meaning you've made of your experiences. This is where insight, understanding, and cognitive reframing happen. It's important work, and it needs to be integrated with what's happening in your body.

The social level includes your relationships, your environment, your work culture, your support system. Trauma doesn't happen in isolation, and neither does healing. The quality of your relationships, the safety of your environment, the rhythms and rituals of your daily life all support or hinder your nervous system's capacity to regulate and heal.

In our work together, we're paying attention to all three levels. We're not just processing memories or learning coping skills. We're looking at how your sleep affects your emotional regulation. How your work stress impacts your relationship patterns. How movement and breathwork support your capacity to stay present. How the environment you're in, whether you're in Singapore, Dubai, San Francisco, or Jakarta, shapes your access to safety and connection.

This isn't compartmentalized healing where we address your anxiety in one session and your relationship problems in another. It's recognizing that your anxiety might be rooted in your nervous system's chronic activation, which is affecting your sleep, which is impacting how you show up in your relationship, which is creating more stress, which is reinforcing the nervous system activation. Everything is connected, and healing one part affects the whole system.

Why High-Functioning Adults Need Body-Based Healing

Many of the adults I work with are what others would call "successful." You've built careers, maintained relationships, accomplished goals. You're articulate, insightful, and capable. You might even be someone others come to for support.

And yet, beneath the surface, you're exhausted. You're anxious. You feel disconnected. You might be carrying trauma from childhood, from a difficult relationship, from chronic work stress, from major life transitions. You've learned to function despite it, but you're tired of just functioning.

High-functioning doesn't mean unaffected. Often, it means you've developed sophisticated coping strategies that keep you moving forward while your nervous system remains chronically activated. You might be always in motion and unable to rest, highly productive but emotionally numb, or able to help everyone else but struggling to access your own needs.

This is where somatic work becomes essential. Your thinking brain already understands what's happening. What needs healing is the survival response running in the background, keeping you in perpetual vigilance or shutdown.

What Trauma-Informed Somatic Therapy Looks Like

When you work with me, you can expect a different kind of therapy experience. We're not just sitting and talking, though conversation is certainly part of the process. We're bringing curiosity to what's happening in your body, your breath, your energy as we talk.

In our first session, we'll start with parts mapping, a way of understanding the different aspects of yourself that developed in response to your experiences. We'll also begin building a foundation of nervous system awareness through experiential practices. This isn't about forcing you to feel things you're not ready for; it's about building capacity to stay present with your experience.

As we continue working together, we might use Brainspotting to access trauma that feels stuck or overwhelming. We might work with Internal Family Systems to help protective parts relax their grip. We might bring in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles to help you build psychological flexibility and stay connected to what matters most to you, even in the presence of difficult feelings.

Throughout this work, we're paying attention to pacing. One of the most important things I've learned is that healing trauma isn't about diving into the deepest pain as quickly as possible. It's about building resources first, helping your nervous system develop a greater capacity for regulation before we ask it to process difficult material.

If you're a couple dealing with the impact of trauma on your relationship, we start with a Couple Counselling Intensive. This might be an Exploration Intensive if you're working through a specific challenge, or a Deepening Intensive if you're ready for more sustained repair and transformation. Relational Life Therapy brings a somatic lens to couple work, recognizing that relationship dynamics are often driven by nervous system responses that were adaptive in your past but are creating disconnection now.

The Role of Practices Between Sessions

Somatic healing doesn't happen only in the therapy room. What you do between sessions, the daily rhythms, the small practices, the ways you care for your nervous system, matters as much as the work we do together.

I'll often send you mindfulness practices to do between sessions. These aren't about adding more to your overwhelmed schedule; they're about creating moments of presence that help your nervous system shift out of survival mode. Sometimes it's a three-minute breathing practice. Sometimes it's a body scan to help you reconnect with sensation. Sometimes it's a grounding technique you can use when you notice yourself getting activated.

We'll also look at the practical elements of your life that support or hinder healing: your sleep hygiene, your movement practices, your nutrition, your screen time, your boundaries. This isn't about perfection or rigid self-improvement. It's about honest assessment of what's working and what's not, and making small, sustainable shifts that support your nervous system's capacity to heal.

If we do intensive work together, whether you choose an individual intensive or a couple intensive, you can expect periods of integration where your system is processing what we've worked on. During these times, additional support through mindfulness practices and, when appropriate, check-ins can help ensure you feel resourced as the work lands.

Moving from Survival to Thriving

The goal of trauma healing isn't just symptom reduction. It's not just about feeling less anxious or less reactive. The deeper goal is to help you shift from a life organized around survival to a life where you have access to your full range of human experience: joy, connection, rest, creativity, passion.

When your nervous system is chronically activated, your world becomes narrow. You're either in fight mode (pushing, controlling, achieving) or flight mode (avoiding, withdrawing, numbing) or freeze mode (stuck, disconnected, exhausted) or fawn mode (people-pleasing, shape-shifting, abandoning yourself). These aren't choices you're making consciously; they're survival responses your nervous system learned a long time ago.

Somatic healing helps your nervous system update its threat detection system. It helps your body learn that what was dangerous then isn't dangerous now. It creates new neural pathways where safety and connection are possible. Over time, you develop what we call "window of tolerance," the capacity to experience difficult emotions and sensations without being overwhelmed by them or shutting them down entirely.

This is what embodied healing looks like: You still feel things deeply, but you're not hijacked by them. You can be with discomfort without needing to immediately fix it or escape it. You have access to your anger without being consumed by it. You can feel sadness without collapsing into it. You can experience joy without waiting for the other shoe to drop.

You become more present in your relationships because you're more present in your body. You make decisions from a place of alignment rather than reactivity. You notice patterns early and have the capacity to choose differently. You sleep better. You have more energy. You feel more like yourself.

For Couples: When Both Bodies Hold the Story

If you're in a relationship, trauma healing becomes even more complex because now there are two nervous systems in the room, each with their own history of adaptation and survival.

Maybe one partner's nervous system responds to conflict by shutting down, while the other's revs up and pursues. Maybe intimacy triggers a freeze response in one partner because closeness wasn't safe in their past. Maybe one partner's anxiety activates the other's caretaking, creating a cycle where neither feels truly seen.

These aren't just communication problems or personality differences. They're nervous system responses that developed long before this relationship began, now playing out in real time between two people who love each other but can't seem to stop triggering each other's defenses.

This is why couple work needs a somatic lens. It's not enough to teach better communication skills if one partner's nervous system is constantly signaling danger in moments of vulnerability. We need to help both nervous systems come down from high alert so that new ways of relating can actually land.

In Couple Counselling Intensives, we create space to slow down the patterns that usually move too fast to interrupt. We bring awareness to what's happening in each person's body as conflict arises. We help partners recognize each other's nervous system responses not as personal attacks but as protection strategies that made sense in another time and place.

Cultural Context and the Nervous System

I work with many expat professionals navigating multiple cultural contexts, whether you're based in Singapore, Dubai, San Francisco, or Jakarta. Cultural adjustment and living between worlds has a profound impact on the nervous system.

When you're constantly code-switching, managing complex family expectations across cultures, and navigating work environments with different norms, your nervous system is working overtime. Chronic stress and the pressure to constantly adapt can create patterns in the body: hypervigilance, exhaustion, disconnection.

Many of us also carry intergenerational trauma, the unprocessed responses of parents and grandparents who lived through hardship. These patterns can be passed down through the nervous system itself, shaping how we respond to stress before we're even conscious of it.

Healing happens when we bring awareness to these layers and help your nervous system find safety in the present moment, even when the world feels uncertain.

What Changes When Healing Is Embodied

When trauma healing includes the body, the shifts are tangible. You might notice:

• You sleep through the night for the first time in years

• Your chronic shoulder tension finally releases

• You can be in conflict without your heart racing or your mind going blank

• You feel angry without being consumed by rage or shutting down

• You can set a boundary without feeling guilty or terrified

• You experience pleasure and joy without waiting for something bad to happen

• Your digestive issues improve as your nervous system relaxes

• You feel more connected to your partner because you're more connected to yourself

• You can be present with your children instead of constantly worrying about the future

These aren't abstract psychological improvements. They're changes in how you inhabit your body, how your nervous system responds to life, how you show up in your relationships and your daily life.

This is the promise of integrative, body-based trauma work: not just understanding your patterns but actually shifting them at the level where they were formed, in the nervous system, in the body, in the implicit memory that your thinking brain couldn't fully access.

Beginning the Journey

If you're reading this and recognizing yourself, if you're tired of understanding your trauma without feeling it shift, if you're ready for healing that goes deeper than insight, change is possible.

Healing trauma isn't about reliving the worst moments or forcing yourself to feel things you've spent years protecting yourself from. It's about creating enough safety in the present that your body can begin to release what it's been holding. It's about building capacity gradually, honoring your pace, and trusting the wisdom of your nervous system.

You don't have to have all the answers or know exactly what happened. You just have to be willing to start paying attention to what your body has been trying to tell you.

Whether you're interested in weekly sessions for ongoing support or an intensive format for focused progress, my practice offers both paths. The work is personalized to your nervous system, your history, your goals, and your life circumstances.

I offer a free 15-minute consultation to explore whether this approach feels right for you. We can talk about what you're struggling with, what you've already tried, and whether somatic trauma work might offer the missing piece.

Your body has been carrying this for a long time. It's ready to set it down when you're ready, and at the pace that feels safe for you. Let's begin.

Ready to explore body-based trauma healing? I work with adults and couples in Singapore, Dubai, San Francisco, and Jakarta through online sessions, and offer in-person sessions in Jakarta. Schedule a free 15-minute consultation to learn more about how we can work together.