Many of my clients begin therapy with a familiar sentiment: “I know where this comes from… but I still feel stuck.” Despite all the insight they’ve gathered — identifying patterns, naming traumas, and immersing themselves in the literature — the anxiety continues, the tightness in the chest returns, and the freeze response reappears, often without warning.

This isn’t a failure of understanding; it’s the nervous system doing exactly what it was designed to do — automatically, efficiently, and often beyond conscious awareness.

Trauma, stress, and overwhelm are not merely stories carried in the mind. They manifest as physiological states embedded in the body. For healing to be lasting and complete, we must include the body in the therapeutic process.

Trauma Lives in the Body — Especially for Women

Jan Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model describes how behaviors that might appear dysfunctional — like emotional overwhelm or addiction — are actually adaptive responses to unbearable internal states. For women, who are often socialized into roles of caregiving and compliance, survival is frequently maintained through subtle and sometimes invisible patterns of appeasement, freezing, or collapse.

These responses are not voluntary. They are deeply embedded survival strategies that emerge from prolonged exposure to threat or the absence of safety. Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory gives us a biological framework: the nervous system continuously monitors for cues of safety or threat, not through rational thought but through a subconscious mechanism called neuroception — the body’s innate way of detecting danger or safety in the environment.

When we experience our environment — or even our relationships — as unsafe, the body naturally responds:

• It might activate (fight/flight — sympathetic response).

• It might shut down or go numb (freeze — dorsal vagal response).

• It might shift into appeasement (fawning to maintain safety).

Over time, these responses can become so familiar that we hardly notice how deeply they shape our behaviors, choices, and physical health.

Chronic Stress Changes the Body’s Settings

With prolonged stress or unresolved trauma, the autonomic nervous system can become stuck in patterns that favor defense over ease. Instead of adapting fluidly to challenges, the system may default to survival responses that remain long after the original threat is gone. This can lead to symptoms such as:

• Persistent anxiety, restlessness, or panic

• Dissociation, brain fog, or chronic fatigue

• Digestive disturbances, sleep issues, or muscle tension

• Emotional flatness or volatility

Pat Ogden, founder of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, reminds us that these are not just psychological phenomena — they are deeply embodied. The body remembers through posture, breath, gesture, and internal sensation. Trauma isn’t simply recalled in memory; it’s re-experienced in the body, often outside of awareness.

Talk Therapy Alone Can’t Reach the Body

Talk therapy primarily engages the neocortex — the rational, thinking brain. While this is valuable for developing insight and understanding, trauma resides elsewhere: in the subcortical brain and autonomic nervous system, which are responsible for reflexive, survival-based responses. These areas do not operate through logic or language; they communicate through sensations, emotions, and movement.

As Peter Levine and others have shown, this is why clients may intellectually understand their trauma and still feel powerless in the face of their symptoms. To truly support healing, we must also engage in bottom-up approaches — therapies that begin with the body’s felt experience and help re-pattern its response to safety and connection.

What Happens When We Bring the Body Into Therapy

Somatic and nervous-system-focused therapies help clients develop awareness of their bodily cues — what Eugene Gendlin termed the “felt sense” — and begin to renegotiate patterns rooted in past survival needs.

This might include:

• Attending to internal sensations with curiosity

• Using breath, movement, and grounding to shift state

• Noticing and altering habitual postures or gestures

• Developing capacity for co-regulation within the therapeutic relationship

With gentle support, clients begin to complete the survival responses that were once cut short. A body frozen in fear learns to move again. A system stuck in collapse finds the capacity to rise. The sense of safety, long absent, becomes something not just understood — but lived.

Whether through Porges' Safe and Sound Protocol, Winhall’s Felt Sense Polyvagal Model, or Ogden’s Sensorimotor techniques, the goal remains consistent: to restore regulation, safety, and connection from the inside out.

Healing Is an Embodied Process

True healing does not bypass the mind — it completes the story by including the body. As clients reconnect with their physical experience, they begin to feel more grounded, present, and emotionally alive. Relationships improve, emotional responses soften and the old patterns no longer dictate their every move.

As Linda Thai so wisely says, “Healing is not about fixing; it’s about becoming", and becoming demands presence — in body, heart, and mind. It invites us not just to talk about our pain, but to meet it, feel it, and move with it in ways that create real change.

If traditional therapy has left you feeling stuck, the issue may not be your effort — it may be that your body needs a different kind of invitation. One that welcomes your whole self back into connection, regulation, and healing.