It wasn’t what you think. It wasn’t a dramatic, violent event. It was small. Quiet. A relative’s hand where it shouldn’t have been. A comment about my body that felt wrong but I didn’t have words for. A pattern of being told my feelings weren’t real, that I was overreacting, that what I remembered didn’t happen the way I remembered it. Small things. Quiet things. But a child’s nervous system doesn’t distinguish between big trauma and little trauma. It just records the threat. And thirty years later, my body still has the file open.
The body keeps the score – literally
Bessel van der Kolk’s book has that title for a reason. Trauma doesn’t live in the story you tell about it. It lives in your nervous system. In the way your shoulders tense when someone raises their voice. In the way you freeze when touch comes unexpectedly. In the way you dissociate during sex – floating above your body, watching from the ceiling, not really there. This is not a character flaw. This is your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do to survive. It protected you then. It’s still protecting you now. The problem is that the threat is gone and the protection remains. Your body never got the memo that you’re safe now.
What I learned in therapy – the practical tools
Grounding. When I feel myself dissociating during intimacy, I stop and name five things I can see, four I can touch, three I can hear. It sounds too simple. It works – because it pulls your brain out of the past and into the present. Your trauma happened then. You are here now. Your body needs to know the difference. Somatic therapy. Talk therapy helped me understand what happened. Somatic therapy helped my body release it. I spent years intellectually understanding my trauma while my body kept right on reacting. The body doesn’t speak in words. It speaks in sensation. You have to learn its language. Safe touch practice. My partner and I created a practice: ten minutes of non-sexual touch, once a week. No goal. No escalation. Just presence. This retrained my body to associate touch with safety instead of threat. It took months. It’s still working.
What happened to you was real. Your body remembers. And you can teach it – slowly, gently – that the war is over. You’re allowed to feel safe now.
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