The Body You Left Behind

Bessel van der Kolk, whose work on trauma has probably shaped more clinicians than anyone writing in the last thirty years, titled his landmark book The Body Keeps the Score^[1]. It's a deliberate provocation. The body keeps the score of everything the mind has decided not to hold. The experiences that were too overwhelming to process consciously, the feelings that weren't safe to feel in the room where they arose, the history that couldn't be spoken. None of it disappears. It goes into the body and stays there, influencing everything from posture to digestion to the way the chest tightens in certain kinds of rooms, to the quality of sleep, to the persistent exhaustion that no amount of rest seems to touch.

What I see in clinical practice is a slightly different face of the same thing. Many of the people I work with haven't experienced dramatic trauma. They haven't been through a single catastrophic event. What they've experienced is a quieter and more chronic disconnection from the body, one that happened gradually as they learned what was safe to feel and what wasn't. The child who was told not to cry who learned to override the crying impulse. The child whose anger was so frightening to the adults around her that she learned to suppress it before it fully formed. The child who learned to stay still, stay calm, stay easy. All of that suppression goes somewhere. It goes into the body. The body becomes the place where all the feelings she wasn't allowed to have get stored.

The result in adulthood is a particular kind of body alienation. Not dramatic. More like distance. She can tell you intellectually that she has a body. She manages it. She exercises it or doesn't. She sleeps it. She takes it to the doctor when it demands attention. But she doesn't live in it. She lives slightly above or behind it. The body is a vehicle she drives rather than a home she inhabits. She notices this most clearly in moments where the body should be pleasurable: good food, physical affection, sun, water, rest. The physical sensation is present but she can't quite settle into it. Allowing it to matter would require a level of presence in the body that the old strategy never permitted.

One of the things that happens when we disconnect from the body is that we lose access to a crucial information system. The body's felt sense of what's true: the tightening in the chest, the hollow in the stomach, the instinctive recoil, the opening feeling of something being right. These signals are pre-verbal. They're faster than thought. They're the nervous system's immediate evaluation of what's safe and what isn't, what's good and what isn't. A person who has been trained to override these signals since childhood doesn't have access to that information system in adulthood. She's navigating without a compass that most people don't even know they have.

Gabor Maté has written extensively about the physical consequences of this kind of chronic self-suppression^[2]. His work proposes that bodies which have spent decades being overridden, where the authentic physical and emotional signal has been routinely suppressed in service of being acceptable, begin to express what was suppressed in physical form. The autoimmune condition. The chronic pain without a clear structural cause. The gut that won't settle. These aren't imaginary. The body is a real system that produces real symptoms. I'd add the clinical caveat that this is a contributing pattern and not a one-to-one cause, and that any chronic physical symptom deserves proper medical assessment. But the pattern shows up too consistently to ignore.

Reconnecting with the body is not a project of discipline. This matters because the instinct for people who've been disconnected from their bodies is often to start exercising harder or eating better or doing the thing they've been told is good for the body. None of that is inherently wrong but it's not reconnection. Reconnection is slower and gentler. It starts with noticing. Pausing in the middle of an ordinary moment and asking: what does my body feel right now? Not what should it feel. Not what would be appropriate. Just what does it actually feel? For many people this question returns a blank at first. The signal has been very quiet for a long time. It comes back in fragments, over months, as the system learns it's safe to be felt.

In sessions together we go to the moments where the body first learned it wasn't safe to be felt. We're gentle there. We're not excavating. We're meeting the small version of you who put her body away and telling her it was the right thing to do at the time. The body wasn't the problem. The room was. She kept herself as safe as she could. Now the room is different. The body is allowed to come home. And when it does, something shifts that is hard to describe but that clients describe in very similar terms: a sense of finally being in the right place. Not in a new place. In a place that was always there, waiting to be inhabited.